User:Ghelæ/Guide To Stuff

Welcome to Ghelæ's Guide To Stuff, the successor to the far more useful and world-renowned Ghelæ's Guide To Battle Images! Over the coming millennium or so, I intend to fill out this page with useful stuff that can be useful for building a realistic fiction, and isn't specific to the main collaborative SporeWiki fiction univese. Useful, don't you think?

Exopolitics
There are four main areas by which societies can be classified - the leadership, the centralisation of authority, the freedom given to citizens, and the form of economy. For the most part, these exist along a spectrum, and therefore the difference between the categories is often vague at best.

Leadership= We'll call this the standard scale of government. It ranges from a single individual having control to the entire population having a say in the running of civilisation.
 * Standard Scale


 * Autocracies (rule by one) are controlled by an individual.
 * Diarchies and polyarchies (rule by two and rule by many) can sometimes be seen as intermediate between monarchy and oligarchy, but usually even polyarchies have sufficiently few rulers (less than ten) so that they work in effectively the same manner as autocracies.
 * Oligarchies (rule by few) are controlled by a large number of individuals relative to the size of average social groups, but only a small proportion of the total population.
 * Democracies (rule by the people) are controlled by a significant proporion to a large majority of the population, not to be confused with systems where the government is merely elected democratically.
 * Anarchies or isocracies are "rule by none" or "rule by all"; political hierarchies are unneccessary (as some species simply lack social hierarchies), rejected (for some ideal, from anti-establishment to social darwinist), or destroyed due to civil strife.

Note that the difference between these categories often depends on the natural social systems of the species involved, as well as the size of the civilisation itself. For example, a government consisting of hundreds of individuals may be a democracy for a small tribal society, or one in which social bonding is rare, while it may be an oligarchy for a galaxy-spanning empire, or a polyarchy for a species in which social interactions normally involve handling large numbers of interpersonal relationships.

Another factor within standard scale governments is the legitimacy by which leaders claim their rule.


 * Electoral systems, where the leaders are chosen by the general populace.
 * Dicatorships, where a particular group is given privilege to rule. There are countless possibilities as to which may be used in a civilisation, with popular ones including age or gender, divine commandment, merit of personality, military power, perceived intrinsic superiority, or wealth.
 * Cryptocracies, in which the real leaders of the society are kept secret from all but very few individuals, and there is often a puppet government put into place to hide the existence of cryptocracy.

Further means of categorisation can also be used, such as the length of time that a leader can be in power for, variously from short terms to being able to rule for life.

Note that combinations of governments can also exist within the same society. For example, constitutional monarchies usually implement the concept of trias politica (seperation of powers), and have a hereditary monarch as the (symbolic) head of the executive branch, while a form of electoral system such as a representative democracy or democratic republic holds most or all of the real power.


 * Collective consciousness

A collective consciousness is a system by which all members of a society are capable of directly sharing thoughts, emotions, opinions, and other concepts, directly to each others' brains. This can be achieved by various means, such as telepathy, pheromones, and technological communication. Collective consciousnesses often have aspects of anarchies, democracies, or even autocracies, although in practice the decisions are all made by the collective consciousness and not individuals acting alone or in consensus. Some collective consciousnesses evolved naturally within certain species, while others were created artificially. Entities in some such consciousnesses are often biologically incapable of functioning as individual creatures, and if they are separated from their collective consciousness then they will often revert to basic instincts or even cease to function (either becoming vegetative or even dying).

There are several types of collective consciousness.


 * Group mind - all beings have individuality, but are all still mentally connected. These tend to resemble other forms of governments more than hive minds and superorganisms do, since there is usually a greater need for a system of organisation and administration in a society in which many individuals exist. This is usually a step in the evolution of a hive mind organism.
 * Hive mind - there is no individuality; all entities within the consciousness are merely different bodies which the same mind has complete control over.
 * Superorganisms - not always literally collective, often instead being eusocial hierachies. In a typical superorganism, a central mind (often referred to as a "king" or "queen", due to the superorganism's similarity to an autocratic monarchy) exerts its will, via pheromones or a similar one-way means of control, on other beings that exist purely to serve the superorganism. Such creatures are usually divided into castes such "workers" and "soldiers", and are created purely for specific tasks. Generations also overlap. The central mind often receives information from outside via its subservient beings, but it is far from the clear two-way flow of information that other collective consciousnesses have.

