This comes in a few parts.

First, we need to establish a very good system to run a country. Since there is so much experience out there about this, you pretty much could write it up in a book. It would describe things like economics, healthcare, space industry, and daycare, and how to manage holidays off in large global companies where people operate in different time zones as well as have multiple queens birthdays to worry about, and the most key part, how to build a bureaucracy that is both highly functional as well as impenetrable.

Second, gift the book to everyone in the world currently in process running a country. Most of them would be glad to have a guide.

Thirdly, wait a decade while seeds take root, bureaucrats are hired, and we have, generally speaking, a good running set of countries. People are fed, kids are looked after, teeth are capped, the monarchy has ended, forms are filled, and race and gender issues are secondary to all the pain of logging in with 2-factor for all the SSOs you have.

Fourthly, it is revealed a set of details and instructions for the Big Game.

The Big Game is an internationally legal instrument approved (by a variety of people who are international) to describe a game as thus:

* Every leader of every country, can take part in the game
* Anyone who takes part in the game, has at risk, in part or in whole, their country.
* Anyone who takes part in the game, has a possibility to win, in part or in whole, anyone else's country.
* The game itself is simply a board game in a nicely set up room somewhere in Antarctica that is easily reachable by airplanes or suborbital rockets or very expensive boats.
* Everyone who arrives, needs to wear masks from the door, until they sit down. Then they can take them off.
* The rules of the board game are interesting and very detailed and basically describe a system whereby a leader can pool virtual resources to overcome some section of a neighbor's territory. Leaders can also plot and scheme amongst each other. There are so many games like this out there it is hardly worth going into it.

* This is dragging on but - the key idea, that makes this whole thing sing, is that whoever wins any section or county, or borough, or region or state, 100% legally becomes the new owner. It is theirs! Such a prize. It belongs to them and they can do what they want with it. As long as they fill out the right forms, because none of those bureaucracy can process data unless it is formatted right.

Therefore, leaders can win and overthrow and legally own as much as they like. In a room in Antarctica.

Conquest is absolute, until re-conquested by someone else.

But the average person, protected by a thick layer of bureaucracy, may never know their county has been taken over. It is like the good old days of Attila the Hun, where there was so much space and so little conquerors that even if a continent was won, the peasants tilling the mud would have no idea or even care. They just get on with logging into all their services.
-- mylodon, Mar 23 2022

I know you have framed this as a speculative counter-factual fantasy but nonetheless this counts as a gross violation of the official secrets act. I mean you have basically explained in excrutiating detail every aspect of how the current world order actually operates. Your handlers will be in touch very soon to re-assign you to other duties.
-- pocmloc, Mar 23 2022


You didn't mention the most important part, where you ship them off to Antarctica and then simply leave them there.
-- RayfordSteele, Mar 23 2022


[+/-]
-- Voice, Mar 23 2022


This is reminiscent of an original series Star Trek episode titled "a taste of Armageddon". The main difference there was that when an attack struck a populated area on the game board, casualties were calculated by a computer and that number of civilians was rounded up (by their own side) and executed in an incinerator. The biggest flaw in your version is that you didn't include a requirement for participating nations to adopt the system of government described in the book.
-- 21 Quest, Mar 23 2022


//everyone in the world currently in process running a country//
//People are fed, kids are looked after,...//
For some countries (a lot? a few? dunno...), these statements are at odds.
//Conquest is absolute//
In other words, some despot will come in, shoot/gas/poison all other leaders, & take over the world. Until we have BETTER PEOPLE, this won't work. It will take generations (not "a decade") of good education (& healthcare & etc etc) to make the world a decent place for everyone.
-- neutrinos_shadow, Mar 23 2022


Yeah I realize there are some details to resolve. But you can't just give Putin a laptop with Civilization on it.

Some aspects of this has been attempted in a few areas:

* Large sporting organizations, allowing for players to battle each other on the field largely unaffected by whoever at the time owns the team

* Multinational corporations, letting people go about doing whatever they do daily, without being fussed about shareholder percentages.

In these cases it is largely (if not always) the benefit of the new conqueror/owner to keep the players/employees satisfied and undisturbed.

An extension of this idea would be to disassociate citizenship from land. So countries could be more like multinational insurance organizations. And people could change citizenship and benefits without having to move their own house. Or they could more easily move locations and keep their old citizenship.
-- mylodon, Mar 24 2022


Just my two cents.

Without a metric to determine altruism and empathy in our public servants then proximity to power must remain a short term affair, or eventually it becomes...
..."What good are all these toys and all this power if I don't get to play with them?"

I think we all at a gut level understand this, it's been going on since before we could speak.

Do we really want our elected representatives to be comprised of nothing but business and law degrees?

Is there really not anything else to vote for other than that?

No, [none-of-the-above] vote?

Pretty easy to stack a deck that way.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 24 2022


It's not that there's nothing else to vote for, it's that all the other degree holders are busy in their respective fields. What good is a scientist who's too busy campaigning to do science? If he HAS enough spare time to run for political office, he's probably not very good at doing science, and then what's the point in voting for him?
-- 21 Quest, Mar 24 2022


Plenty of successful companies have been created or run by people without applicable degrees, so the tools of the trade can be picked up by those with the right skillset without necessarily resorting to business degreed folk. But they are decidey less common.
-- RayfordSteele, Mar 24 2022



random, halfbakery