Jim Dator
The challenge
The call for papers for this symposium was extremely daunting—multidimensional, multidisciplinary, multicultural, multitemporal—to be written in barely more than a very linear month after the call. With that in mind, I decided to focus on only one of the three areas of substance in the title of the call—US hegemony, pasts, presents and futures. Where should I commence my story? When did the US become a global hegemon—if it ever really was one in anyone’s mind but its own? Before the US existed, proto-Americans from Europe were brutally—genocidally–hegemonic in their interactions with the diverse and culturally-rich peoples who had lived on the land for eons. Hegemony pales as a term for the theft and cruelty that colonial and then national polities encouraged property owners to exercise over the enslaved Africans who labored in their fields and nurtured their children, enriching slavers far beyond anything the slavers could have achieved with their own sweat and toil.
Historical stories are typically told from the side that favors the victors, but every aspect of the American past was hotly contested at the time and subsequently. A minority of (largely) young hotheads felt so strongly about “independence” that they were willing and eager to wage revolutionary war against England, 1775-1783. Robert Calhoon estimates that about 40–45% of the colonists, mainly in Massachusetts and Virginia, supported the war. 15–20% were opposed and actively supported and/or fought for England against the revolutionaries, with the remaining 35–45% neutral, uncommitted and uninvolved (Calhoon, 1989).
Alan Taylor (2016) writes that “during the Revolutionary War, Americans killed one another over politics and massacred Indians, who returned the bloody favors. Patriots also kept two-fifths of Americans enslaved, and thousands of those slaves escaped to help the British oppose the revolution. After the war, 60,000 dispossessed Loyalists became refugees. The dislocated proportion of the American population exceeded that of the French in their revolution.” Those who fled from the bloody turmoil of the United States to Canada peacefully and productively waited for the fancies and follies of colonialism to run their course. Canada eventually became a sovereign nation without a fight.
The same might have been true for slavery in the US and US South. While the Civil War ended slavery technically, white hatred of and will to dominate people of color continued to fester and metastasize with lynchings, massacres of entire communities, egregious inequalities of collective opportunities as well as usurpation of individual achievements being normal parts of American life down to the present. When the fleeting decade of so-called “Reconstruction” after the Civil War ended, the arc of justice snapped back with the sound of a slaver’s whip. It is as though the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 70s—an interval of great hope and progress in my budding life– never happened.
Officially, the US initially followed the admonition of George Washington’s farewell letter to Congress of 1796 to tend to its own business within its own bounds. Why, the departing first president wrote, should we, “by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice? It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world…. Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest.”
In reality, each of the American colonies had been “entangled” in European rivalries from their beginnings. The entanglement of colonies in the south was largely agrarian while the north was more proto-industrial. The political parties of the newly-constituted United States were similarly divided in orientation between pro-industrial economic development and agrarianism. But one side—that favoring globalized industrialized economic growth—always won. For every Thoreau cooling his heels in Walden Pond, there were a dozen men endeavoring to drain paradise and put up a parking lot. For every poet who plucked the flower from the crannied wall to “know what God and man is”, there were a dozen Cornelius Vanderbilts felling trees, leveling mountains, building railroads connecting cities and factories to ships that sailed between all foreign ports so that
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”
Certain European nations rapidly transformed during the 19th Century from being agricultural societies (as they had been for thousands of years) that featured subsistence-level family farm communities with small, decentralized, overwhelmingly rural populations into urbanizing, rapidly-expanding industrial societies with belching factories, fuming engines, squalid cities, global trade, and inter-national wars. The territorial expansion of the US on the North American continent proceeded via invasion, war, and conquest from sea to shining sea, and as far north and south as Canada and Mexico would allow. The hardware, software, and orgware of emerging industrial technologies powered by the mining, transportation, and burning first of coal and then oil—along with waves of cheap immigrant labor, and the establishment of scores of universities in tiny towns across the growing states–enabled the north to vanquish the south in almost every contest.
After some hesitation, it was revealed that America’s God-ordained manifest destiny was to follow the example of European powers by invading weaker nations, grabbing their resources, and establishing subservient colonies overseas—in the Caribbean, Hawaii, the Philippines—with suzerainty over most of the nations in central and south America via the Monroe Doctrine. Conventionally, this is understood to be when the US made its first serious attempts to become a significant global hegemonic power, at war with competing hegemons.
