Chapter 12 of 13

One Society or Many

About 23 minutes to read

The world citizen

On 25 May 1948 a young American named Garry Davis walked into the United States embassy in Paris and gave up his citizenship. He had been a Broadway actor before the war and a bomber pilot during it, flying missions over Germany; his brother had been killed in the fighting. He had come to believe that nations, and the wars between them, were the problem, and that the only cure was a government for the whole world. To show it, he made himself a citizen of the world and of no state. He left the embassy without a passport, without a nationality and without the right to stay in France.

That autumn the General Assembly of the new United Nations met in Paris, in the Palais de Chaillot, on ground that had been lent to the UN for the session. Davis pitched a tent on its steps and declared that, since the land was international territory, a world citizen could live on it. When the French authorities removed him, he tried again. On 19 November 1948, during a session of the Assembly, he and a group of supporters interrupted the proceedings from the public gallery and called out for a world government: "We, the people, want the peace which only a world government can give." He was hustled out. But the gesture made him famous. Thousands of people wrote to ask how they, too, could become world citizens; within a few years a registry he helped found in Paris had enrolled hundreds of thousands. In the 1950s he began issuing a "world passport", which a handful of countries occasionally accepted and most ignored.

For most of the rest of his life Davis lived as a stateless man, and he discovered what that meant. He was expelled from countries, jailed for entering them without papers, and sent back and forth across borders that would not have him. When he died in Vermont in 2013, aged ninety-one, he had spent sixty-five years as a citizen of a world that did not exist, and had learned in his own person that without a state that would claim him, he had almost no rights that anyone was obliged to respect.

The design under test begins with the idea Davis lived for. Its first element is one borderless society: humanity organised as a single society, or a federation of societies, with no outside to which wealth can flee and no border behind which people can be fenced. Chapter 8 found that element strongly supported by the owners' exit. Chapter 11 ended on the question it raises. The floor is a right of belonging, the dividend is paid to everyone who belongs, and contribution is counted for those who belong. So who belongs? And is one society the right answer, or a new and larger farm?

The right to have rights

In 1951 the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, who had herself been a stateless refugee after fleeing Nazi Germany, published The Origins of Totalitarianism. In one of its most influential chapters she described what she had seen happen to the millions of people left without a state by the wars, revolutions and population transfers of the first half of the century. The rights of man had been declared to be inalienable, belonging to every human being simply as human. But the moment people lost the protection of a government, Arendt observed, no authority was left to protect those rights and no institution was willing to guarantee them. The stateless discovered that what they had lost was not any particular right but "the right to have rights": the right to belong to a political community that would recognise and defend them.

Davis chose statelessness; most stateless people do not. The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, counted about four and a half million stateless people at the end of 2025 and acknowledged that the true number was certainly higher. The largest single group are the Rohingya of Myanmar, around 1.8 million people, stripped of citizenship by the state in which they were born.

Arendt's lesson is the first test of this chapter. Rights, floors and dividends are not given by humanity in the abstract; they are given by some community that has the power to pay them and the duty to do so. The design's floor is a right of belonging. Everything therefore depends on what one belongs to, and on whether anyone can be left outside it.

The farm at scale

The obvious answer is that everyone should belong to one society, and that is the answer the design began with. The history of book one is a warning against it.

Every great empire in the first book claimed, in some sense, to include everyone. The Roman Empire called the Mediterranean "our sea"; the Chinese emperors ruled "all under heaven"; the Mongols, the Ottomans and the European colonial empires each claimed a universal mission. None of them abolished the farm. Each was the farm at scale, with its owners richer and its herd more numerous than any before. And a single power that covers the whole known world has one property that no other farm has: there is nowhere to run.

Edward Gibbon, describing the Roman Empire at its height, put this with grim precision. In a world of many states, he observed, an exile could always find refuge somewhere. "But the empire of the Romans filled the world, and when that empire fell into the hands of a single person, the world became a safe and dreary prison for his enemies." The subject of a tyrant who ruled everything could not escape him, because there was no place outside his reach. "To resist was fatal, and it was impossible to fly."

Immanuel Kant drew the political conclusion in his essay Perpetual Peace (1795). He wanted an end to war as much as Davis did, and he believed that peace required a union of the world's states under law. But he rejected a single world state. A "universal monarchy", he warned, would become a "soulless despotism" that, after crushing the seeds of good, would finally collapse into anarchy. He proposed instead a federation of free republics, each governing itself, bound by a law of peace and by a right of every person to visit any country without being treated as an enemy.