Everything else= The centralisation of a society relates to where most of its organisation occurs.
 * Centralisation


 * Unitary societies are the most centralised, with all decisions falling to a central authority.
 * Imperial societies often evolve from unitary governments. They have a powerful central authority, but also have seperate systems for controlling the other regions within their dominion.
 * Federations are less centralised than empires, with individual regions having a greater degree of autonomy.
 * Alliances rarely count as distinct civilisations, instead being groups of completely independent nations joined by an agreement such as a military pact. Such groups are not listed here; however, the memeber states of some alliances are closely associated enough for them to be indistinguishable from a single nation, and these may be listed here.
 * Decentralised societies are ones where there is no central form of government. It is almost impossible outside of a democracy or isocracy.

The freedom experienced by citizens of a society is only relevent to societies governed by standard scale systems, as the issue becomes more complex when dealing with others. Most anarchic and collective systems can be viewed as being perfectly libertarian, and some hive minds and superorganisms and can simultaneously be viewed as being perfectly libertarian and totalitarian due to the nature of collective consciousness.
 * Freedom


 * Libertarian societies grant numerous social, political, and economic rights to all of their citizens.
 * Egalitarian societies treat their citizens equally, but not necessarily with as many rights as libertarian civilisations.
 * Authoritarian societies involve obedience to authority by their citizens.
 * Totalitarian societies involve total control of citizens by authority, often resembling an attempt at creating a hive mind but with coercive rather than biological means of control. Fascist societies control by ideologies, such as the nation or race being more important than the individual, while police states condition very strict rules over society. In surveillance societies, the government uses mass surveillance, usually using infotech, sometimes invading privacy and destroying civil liberties to do so, in order to maintain social control.

Economies are, essentially, systems of distributing limited resources. The main scale for economic systems is the capitalist-socialist spectrum, where capitalism is the range of systems in which the means of production are privately owned, and are operated for a profit involving the acquisition of currency (usually in the form of money).
 * Economy


 * Liberal societies involve little state control over the economy, and usually there are laws in place to encourage free trade and prevent corporatism or mercantilism.
 * Mercantile societies have increasing control by the government, often with the ideal of the interests of the state being a greater priority than that of the individual. They may focus heavily on international trade, with a significant proportion of the population working in production and manufacturing so that there is a large excess of goods that can then be exported to other states for large financial gains, with few financial losses as a result of imports. Often, high taxes are then used to transfer this money to the government.
 * Corporate societies have a large degree of control is exerted over the economy, either by the state or by large corporations. In societies ruled by totalitarian and corrupt regimes, corporatism is often used for the benefit of the ruling party. Business-controlled corporatism is clearly capitalism, while state-controlled corporatism often has socialist features.
 * Welfare or mixed societies are those which have aspects of both capitalist and socialist aspects. In practice, most economies are mixed, but with a tendency towards one end of the capitalist-socialist spectrum, such as being mostly capitalist but having nationalised institutions such as healthcare or a limited system of redistributing wealth, or being mostly socialist but with a limited trade-based economy.
 * Socialist societies are those in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the public, often by the state on the behalf of its citizens.
 * Communist societies are where a socialist economy has become universal; resources are taken from all workers and (ideally) distributed to each citizen of the society according to their needs.

Non-economic societies also exist, which are those that require little to no labour for the acquisition of essential products such as food, water, and shelter. Despite the names, there can still be scarcity in these societies, either from natural disasters or intrinstically limited commodities.


 * Pre-scarcity societies are where the economy has not developed. Economies normally evolve with the emergence of the division of labour within societies; specifically, where only certain people are in control of food production via farming. Rather than farming, pre-scarcity societies use only food that is naturally occuring, rather than manipulating the environment themselves. Pre-scarcity societies are most commonly represented by stone age tribes, since the development of a sustainable agricultural system and an agricultural worker class is usually necessary for there to be people who have sufficient free time in which to invent new technologies. Alternatively, the collapse of civilisation, such as that resulting from internal conflict, can result in an economic collapse that leads to many individuals being forced to adapt to a pre-scarcity style of life.
 * Post-scarcity societies are usually those which previously had an economy - hence the name - but due to advanced technology (such as automation, high-efficiency clean energy generation, and matter replicators), managed to remove the need for a system of distributing limited resources, as resources were no longer limited.