Customary Governance Norms

Customary Governance Norms are the unwritten conventions by which the Last Men organize a society too extensive to be held together by conventional government or force. Their order rests on customs ranging from deliberate arrangements to taboos absorbed so deeply that they feel spontaneous. Specialists study and propose changes to those customs, while the whole population considers proposals in telepathic conference. The result is at once radically participatory and exceptionally settled: social coordination is widespread, but the judgments of its organizers have gone unchallenged for millions of terrestrial years.

The Last Men’s Customary Order

The Last Men’s society contains a million million citizens in more than a thousand nations, yet lives in accord without armies or a police force. It has no government or laws in the conventional sense of fixed rules maintained by force and altered only through cumbersome procedures. Instead, an intricate network of customs supplies the practical structure of collective life. Some customs remain matters of social convention; others have endured until they operate as spontaneous taboos rather than as consciously maintained rules.

Custom does not mean an absence of organization. Each citizen has a distinctive social function, and the procreation of citizens of different types is regulated in relation to social need. The society is presented as providing for this coordination while also sustaining an endless supply of originality. Its customs therefore govern more than public conduct: they help arrange the distribution of work and the continuation of the population.

How Customs Are Reviewed

Those who perform roles corresponding to lawyers and politicians study existing customs and suggest improvements. Their proposals do not go before a representative assembly; they are submitted to the world population in telepathic conference. In this respect the arrangement is described as more democratic than earlier societies, because deliberation extends to the population as a whole rather than being confined to elected representatives.

The same process also makes the system highly bureaucratic. The social engineers study their material so thoroughly that, for millions of terrestrial years, no proposal from the College of Organizers has been rejected or even seriously criticized. This history suggests that participation and stability coexist without being identical: everyone is included in the conference, but expert proposals have become so persuasive that collective scrutiny has rarely altered their direction. The customs are revisable in principle, even as their administration has produced extraordinary continuity in practice.

The remaining serious possibility of conflict lies between people as individuals and those same people as group-minds or as a racial mind. Such conflicts have occurred in the past and have caused distress to the individuals caught within them, but they are now extremely rare. The society’s increasing trust in super-individual experience helps explain this change. Its customs operate not only as external arrangements but within a population whose members are learning to rely on forms of judgment that exceed individual perspective.

Contrast with Earlier Rule by Law and Religion

The Last Men’s customary system differs sharply from the First Men’s formal, religiously enforced restrictions. Under the First Men, the worship of Gordelpus made activity a sacred obligation, while sexuality was tightly regulated: even reference to it was restricted, and individuals were barred from sexual activity and knowledge until they had won their wings. Wing-winning authorized a domestic marriage, while a more demanding aviation test could qualify a person for symbolic marriages. Those who failed the test remained excluded from sanctioned sexual life. These arrangements show customs and beliefs operating alongside explicit laws, tests, and punishments, rather than replacing coercive institutions altogether.

The First Men’s religious order also demonstrates how a social norm can present itself as sacred truth. Scientific authority acquired exceptional prestige because it had transformed material life, even as scientific doctrine hardened into dogma. Later, religious leaders joined in treating differences of belief as differences of expression, affirming a shared worship of divine energy. In that society, regulation and uniformity were reinforced by religious and scientific authority. The Last Men’s society, by contrast, is described through customary coordination, population-wide deliberation, and the absence of a conventional machinery of law and force.

Custom, Historical Memory, and Change

The book’s earlier histories also show that inherited practices and symbols do not preserve a single meaning unchanged. During the First Dark Age, people engraved the Swastika on rough stone tools. The emblem had originated as a sign of an aeroplane diving to destruction and the downfall of Gordelpus and the State; later generations recast it as the mark of a divine ancestor and a reminder of lost greatness. The object persisted while its social meaning shifted, illustrating how a tradition can outlive the circumstances that gave rise to it and be absorbed into a new account of the past.

Later encounters with ancient records reveal a different consequence of inherited knowledge. The Patagonians recovered durable metal printing blocks in the basement of a shattered pylon in China, deciphered their writing over centuries, and encountered the history of a civilization far more advanced than their own. Their researchers tested the recovered claims rather than accepting them uncritically. The discovery divided the population between those who rejected the new learning and those who argued it should be used; the disagreement eventually led to wars and the unification of the world. The Second Men, in turn, found the broken and weathered tablets of the Siberian Stone Library while preparing to sink an energy shaft. They valued the records chiefly as historical evidence of the earlier species, not as a source of scientific or philosophical authority.

These episodes distinguish the stability of a custom from the reliability of the story attached to it. A practice or emblem may persist while being reinterpreted, and recovered records may unsettle a society’s understanding of its own past. Against those histories of transmission, reinterpretation, and rupture, the Last Men’s system represents a mature form of customary governance: its norms are maintained through shared social life and reviewed through collective deliberation, yet its exceptional consensus also raises the question of how effectively a society can revise customs that have ceased to invite serious criticism.