And yet, even as late as World War I and World War II, in the early and mid 20th Century, many Americans preferred to pretend they could thrive isolated from international conflicts and conquests. It took much prodding, provoking, dropping bombs, and sinking ships to drag America into those military misadventures.
Arguably, America emerged the only true victor of the Second World War, and immediately plunged confidentially and recklessly into war after war overseas. According to ChatGPT 5.2, the US has been involved in more than 200 military interventions, covert operations and “peacekeeping missions” since the end of World War II in 1945.
But while Great Britain, Germany, Japan, and some other parts of the world preceded America in transforming from agricultural societies into industrial societies, America became the first “post industrial” society: by 1960—for the first time in history–more people were engaged in service and information activities in the US than in hunting-gathering, agricultural, or even industrial processes. However, around 2015 by my reckoning, the dominance of information societies, in all their characteristic ways of life, values and institutions, rapidly crashed to an end, with dream (or, perhaps, better, meme) societies steadily replacing them. My most recent book, Living make-belief: Thriving in a Dream Society (Dator 2024), is entirely devoted to explaining that and how America and much of the rest of the world is in the process of transforming from being hunting/gathering, agricultural, industrial, or information societies into dream societies. Industrial and especially information societies are grounded on literacy, logic, reason, and “truth” whereas dream societies are exemplified by performance, schtick, emotion, and “make-belief”. Each chapter of my book shows, step by step, how new technologies, institutions and values led to the transformation.
Many features of what this transformation portends are exemplified by the words and antics of Donald Trump during his first and especially second term of office (so far) as president of the United States. It was his intention that Elon Musk via the so-called Department of Government Efficiency would wantonly crush institutions, human relations, and values that had been painstakingly built after America’s founding, and especially over the 90 years since the Great Depression in the 1930s and World War II. As a prime exemplar of what it means to be successful in a dream society, Trump masterfully provoked perpetual shock, surprise, wonder, uncertainty, outrage, anxiety among friends and foes alike, with today’s foes becoming tomorrow’s friends who are forgotten the day after. The only essential is that Trump be constantly at the center of everything in totally unexpected and largely irrelevant ways. Thus, while his random destruction might continue to the end of his presidency, he might suddenly choose to glue the broken and scattered pieces back together again, or conjure new phoenixes to rise extravagantly from the smoldering ashes. America’s days as hegemon might come to an end by suicide, or flourish in ways and spheres beyond imagination today.
A response.
In 1651, the political philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, published The Leviathan in which he flatly declared that humanity’s origin and existence has been a constant Bellum omnium contra omnes—a war of all against all. Life “in the state of nature”, Hobbes famously insisted, was “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” This intolerable condition ended when a few of the strongest men joined in conquering, killing, and capturing the rest, while creating and enforcing legal, religious, educational and other institutions that forced humans to give up their solitary, free but brutal and brutish existence in exchange for a strongman’s dictatorial “peace”. Land, plants, animals, women, and other men were forcibly domesticated and restrained. Then, and only then, under the strict control of the Levithan, could humans live longer and more stable lives, Hobbes—and many others–maintained.
To the contrary, for one example among many, in a recent, extensive review of the literature on the complex subject, F. Xavier Ruiz Collantes concluded that “For tens of thousands of years Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer communities lived in democratic systems”. “Since our species was established around 300,000 years ago, 97% of its history has developed in egalitarian and democratic communities.” “The democracies of the Palaeolithic demonstrate that democratic political systems cover most of human history, that humans have imagined and built democracies with a very high degree of political equality, and that democratic practices are closely linked to the evolutionary development of our species” (Ruiz Collantes, 2024). Ruiz Collantes concludes that “it could be said that antiauthoritarianism and the democratic spirit are fundamental to human evolution”. “[I]f humanity originated in Africa, democracy also originated in Africa because the emergence of democracy is linked to the emergence of Homo sapiens”.
But what does Ruiz Collantes mean by democracy? Even though he says he takes “a very generic definition of democracy”, it is well beyond what most Americans and others call “democracy” now: “namely, a political system in which all or most of the members of a community have the right to political participation in decision making for all or most of the community”. “[A]ll citizens have equal political power, the same freedoms, the same rights to participate in politics and to define the agenda, and, above all, the same influence on decisions that affect the community”. Speaking more broadly about democracy now, he states that “the demos [democratic polities]should include all those affected by its decisions and those for whom its decisions imply some kind of coercion. In a context of superpowers whose decisions affect other countries, the demos could be expanded to encompass all of humanity”.