Gibbon and Kant were describing something that the first book found again and again: the breakouts of the 99 depended, more often than is usually noticed, on the existence of somewhere else. Medieval serfs fled to other manors and to the towns, whose air, a German saying held, made a person free after a year and a day. The enslaved of the American South fled north along the Underground Railroad. Dissenters, heretics and the persecuted moved between the small states of early modern Europe, and the printers who published what one prince banned found a market in the territory of another. A world with no outside closes the owners' doors. It also closes everyone else's.

The line drawn inside

Who belongs has never been decided only at the border. The first book found farms that drew the line inside their own territory, between the people who belonged and the people who merely worked there. Athens had its metics, free foreigners who lived and worked in the city for generations, paid a special tax, served in its armies and could never vote or own land. Rome extended its citizenship slowly over centuries until, in 212 CE, the emperor Caracalla granted it to almost every free inhabitant of the empire — and the line, as book one described, simply moved, to a new division between the "more honourable" and the "humbler" people.

The modern world has its own versions. In 1955 West Germany signed the first of a series of agreements to recruit "guest workers" from Italy, then from Spain, Greece, Turkey, Morocco, Portugal, Tunisia and Yugoslavia. They were expected to work for a few years and go home. Millions came, and many stayed, raised children and grew old in a country that for decades did not consider them or their German-born children to be Germans. Switzerland ran a similar policy, and the Swiss writer Max Frisch, writing about his own country in 1965, summed up the mistake in a sentence that became famous: "We called for workers, and people came." Germany began to grant citizenship by birth to some children of long-term residents only in 2000, and in 2024 reduced the period of residence required for naturalisation to five years.

The starkest modern case is the Gulf. In Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, citizens are a minority of the population; in Qatar, by most estimates, only around one resident in ten is a citizen. Most of the rest are migrant workers from South Asia, Africa and the Philippines who build the cities, staff the shops and clean the homes. For decades, under the kafala or sponsorship system, a worker's right to be in the country was tied to a single employer, who could prevent them from changing jobs or leaving the country. Citizens receive generous public benefits paid from oil and gas revenues; the workers who make up most of the population receive none of them. It is the rentier state of Chapter 8 joined to the Athenian line between citizen and metic. Under pressure from international unions and the scrutiny that came with hosting the 2022 football World Cup, Qatar announced reforms in 2020, including a minimum wage and the right to change employers without permission. Human rights organisations have reported that enforcement has been uneven.

Every one of these cases shows the same thing. A society that gives a floor and a share to those who belong, and denies them to those who do the work, has not abolished the farm; it has made belonging the fence. The design must not draw that line inside itself.

What competition gave

The existence of many states did more than offer refuge. It forced concessions that no single power would have made.

The historian Walter Scheidel, whose study of the "Four Horsemen" of levelling the first book used, argued in Escape from Rome (2019) that the failure of any single empire to reunite Europe after the fall of Rome was the precondition of Europe's later transformation. Because no ruler could control the whole continent, rulers had to compete — for merchants, for skilled workers, for soldiers, for ideas — and that competition allowed new institutions, from self-governing cities to representative assemblies, to survive in some places even when they were crushed in others. China, unified for most of its history, produced remarkable achievements but less of that competitive variety.

The same competition pushed rulers towards the 99. When Prussia was crushed by Napoleon in 1806, its reformers abolished hereditary serfdom within a year, partly so that a free peasantry could supply the army a modern state now needed. Otto von Bismarck introduced the world's first national systems of health, accident and old-age insurance in the 1880s to undercut the socialists at home and to strengthen Germany against its rivals, and other states followed partly to keep up. During the Cold War the welfare states of Western Europe were built, in part, by governments competing with a rival system that promised the workers everything. The economist Charles Tiebout described a gentler version in 1956: where people can "vote with their feet" by moving between local governments, those governments must compete to offer the best combination of services and taxes.

But competition between states has a second face, which Chapters 6 and 8 described. States compete for the owners as well as for the workers, and the owners are far more mobile. Tax havens compete to hide wealth; small states sell passports; private zones offer territory to those who want to escape national law. The competition that once forced rulers to free serfs now forces them to cut taxes on capital. Book one's competition between states helped the 99 when the 99 were what states needed — soldiers, workers, taxpayers. It helps the owners when capital is what states need, and capital can move faster than people.

