On Secession

[avatar (Alistair Young)]

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@Specialist290 <specialist290@hughes.net> on 2016-08-30 14:08:09 wrote

Besides, why would anyone ever want to leave anyway?

And yet, we seem to have enough renunciates and Renegades running around to demonstrate that a sizeable number of people – if technically a very small minority proportionally – do want to leave.

Which leads me to ask: Why would someone want to leave? More specifically, given the obvious material and cognitive advantages that someone born and raised while surrounded by Imperial culture and praxis enjoys, what would compel them to see the Empire itself as an “inferior” option, enough so that they would disclaim their own citizenship that was (presumably) hard-won in the first place?

@Vyslanté <val.stephanois@hotmail.fr> on 2016-08-31 01:37:04 wrote

I think that Renegades… renegate because they want to use force to impose the Empire way of live. Something that the Empire itself is not too fond of doing – respecting the right of people to chose and all that.

And as why someone would want to leave ? That’s harder… I can think of differents reasons one might want not to join, but join then leave ? Maybe “I was only testing how they live but in the end that does not suit me”…

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2016-08-31 02:43:12 wrote

Well, of course, that was from the point of the view of the people founding said ecumenical empire. I suspect that most people in that position don’t spend a lot of time thinking about that particular question.

(And, of course, the numbers we see are distinctly exaggerated for literary purposes. Out of a population over a trillion, you can reasonably print the names of all the Renegades in a single book. Not using micro-print, either.)

You can pick out some identifiable groups of motivations. Love and greed would be two, along with the other things that can make a chap mighty stupid. We’ve mentioned the desire to use unethical techniques to fix bits of the universe that don’t want to be. Then there’s straight-up criminality, either before or after being shown the door, and/or being unpleasant enough that people will pay you to self-ostracise. Wanting to do something that your tort insurer won’t cover at a price you can afford, but hey, some governments have invented liability caps, poor suckers they. The wrong kind of ambition (like the dodgy business practices that made the Magenites leave), confusing anarchy with chaos, an incurably poliical turn of mind, that sort of thing. Cacophilia.

But, y’know, there are a hundred million stories in the naked galaxy…

@joelkreissman <zarpaulus@gmail.com> on 2016-08-30 14:14:38 wrote

I’m pretty certain that kind of thing might work for eldrae, but I seriously doubt it would for humans. The majority of the species are not only too territorial but also get too many opiates from in-person interactions for any sort of polity that isn’t based on geography to work.

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2016-08-31 02:08:56 wrote

Well, it’s not like you’re going to get any fewer in-person interactions just because you organize your polity a bit differently, I wouldn’t think?

(As for territoriality - well, this, among other things, is one of those tendencies that doesn’t do a species many favors in a space environment distinctly unsuited for that sort of thing. The Interstellar League of Tribal Chiefdoms was sarcastically coined to describe exactly that sort of thing.)

@joelkreissman <zarpaulus@gmail.com> on 2016-08-31 09:14:46 wrote

If only because the Empire already had control over the territory where their starting population of citizen-shareholders resided. I seriously doubt any human government would think of organizing that way and if a corporate government tried to establish itself their citizens would be too dispersed for them to do anything about it.

The only possible exception I can imagine is if a corporation had a tabula rasa to work with such as Mars, and I’d expect them to revert to territorial thinking after a generation or two.

@Vyslanté <val.stephanois@hotmail.fr> on 2016-08-31 09:24:55 wrote

Yeah, but Eldrae are not humans, so…

@PyroDesu <stephentclements@gmail.com> on 2016-09-14 11:50:36 wrote

I wonder how the reverse might function. Based on this piece: Someone wishes to join the Empire (and is successful in doing so, for the sake of the example) but does not want to leave their residence that might be considered to be territory of the previous holder of their citizenship. In the Empire’s view, this creates an Imperial Exclave the size of the new Citizen-Shareholder’s yard, but the previous holder of their citizenship says that it’s their territory and they can compel the new Citizen-Shareholder (to move, to pay taxes, whatever) because of it… Cue curbstomp war.

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2016-09-14 12:39:29 wrote

In the Empire’s view, this creates an Imperial Exclave the size of the new Citizen-Shareholder’s yard

Ah, not quite. Remember: “sovereignty is a bundle of a few specialized property rights which it acquires, often purchasing, over the territory in which its subscribers are domiciled for the sake of ease of administration”.

When someone becomes a new citizen-shareholder, that’s easy enough to do if they live in space on their own private rock - but if they happen to live in the middle of an existing polity, they can’t sell the Empire those sovereign rights (creating an exclave), because they don’t have them to sell. They’re held by the polity they happen to live in.

(Now, one can argue - and some people have - that the polities only have them because of unlawful takings in the first place. To this, the Curia has a lengthy legal argument which boils down to:

(a) Yes, that’s probably technically true, but it was an unlawful taking from whoever the volume originally belonged to n generations ago, and while that doesn’t make it right, there’s a limit to how far anyone can be reasonably expected to unwind the transaction log; and

(b) Yes, that’s probably technically true, but in one of our rare and unpleasant bows to pragmatism, we’re not going to insist on the point because we don’t want to go to war with everyone today.)

@PyroDesu <stephentclements@gmail.com> on 2016-09-14 17:21:43 wrote

So the Empire considers sovereignty of a territory separate from the physical territory itself. Thus, a new Citizen-Shareholder who purchased territory (sovereignty not specified, but after the fact the polity insists it was not sold because, for example, they don’t think it’s something that can be sold) in another polity would wind up owning a piece of territory that is still a part of the original polity and subject to it despite the land the territory is on being property of an Imperial Citizen-Shareholder.

Seems like it might create an unusual situation where a polity could say something to the effect of: “You purchased this land (but not sovereignty of it) while a citizen of this polity, but on renouncing your citizenship and purchasing (I suppose that’s the right verb) Imperial Citizen-Shareholdership, we will now take (not buy) the land (and all associated property - structures, etc.) back from you as we still hold sovereign rights over it. Now get off our planet”, though by Imperial law that land and such is property of, and thus, technically an extension of, the Citizen-Shareholder who purchased it, even if they do not hold the sovereignty of it.