So what happened? If Ruiz Collantes is correct, in spite of its very early origins and long history, democratic governance apparently did not proceed and improve smoothly, linearly, and directly after the democratic Paleolithic period to a glorious present. To the contrary, there seems to have been a substantial regression to an extended and continuing period of alpha male-dominance and inequality that arrested and prevented further evolution of democracy. Ruiz Collantes cites abundant evidence that “The Neolithic extension and consolidation of sedentarism and agriculture [and, I would add, the invention of writing systems], approximately 10,000 years ago, began a massive transition from egalitarian and democratic societies to hierarchical societies based on direct dominance.” “The hierarchies and power systems that developed from the Neolithic regressed most of humanity to the dominance of communities by Homo sapiens alpha individuals and coalitions that persists to this day”. In other words, Hobbes’ Leviathan did not end a long history of war and violence, finally allowing for peace under his firm hand. Rather, he destroyed centuries of relative peace and harmony, and created a lengthy era of submission, theft, and killing by the hand of the Leviathan and his minions.
To be sure, most people have been taught to reject and ridicule this characterization. They have been convinced that Hobbes is correct; that democracy, as defined here, never existed, and certainly is neither possible nor desirable now; that strong men did, will, and should rule, wisely and justly preferably, but nonetheless with a strong hand; that only indirect, loosely representative and highly bureaucratized forms of governance, with prominent roles for strong men are essential. And it goes without saying that hegemony—the dominance of superior nations over inferior ones—is natural, desirable, and inevitable. Democracy, that might have been possible in tiny bands of genetically, linguistically, and cosmologically homogeneous humans, is not in any way feasible in our diverse, quarreling, armed, overpopulated, overexploited, inequitable dream world of today and tomorrow, we have been repeatedly taught.
And this may be correct. But if it is not–if, as a lifetime of workshops and classes on governance design around the world has repeatedly made clear to me, the preference for direct participation in agenda-setting, decision-making and (often overlooked) monitoring and carrying-out the community decisions may be encoded in our genes through many thousands of years of experience–then we need to turn our attention to redesigning and creating truly participatory and anticipatory governance, economic, and other structures and processes for our futures.
For all of its history, from the very beginning, the national government of the United States was sold to its citizens and the rest of the world as a perfect God-directed model of “Democracy”. And yet, the document that constituted the United States was handwritten–hastily, secretly, and cleverly–by a few white property owners to prevent democracy. Based on cutting-edge cosmologies and technologies of the day, it was designed for a highly-fragmented and geographically-dispersed tiny population of owners, farmers, and slaves. None of the cosmologies or technologies of industrial societies, much less of information or dream societies, existed. The presses that printed the Constitution were hand-powered; the steam engine had not been made operational yet. Moreover the writers made it extremely difficult to amend the document. Aside from the so-called Bill of Rights added immediately after it was (undemocratically) adopted, it has had only a handful of significant modifications—following the Civil War—down to the present. The document was flawed in many ways, and although numerous proposals for amending or re-writing it have been made (for better or worse), the public generally has been cajoled into believing the document is above reproach or improvement; that it is only a few bad apples that have caused all the rotten fruit. To even suggest real changes for current conditions literally has been tantamount to treason (Dator 2024, Chapters 9-11).
Well, fortunately, for the first time in a long time, we may be in luck. A series of blundering developments have made it possible—nay, mandatory—that more of us begin thinking about and moving towards new governance design. In July 2025, I sent the following to a number of futures-oriented groups and individuals:
Now is the time.
Trump, Musk, et al, should be sincerely thanked for having done all of us great favor. They have both desanctified the US Constitution and diminished the structures and functioning of the US national government while also aiming to replace humans with AI in routine decision-making positions. Having performed a miracle in an eyeblink, we now have the extraordinary opportunity to do what we never thought we would be able to do: fundamentally rethink the purpose and functioning of governance, while actually creating better structures and processes to fill the vacuum.
