Read the Stylized Paper: https://www.sapien.network/The_Purple_Paper_v1.2.pdf
The world is at a turning point and we are faced with tremendous uncertainty in all directions. As the threats we face grow to existential proportions, the things we might turn to for support — our communities, our shared purpose and even a shared reality have eroded from under us. If we are to have any hope of conquering the challenges ahead of us, we must first understand the problems that we face and how they are connected. These problems go to the very roots of society and its institutions, affecting every aspect of how we make decisions and live our lives; from the information we consume to the communities that give us meaning; from the careers to which we dedicate ourselves to the causes we invest in. At the first glance these problems may seem unconnected but as we delve deeper it becomes clear that they share a common thread — a fundamental disconnect in how we engage in these systems and one of the deepest roots of human nature — the Tribe.
For tens of thousands of years the Tribe was the driving force behind human existence, dictating every aspect of how we lived our lives. As our Tribes wandered across every corner of the globe we found balance with nature and each other. We evolved alongside our Tribes and many of the unique things that would come to define our species — Homo Sapiens — such as language and our ability to solve problems collaboratively emerged from this inseparable interdependence between each of us and our Tribes.
With the invention of agriculture and the emergence of civilization the rules and social dynamics that had governed our lives for so long were turned upside down. As the first cities formed individuals were no longer dependent upon their Tribes for survival but rather depended upon the state and its complex system of rules and regulations. This development offered new freedoms for individuals who were now free to pursue whatever they desired within prescribed societal boundaries. It was this freedom that unleashed the incredible power of human creativity upon the world in the form of the arts and sciences.
Although the Tribe had lost its pre-eminent importance for many, it continued to have a large role in our nascent civilizations, directing ordinary citizens whose lives were dominated by the affairs of their local communities and the extended family groups that composed them. As society has grown and technology has developed we have gained incredible freedom and with fewer constraints our lives have shifted further and further away from the small local communities that defined our lives for the majority of human history. This freedom has not come without a cost — in an age where everything we need is accessible at our fingertips, many of us find ourselves longing for connection and the sense of meaning and purpose that comes with being a part of a community.
The tension between the individual and the collective has been a driving force throughout history and has been the source of much conflict and debate for centuries. The last century was defined in large part by this conflict as the nations of the world fell on either side of this divide in the cold war. This tension continues to drive our politics, both on a global scale and nationally in the form of debate over individual rights and freedoms and their relation to the collective social good.
Individualism is at the heart of the philosophies and political ideologies that have driven the western world for centuries. In large part the economic growth and successes of the recent past have paralleled and been driven by the strengthening of individual liberties. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith formalized this observation, asserting that rational self-interest and competition within free markets formed the basis of economic prosperity. It is this idea more than any other that has shaped our politics and driven much of our decision making in recent history. While the self-interest of the individual may be sufficient to drive the market to great heights, the individual alone cannot drive our collective decision making in our politics where the collective interests of various groups are invariably the driving force.
In America today, the groups that drive our politics are largely corporations. The decision of Citizens United paved the way for unlimited corporate spending in elections, practically guaranteeing the supremacy of corporate interests over those of the individual in the political process. The trend of concentrating political power in the hands of corporations is reflected in decisions such as the repeal of Net neutrality in 2017 enabling internet service providers to charge exploitative rates for access based on their position as gatekeepers at the expense of the consumer. Trends like these have led prominent commentators such as former president Jimmy Carter and former chair of the federal reserve Paul Volcker to compare the United States to a [Plutocracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutocracy#:~:text=According to Noam Chomsky and,be developing into a plutocracy.). While the concentration of power in corporations leads to many bad outcomes for ordinary citizens, it is a simple fact of human nature and group dynamics that power concentrates in groups — the only question we have to answer is which groups do we give power to?
Politics (from Greek: Πολιτικά, politiká, 'affairs of the cities') is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups. Making decisions within a group inevitably involves a delegation of trust within a hierarchy. At the end of this chain of trust is an entity with the authority and ability to act on behalf of the individuals involved — this is where sovereignty resides. Sovereignty is exercised over a polity — a group with a collective identity, strong social cohesion and the ability to mobilize resources.
When we think of politics and sovereignty today most of us immediately think within the context of the nation state — the large sprawling polities within whose borders most of us reside. While many of us might think of “Nation” and “State” as interchangeable terms, they are in fact distinct concepts. A nation is a community of people formed on the basis of a combination of shared features such as language, history, ethnicity, culture and/or territory, while a state is a centralized political organization that imposes and enforces rules over a population within a territory. While the nation state is dominant today, a wide variety of political entities such as Multinational states, city-states, and diverse confederations such as the Hanseatic League have held sway throughout history.