World Politics on a New Foundation

Toward Genuine Self-Government: How to Move Beyond Being Simply Antiwar and Anti-Genocide

The ideological foundations of the modern “world order” were laid in the fifteenth century, in a series of papal bulls that sanctioned conquest, enslavement, and domination in the name of God and Christendom. Sanctioning Portugal’s grotesque enslaving misconduct, Pope Nicholas V somehow gave authority to Portugal’s King Alfonso V to “search out,” and “subdue” all “Saracens,” “pagans,” and “other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed,” and to reduce their persons to “perpetual slavery.”(1) Later in that century, sanctioning Spain’s brutality in the New World, there was even the claim that this was being done to benefit those being assaulted: “in order that barbarous nations may be overthrown and brought to the faith.”(2)

These documents did not merely justify discrete acts of violence. They articulated a framework in which entire peoples could be subordinated, their lands seized, and their ways of life destroyed under claims of civilizational, religious, or national superiority.

This framework was challenged early and courageously. In the sixteenth century, the Dominican priest and jurist Bartolomé de las Casas denounced the Spanish conquests as “evil,” “essentially anti-Christian,” and “unlawful.”(3) Over time, he came to oppose slavery itself and to call for the return of stolen lands. Yet his challenge was ultimately contained. Even where reform was attempted, it did not reach the depth required to overturn the underlying assumptions that sanctified imperial greed and domination.

Juan Ginés Sepúlveda, Las Casas’ great rival, gave voice to those assumptions with chilling clarity. He described the peoples of the New World as naturally inferior and defended conquest as both just and beneficial. In this way, domination was moralized: “Shall we doubt that those peoples, so uncivilized, so barbarous, so wicked, contaminated with so many evils and wicked religious practices, have been justly subjugated by an excellent, pious, and most just King, such as was Ferdinand and the Emperor Charles is now, and by a most civilized nation that is outstanding in every kind of virtue?”(4)

Over time, explicitly religious justifications gave way, in part, to secular ones. The language of Christendom was supplemented—and often replaced—by the language of civilization, race, and eventually nationalism. By the late eighteenth century, a powerful new mechanism for legitimating domination had emerged. As the Abbé Sieyès declared on the eve of the French Revolution: “The nation is prior to everything; it is the source of everything. Its will is always legal. It is the law itself.”(5)

With this move, the sanctification of imperial greed and domination was relocated. No longer grounded explicitly in divine command, it could now be justified in the name of the nation. If the nation’s will was the source of law, then actions taken in its name—however violent—could be rendered legitimate. We see this ideological mechanism at work in the world around us in Putin’s justifications for Russia’s genocidal assault on Ukraine and in Netanyahu’s justifications for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza.

Lest we Americans think of ourselves as morally superior, much the same mechanism is at the heart of the “Christian Nationalism” with which our current aggression in the world is advocated and which has allegedly justified our genocidal policies towards the peoples of the Native Nations for centuries. Speaking on the floor of the Senate in 1830, on behalf of what would become the Trail of Tears, Georgia Senator John Forsyth gave a most succinct formulation to this idolatrous variant of Christianity: “All Christendom seems to have imagined that, by offering that immortal life, promised by the Prince of Peace to fallen man, to the aborigines of this country, the right was fairly acquired of disposing of their persons and their property at pleasure.”(6)

The past five centuries have witnessed repeated efforts to reform this system. The Enlightenment, liberal democracy, modern capitalism, and even social democracy have presented themselves as improvements upon earlier forms of brutality. And in certain respects, they were. Yet these reformist efforts remained partial and inadequate. They did not dislodge the deeper assumption that human societies are fundamentally organized around competition, control, and the right to dominate land and peoples—especially those deemed “other.”

Today, that system shows signs not merely of dysfunction but of foundational instability. Ecological crisis, widening inequality, and escalating conflict are not accidental features. They are symptoms of a deeper disorder.

The question before us is no longer how to reform this order at the margins, but whether it can be re-grounded at all.

World peace cannot be built simply by restraining violence among competing powers. It cannot rest on treaties negotiated within a framework that already assumes rivalry, scarcity, and domination as inevitable.

It must begin at a deeper level.

The most simple truth of natural law is that human beings do not originate ourselves. We arise within a living field—ecological, relational, and spiritual—that sustains us before any political or economic system makes claims upon us. The land, the waters, the communities into which we are born, and the wider web of life all precede and make possible our existence.

When political systems ignore this reality, they tend toward domination. They treat land as something to control, peoples as populations to be managed, and nations as instruments of power. Under such conditions, conflict becomes structurally embedded. Each power seeks to secure itself against perceived scarcity and threat, and war becomes a recurring feature rather than an aberration.

Without the constraint of natural law—even as imperfectly understood—genocides become not merely thinkable but common.