This is an opportunity well beyond current left, right, green and other ideologies. It must be grasped as a way to transcend current differences and antagonisms, uniting everyone in a common task of creativity, design, and implementation.
This is the responsibility not only for the few of us who have spent a lifetime thinking about and working towards new governance design but also for all people everywhere who feel frustrated and angry with the limits of current structures, while admiring and striving to emulate the genius and determination of the original constitution’s authors.
With existing structures of governance everywhere flailing and moribund; with nuclear-armed, AI-reliant world wars blissfully in vogue again; with the debt-ingurgitating, immiseration-defecating, ponzi-esque, global casino capitalist economy in terminal rigor mortis; with growing numbers of people distrustful or disdainful of hoary institutions and processes ineptly twitching futilely on the basis of antique ideas and creaking technologies; with artilects replacing human decision-making and labor in the race towards full unemployment; with human fertility below replacement everywhere but sub-Saharan Africa; with profoundly and widely disruptive climate change being hastened by spiteful attacks on science and empirical evidence; with most people (including in the educated, leisure, and formally elite classes) befuddled and bemused by perpetually-diverting spectacles of outrage, extravagance, and vulgarity characteristic of a dream society… well, widespread social, political, economic and environmental collapse seems imminent and provocatively appealing. Nations, the obsolete nation-state system (a 17th Century solution to a European conundrum wholly unfit for most of the rest of the world then and now) as well as international relations and hegemonic competition may soon be gone with the wind.
Waters and Der Derian (2024) state that “quantum mechanics is our most successful physical theory to date at explaining phenomena from the sub-atomic to the cosmic”. The “description of reality presented by quantum mechanics simply challenges too many of the philosophical foundations upon which the social and political sciences are built. These include, but extend beyond, classical conceptions of causality, prediction, and the observer-independence that undergirds claims of objectivity.”
All modern political constitutions, and most especially that of the United States, derive from a Newtonian worldview. Contemporary political structures, and the political science and philosophy underlying them (as is also the case of contemporary economic structures, sciences, and philosophies), assume a “rational man”, a clear distinction between object and subject (and objective and subjective positions), the reality and determinability of linear and closely-connected “cause and effect”, and many other mechanistic notions that are largely misleading. Quantum designates particles that mediate fundamental interactions (such as the photon). And it is the interactions that are fundamental, not the “separate” particles. While immediate cause-effect determinism and rational decision-making both have roles in our lives, those roles are marginal to and certainly not primary in human affairs. Rather, probability, randomness, uncertainty, and complementarity are ‘”normal”.
What is needed and possible, thus, is a dynamic global network of interacting intelligences animated by principles of quantum politics. Such governance primarily facilitates preferred individual and group behavior, and mediates resulting conflicts. It does not assume that humans act rationally and solitarily on the basis of their carefully calculated individual self-interest. Humans act on the basis of emotion, habit, tradition, loyalty, fear…, and so we should design structures of governance accepting those bases rather than denying or trying to change them. Quantum governance does not enforce conformity to laws determined by an adversarial majority of the slimmest of margins, while punishing misbehavior. It is based on random selection as well as direct individual and group participation in all aspects of governance, including agenda-setting and discussion, decision-making, fine-tuning, implementation, oversight, interpretation, conflict avoidance and mediation. Participation is not restricted to simple acts of electing “representatives” at fixed intervals for specified periods of time but direct, continuous and voluntary, or indirect, episodic and randomly chosen….and so much more. (Dator, 2025) (see Chapter 13).
References
Calhoon, R. M. (1989). The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays. University of South Carolina Press.
Dator, J. (2024). Living Make-Belief: Thriving in a Dream Society. Springer Anticipation Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-61294-7
Ruiz Collantes, F. X. (2024). Democracy against Homo sapiens alpha: Reverse dominance and political equality in human history, Constellations. 31:233–252. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12680]
Taylor, A. (2017). American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804. American Heritage, Special Issue. 62/4. https://www.americanheritage.com/american-revolutions-continental-history
Waters, J. C & & Der Derian,J. (2024), Quantum International Relations for an Age of Uncertainty, in Frueh, J. Ala, J., Murphy, M. and Diehl,P. (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook on the Pedagogy of International Relations Theory. Palgrave Macmillan.
Affiliation
Jim Dator
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Professor emeritus