Two kinds of exit

The economist Albert Hirschman, whose distinction between exit and voice Chapter 8 used, would have recognised the problem at once. Exit disciplines those who rule only if those who can leave are the ones whose departure matters to them.

In today's world the doors are arranged in exactly the wrong way. Capital moves across most borders freely, and the very rich can buy residence or citizenship almost anywhere. Ordinary people cannot. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 says that "everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country". It says nothing about a right to enter any other, and in practice the right to leave is worth only as much as the willingness of some other country to let a person in. The Berlin Wall, built in 1961 to stop East Germans from leaving, became the symbol of a state that fenced in its own people; at least 140 people were killed at it before it fell in 1989. Today's fences mostly face the other way, keeping people out of the rich world rather than in the poor one. Chapter 8 recorded the thousands who die each year trying to cross them.

The economist Branko Milanovic has measured what those fences are worth. On his estimates, roughly half or more of the differences in income between people across the world are explained by the country in which they happen to live, which for most people means the country in which they were born. He calls the gain from being born in a rich country a "citizenship premium", and compares it to the inherited privileges of a feudal estate. In the language of the first book, the border is the fence of the global farm: it keeps the many where their work is cheap, while the owners and their capital move through the gates.

The design must therefore distinguish, as Chapter 8 began to, between two kinds of exit. The exit of persons — the right to leave a society that oppresses or fails them — is a freedom the book has defended from its first chapter, and history shows that it is one of the 99's few reliable weapons. The exit of the commons — the ability of owners to take wealth produced in common to a place where it escapes the obligations that came with it — is the farm's oldest escape from the many. A world with no outside closes both doors. A world of competing states opens both, but mostly the second. The design has to find an arrangement that does the opposite of today's world: close the doors to the commons and open them to people.

Federations that work, and leak

There are partial precedents for unions that keep many societies within a common framework. Each shows something the design can use, and each has a leak.

The United States is a federation of fifty states with free movement among them, a common currency and a national floor in the form of Social Security, Medicare and other federal programmes. The national floor was built in the 1930s and 1960s precisely because state-by-state provision had collapsed or proved too weak. But the states also compete for the owners: Delaware for company registrations, South Dakota and Nevada for trusts that hold the wealth of the very rich, including foreigners, in secrecy that rivals the old havens.

Switzerland is a federation of twenty-six cantons that set their own taxes, including taxes on wealth, and compete with one another for residents. Since 2008 a system of fiscal equalisation has transferred revenue from richer cantons to poorer ones, so that competition cannot leave any canton unable to provide basic services. Switzerland shows that a federation can combine local variety, tax competition and a common floor. It also shows the leak: for decades its banks hid the wealth of the rest of the world.

The European Union is the boldest experiment of all: twenty-seven states that have opened their borders to each other's citizens and pooled parts of their sovereignty, with a common court and funds that transfer money to poorer regions. It has a common market and, for most members, a common currency, but no common floor. It adopted a directive on adequate minimum wages in 2022, but leaves social security, and almost all taxation, to its members. And within it, member states have competed for the owners' profits. In 2016 the European Commission ruled that Ireland had given Apple illegal tax benefits; in 2024 the EU's Court of Justice confirmed that Ireland must recover about thirteen billion euros. Luxembourg and the Netherlands have played similar roles. A union that opened its borders to capital before it agreed how to tax it built its havens inside its own walls.

The lesson of the three is consistent. Federation works when the members share a floor that none can undercut, and a common rule for taxing the owners that none can escape; it leaks wherever they compete for capital. Variety among the members does not harm the 99 if it is variety above a common floor.

The global commons

There is one more precedent, and it points to how the design's floor could reach everyone. In 1967 Arvid Pardo, Malta's ambassador to the United Nations, proposed that the deep seabed beyond national jurisdiction, with its mineral wealth, should be declared "the common heritage of mankind": owned by no state and managed for the benefit of humanity as a whole, with special regard for the poorest countries. The principle was written into the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, completed in 1982, and an International Seabed Authority was created in Jamaica to manage the seabed's resources and share the benefits. The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 had already set aside a continent for peaceful science, and the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 declared that space could not be claimed by any nation.

These are small and fragile institutions. No commercial mining of the deep seabed has yet taken place, and the benefits the Authority was meant to share have not yet existed. They are also under attack from exactly the direction this book would predict. In April 2025 the President of the United States, which never ratified the Convention, issued an executive order directing his government to speed up licences for American companies to mine the deep seabed under a national law, outside the international authority. Within days a mining company applied for permits covering parts of the Pacific seabed it had previously been exploring under the international system. The Authority warned that bypassing it would violate international law. The common heritage of mankind had met the owners' exit.