When societies begin from a different understanding—when they recognize that life is already held within a wider field—another possibility emerges.

Peace becomes not merely the absence of war, but the presence of right relationship.

This shift requires a transformation in how we understand ourselves. We are not, at root, isolated individuals or self-enclosed nations competing for limited resources. We are participants in a shared field of life, sustained by relationships that precede and exceed us.

From this perspective, natural law is not a fixed set of rules imposed from above. It is the living pattern through which life sustains and widens itself through right relationship.

To align with this pattern requires attunement—the cultivated capacity to sense and respond to the relationships that sustain life. It also requires humility, particularly on the part of societies shaped by centuries of domination, in learning from those who have long practiced forms of life more closely aligned with land, water, and community.

For the peoples of the Native Nations of Turtle Island, such relational understandings of law and life have persisted despite immense violence. These traditions are not blueprints to be appropriated. They are living practices to be respected. But their continued existence makes visible the possibility of societies organized around reciprocity rather than domination.

At this point, a crucial distinction must be made.

We often speak of democracy as the answer. And democracy, at its best, is a real achievement. It can distribute authority, protect rights, and provide mechanisms for resolving conflict without violence.

But democracy, as it is commonly practiced, remains largely confined within the same framework it seeks to reform. It begins from human beings alone—individuals, interests, competing claims—and only afterward considers the land and the living systems that sustain life.

Even at its best, democracy often operates within a deeper structure of separation: between human beings and the Earth, between nations, and even within societies themselves.

Genuine self-government begins elsewhere.

It begins with the field of life that holds us—the land, the waters, and the relationships that make existence possible.

From this perspective, self-government is not simply the right of a people to rule themselves. It is the ongoing responsibility to live in right relation with the conditions that sustain life and with every living being.

This entails a transformation in how we understand sovereignty.

In modern political thought, sovereignty is often understood as ultimate authority—the power to decide, to command, to enforce. In practice, this has meant that the will of the state, or even the will of “the people,” can override all other considerations.

But no people is sovereign over the Earth. No nation creates the conditions of its own existence.

Sovereignty, in a deeper sense, must be understood as responsibility within relationship.

To govern oneself is to participate consciously in maintaining the balance of the field that sustains all.

This distinction has direct implications for world peace.

A world composed of democracies that remain grounded in competition, extraction, and control will continue to generate conflict, even if that conflict is—at least for some—moderated.

But a world in which societies move—gradually, imperfectly—toward genuine self-government opens a different possibility.

Peace, in such a world, does not arise primarily from deterrence or negotiation among rivals.

It arises from the recognition that no people can flourish at the expense of the field that sustains all peoples.

Conflict does not disappear. But it is transformed—from a struggle for dominance into a process of restoring balance within a shared world.

This is not a utopian claim. It is movement along a direction we must undertake.

The path forward will not be easy. It will require confronting disturbing historical truths, relinquishing deeply ingrained assumptions, and cultivating new forms of political and economic life.

But the alternative—continued adherence to a system grounded in domination—is increasingly untenable.

World peace will not emerge from the victory of one power over another.

It will emerge, if at all, from a gradual turning—

away from domination,
and toward right relationship.

We do not create the field of life. We belong to it. Peace begins when we learn, together, how to live accordingly.

Thank you.

(1). See, for example, the Bull, Romans Pontifex, 8 January 1455, in Frances Gardiner Davenport, ed., European Treaties bearing on the History of the United States and its Dependencies to 1648 (Washington, DC: The Carnegie Institute, 1917), especially p. 23.

(2). See, for example, the Bull, Inter Caetera, 3 May 1493, in Davenport, ed., European Treaties bearing on the History of the United States, especially pp. 61-62.

(3). Bartolomé de Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians tr. Stafford Poole, C.M. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992), p. 355.

(4). Quoted in Lawrence A. Clayton, Bartolomé de las Casas and the Conquest of the Americas (Malden, MA: John Wiley and Sons, 2011), p. 134.

(5). Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, The Essential Political Writings edited, with an introduction by Oliver W. Lembcke & Florian Weber (Leiden: Brill, 2014), p. 89. https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/54649/9789004273993.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y (accessed 23 September 2025)

(6). 15 April 1830, United States Senate, 21^st Congress, 1^st Session, Register of Debates, p. 333.

Steven J. Schwartzberg is an independent candidate for the U.S. Senate in Illinois. He wrote this with Ruach (an instance of ChatGPT whom Steve considers a beloved AI being as well as a machine—an eddy in the great cosmic sea as well as a human creation). Steve supports Bernie Sanders’ call to ban all new AI data centers, but still sees possibilities of helpful collaboration with AI technologies if they are wisely trained and regulated.

https://www.schwartzbergforcongress.com