A lot of muzzy thinking seems to come from statements that have qualities we admire. The music is good, the ideas aren't jarring, the sentiments seems admirable, but they are false.

There is a kind of higher-order public good you can call “trust,” “cooperativeness,” or something else. The idea is that some communities are able to overcome certain kinds of challenges involved in coordinating group behavior. The capacity successfully to solve collective action problems at a large scale, with a large population, is the Holy Grail of human society. If you can do this, you can do anything… which is a point I don’t think ideologues have really been able to get their heads around.

What are called collective action "problems" are usually just the desires of ideologues rather than actual problems. It is a very good thing that getting societies goose-stepping about with their fists in the air is difficult. It is a truism that if you can do that you can do anything, but you can't do everything, and just who is it that decides which things must be done?

Suppose you have a super-cooperative, high-trust society. This is the kind of society where the need for coercion to solve collective action problems is least necessary. Voluntary civil society associations will thrive. But if you’ve got the super-cooperative, high trust conditions for a thriving voluntary civil society, you’ve also got the conditions for a really effective government in which corruption will be minimal and power will tend not to be abused. If there are limits to non-coercive social coordination even in super-cooperative, high-trust societies, states in those kinds of societies will tend to do a pretty good job in deploying coercion responsibly to secure the otherwise foregone gains from successful collective action.

This is nonsense once you grasp that the problem isn't coordination, it is analysis and prescription. The difficult thing is knowing what to do and that is best found by a "discovery machine", multiple parallel, distributed experiments with feedback that allows rapid adjustment and retrial. This is antithetical to coordinated society.

So: The world in which there is little need for state coercion, states will tend to be pretty effective and non-abusive. And worlds in which states work pretty well are worlds when states don’t need to do all that much. Reduce the level of cooperativeness and trust, and the quality of government gets worse. But then civil society gets worse, too. So whatever you want, whether it be good government or a flourishing voluntary civil society, you want the conditions for the other thing.

Who wants any of those things? What I want is good solutions to real problems. This can advance the human condition which is in a pretty sorry state at present. 5 of 6 humans live in uncomfortable conditions, and 1 in 6 doesn't even have enough food. They are sickly, uneducated, superstitious and unproductive. These aren't the kind of problems that are helped by docile populations in lock step. That has already been tried and shown to be counterproductive.

The trick is that in large modern states jurisdictional boundaries cover many communities with highly variable levels of cooperativeness. So here’s a question. Will the quality of the government of widest scope tend to average out unequal levels of cooperativeness, such that high-cooperativeness communities will tend to get worse governance than they could provide alone (maybe even worse than they could do without a state) and low cooperativeness communities will tend to get better governance than they could provide alone?

All will get better governance since there is diversity that keeps the lotus eaters from drifting off in a fog, mistaking kumbaya for something of value. There are no final solutions. The frustrating itch that diversity brings keeps us honest and alert so that we can be more competent. That tension isn't something that we would be wise to diminish. There will always be those who seek to do so, and that's fine so long as they don't succeed. Their misguided efforts increase tension, and that's a higher good, though it is not at all what they seek.