But the principle exists in international law, and it is the right one for the design. Some wealth belongs to no nation because it was produced by no nation: the seabed and the atmosphere, the knowledge of the species, and — the argument of Chapter 9 — the AI models trained on the written record of all humanity. A share of the income from those commons could be paid to every human being, as a global dividend, wherever they live and whatever their citizenship.

The design, revised

The tests of this chapter change the first element of the design more than any other. One borderless society does not survive in the form the book began with. A federation does. Its outline follows from the precedents above.

Many societies, one floor. The world would be organised as a federation of self-governing societies — nations, regions, cities — that differ in their laws, languages, cultures and ways of life, and in the details of how they weight contribution and set their ceilings. All would share a common floor, below which no member may let any person fall, and the common rules of Chapters 9 to 11: the machines and models in common trusts, governed as Chapter 10 required, with reward capped within the band of Chapter 11. Variety above the floor is a strength. It is what Kant's federation of republics and Scheidel's competing states offered, and it keeps open the possibility that one society will discover what all the others missed.

Closed doors for the commons. The federation would close the owners' doors together, so that no member can reopen them alone. That means automatic exchange of financial information across the whole federation — the reform that, as Chapter 6 found, did more than any other to end the hiding of wealth — extended to a common register of who owns what, including property, trusts and companies; common minimum taxes on great wealth and on profits, with no exemptions for the largest owners such as the one the G7 granted in 2025; a ban on selling citizenship or residence; and no private jurisdictions. The global commons — the seabed, the atmosphere and the shared knowledge from which the AI models were built — would be held by the federation as a whole.

Open doors for people. Every person would have the right to leave any member society and to settle in another, with the movement phased in where the differences between members are large, so that no member is overwhelmed and no member can fence its people in. Kant's right of visit would become a right of residence. A person could also leave the federation altogether, if anywhere outside it remained, and could return.

How the federation decides, and how a member leaves. A federation is only as safe as its own institutions, and a federation's common bodies — its register, its tax rules, the trustees of the global commons — would be the largest prize for capture in the design. They would be governed by the rules of Chapter 10 at federal scale: split powers, independent auditors, rule-setting assemblies chosen by lot from the whole population of the federation, and decisions that need both a majority of the people and a majority of the member societies, as the European Union's double majority and Switzerland's double majority of people and cantons already require for their most important choices. A member society could leave the federation, as a person can leave a society. But it could not take the global commons with it, could not make anyone stateless on the way out, and could not reopen a haven on the federation's border without losing access to the federation's markets — the leverage that, as Chapter 6 found, ended bank secrecy. Leaving would be a right, not a weapon.

Who belongs. Belonging would come in two layers. Every human being would belong to the federation by birth, and would receive the global dividend from the global commons for life, wherever they lived. Nobody could be stateless in the federation, because nobody could be outside it; that is Arendt's answer and Davis's dream, made modest. Membership of a particular society would come with residence, after a period short enough that no one becomes a permanent second-class resident — the lesson of every farm in book one that drew the line between citizens and the rest inside its own territory.

What travels. The question Chapter 10 and Chapter 9 left open can now be answered. A person who moves from one society to another takes their global dividend with them, because it was never tied to any society. Their share of a local society's common trusts — Chapter 9's Mondragon distinction — stays with that society as part of its collective reserves; they acquire a share in their new society when they join it. Nobody can sell either share, and nobody can take the commons with them. And a person who chooses to leave the governance of the common machines — to live in a community that refuses AI, for instance, or a society with rules of its own — keeps the floor and the global dividend, because the claim of the 99 on the common wealth, as Chapter 8 required, must never depend on being needed or on agreeing.

One worker, two worlds

It may help to follow one person through the change. Chapter 4 opened in Nairobi, where content moderators who clean violent and abusive material out of the feeds of the world's largest technology companies voted to form a union. Consider one of them: a young Kenyan graduate who reviews images for a contractor working for a company headquartered in California.

In the world as it is, she belongs to Kenya, where she earns a small fraction of what a moderator in California would be paid for the same work, and where her floor is whatever her family can provide. The company that profits from her work can move it to the Philippines or Colombia if she and her colleagues organise. Its profits can be booked in a low-tax country, and its shareholders can live where they please. She cannot follow the work or the profits; a visa to the country where the company's owners live is very hard for her to get.

