Why run a police force when you can have a self-regulating system which prevents people from even conceiving of criminal behaviors? Why take over countries with military force when you can stimulate a culture’s behavioral circuits to give you what you want?

I agree. There are more peaceful methods to getting people to see your point of view. Bees like honey.

If Washington, DC became - instead of a geographical location - a deeply ingrained pattern layered into your mind? Maybe this is the true purpose of the conspiracy bugaboo known as the Invisible Government - to truly become invisible; to become like water to fish, or air to the beasts of the land and sky. Ever-present, even a source of sustenance. The vaunted “withering away of the state” championed by idealistic communists. (Maybe even a nanotech plugin built into the brain - or the archonic predators giving us their mind, as according to Don Juan)

I liked where you were going with this.

The idea is that scientists can and have discovered “Laws” of nature: gravity, thermodynamics, etc - rules which are constant throughout nature and which can be discovered through the scientific method and then applied for the progress of the human race. Positivism says that these same Natural Laws must therefore exist for human societies and behavior, and that they can be uncovered by means of the scientific method. And once we work out these rules, we may manipulate them for the betterment of the human situation.

*If* such thinking is true (and most contemporary sociological thinking claims it’s not, even though the science of sociology sprang from Positivism), then we could imagine that there would be an endpoint in which scientists have uncovered the Laws of Human Society and Behavior, and manipulated them so that the “negative” aspects of human society were eliminated, and government as we know it becomes totally anachronistic, cumbersome and unnecessary.

Why run a police force when you can have a self-regulating system which prevents people from even conceiving of criminal behaviors? Why take over countries with military force when you can stimulate a culture’s behavioral circuits to give you what you want?

This, I’m afraid, would be the ultimate perfected form of government.