Minimum Viable State Pt. 2

Vegans, Solstice, and the Isle of Man

In part one, we established that the best state is the one that cares for the health of the people and if you were to start a new country as a business, the type of business would be a gym.

But besides people having a Barrys / Orange Theory to go to all together while they are living a in a remote location - you’ll also need a mechanism of cohesion that is works across borders and achieves something greater than “starting a country” — starting a people.

To have a regime, you need a regimen. Rules your people believe in. Things they do, that no one else does. Things they don’t do, despite everyone doing them.

Food

Are you a vegan? No? that’s fine – but if you realize, vegans are their own type of people. They have a distinct identity from everyone else’s. Creating a people requires approaching something like starting a new branch of veganism, or a new type of kosher diet. You need a set of rules, that the people that are part of the City State or Network State follow - the trick is that they need to believe in why they follow that diet. The person who is closest to achieving this recently is Bryan Johnson with BluePrint.

Calendar

A people need their own holidays. Network States need to establish their own festivities that are marked in their citizens’ calendars. Do they work on Saturdays? Are there parties during solstice? Do they celebrate the Bitcoin halving?

Language

This is probably the hardest one. Do your people speak something that no one else does? You could try to come up with a new language, pick up a language from a fictional book, or revive a dead language.

“But reviving a language is extremely hard, no??”

There’s this tiny island in the UK called Isle of Man. It’s a separate country from England. It had a language called “Manx” that went extinct - and then it was revived. How many people do you think speak it natively today (Jan 2024) that is still considered a living language? Stop and guess a number (scroll down for the answer).

The answer is 23 native speakers.

The bar is really low. If you can get 23 people to speak your language as a first language, that language is formally alive and spoken by “a people.”