In the federation, she belongs from birth, and receives the global dividend wherever she lives — including a share of the income of the AI models that her work helped to make safe. Kenya, as a member society, guarantees the common floor; if Kenya cannot yet afford it alone, the federation's equalisation makes up the difference, as Switzerland's richer cantons support the poorer ones. The company cannot book its profits in a haven, because there are none, and cannot escape the common minimum tax. If she wants to move to another member society, she can, as the phased rules allow, and after a period of residence she belongs there fully. If she stays, her work counts under the rules of Chapter 11, and her council has a voice over the machines that direct it under the rules of Chapter 10. She is still a worker in a global economy. She is no longer the cheap end of a global farm.

The tests

This chapter tests the first element of the design — one borderless society — against the history of empires, the evidence on competition between states and federations, and the right to leave.

Precedent. Every universal empire in the first book was the farm at scale, and Gibbon's "safe and dreary prison" describes what a world with no outside can become. Competition between states forced many concessions to the 99, from the end of Prussian serfdom to the welfare state. But it now also forces concessions to the owners. Federations — the United States, Switzerland, the European Union — show that common floors and free movement can coexist with local variety, and that they leak wherever members compete for capital. The common heritage of mankind is a principle in law, so far with little practice.

Evidence. The end of bank secrecy, described in Chapter 6, shows that coordinated rules across many states can close the owners' doors. The evidence on the citizenship premium shows how much of the world's inequality is held in place by borders. There is little evidence on what a common global floor would do, because none has existed.

Capture. A single world government would be the largest prize for capture in history, which is the strongest reason to reject it. A federation divides the prize. But its common institutions — the register of ownership, the common taxes, the trustees of the global commons — could themselves be captured, and the most powerful members could refuse to be bound, as the United States did over the seabed and the minimum tax. The design's defences are those of Chapter 10, applied at the scale of the federation, and the leverage that ended bank secrecy: access to the federation's markets, open only to those who keep its rules.

Exit. The revised design gives people more exit than the present world does and gives the owners less. It keeps the right to leave any society and adds the right to enter another; it keeps a person's floor and global dividend wherever they go; it ends the sale of citizenship and the havens. Whether a federation that covers almost the whole world leaves anywhere real to go is the question it cannot fully answer. Its answer is that the many societies within it are the outside: different enough, and free enough, that leaving one for another is a real choice.

The ledger

What survived. The aim of the first element survives: a world with no outside for the commons, no haven for wealth, no sale of citizenship and no private jurisdiction, and in which no person is stateless or without a floor. The floor survives as something every human being receives by belonging to the federation from birth, and the dividend gains a global layer, paid from the global commons to every person wherever they live.

What had to change. One borderless society becomes a federation of many self-governing societies. Gibbon's prison and Kant's soulless despotism are warnings the design cannot ignore, and the competition between states that book one found forcing concessions to the 99 must be kept — but kept above a common floor and under common rules for the owners, so that it can no longer be turned against the 99. The doors must be arranged the opposite way from today's: closed to the commons and to wealth that would escape its obligations, open to people. Belonging must come in two layers, global by birth and local by residence. A person's global dividend travels with them; their local share stays as part of the society's collective reserves. And nobody's floor may depend on agreeing to the society's machines or its story.

What remains unknown. Whether the most powerful states would ever join a federation that bound them, or would, like the United States over the seabed, take the commons for themselves. Whether free movement between members as unequal as today's countries could be phased in without a backlash that destroys it. Whether a federation covering almost the whole world would leave enough variety for its societies to remain a real outside for one another. And how any of it could be built from the world as it is, which is the question of the last chapter.

Bridge: the next entry

The design has now been built and attacked, piece by piece. The machines and models are held in common trusts, with equal and unsaleable shares. The machine keeps the books, but its governance is split five ways. Contribution is counted broadly and rewarded within a narrow band, above a floor given by right. And the society that holds it all is not one, but many, sharing a floor and closing the owners' doors together. Some of what the book began with survived, some had to change, and some remains unknown. The last chapter gathers the verdicts, sets out the three futures that the five forces make possible — a managed herd fed by its owners, an enclosure of intelligence, or something like the federation this book has tested — and asks what signs will tell them apart, and what the 99 can do. It ends where the first book began: with Kushim's ledger, and the next entry still to be written.