anarchonomicon.com
An Epic length essay of mine in which I lay out my theory of history and why briefly summarized: The Age of the nation state is almost certainly coming to an end under the corroding forces of decentralizing military technology and institutional decay.
The future will not resemble post French Revolution centralized governments asserting their control over each other, but rather will slowly come to resemble the Greek City states (misnomer) or the Holy roman empire's vast network of thousands of polities and war making entities.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Little appetite for a war. Much appetite for harming the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. People are bad at predicting the consequences of their actions, and end up getting themselves in more trouble than they anticipated.
The overall pattern of the culture war is unbroken escalation. Our society's conflict-resolution mechanisms are observably breaking down. The Supreme Court is pretty clearly on the way out, from the right because we observe that its decisions are flouted whenever blues don't like them, and from the left because it's now majority-right and that's unacceptable. The idea that either side will accept an election that goes against them seems implausible, given what we've seen recently. Pressure will continue to build until something breaks that we can't fix.
Rural people can cut power and water to the cities. Both sides can try to blockade food to the communities they don't like. People can attack their neighbors, with varying levels of organization. There's worse things, as well.
Right but people are very mixed in. My immediate neighbors run the full gamut, from an ultra conservative family of 7 on the corner lot, to hard left masters level music students in the 2 unit next door. There simply is no way we all turn on one another in some kind of frenzy of violence, this ain't Rwanda, or The Purge. There is also nothing to gain.
The Floyd riots are a pretty good example of people suddenly turning on their neighbors. Lots of violence, lots of harm caused. We're damn lucky it wasn't worse, and a big part of what kept it from being worse was large amounts of social cohesion that the riots themselves destroyed. But past that, you don't need everyone turning on each other in a frenzy of violence for people to start burning society down. You just need the current escalation to move into open violence badly enough for the violence to become self-sustaining, at which point it spreads.
Floyd stuff was pretty tame, any actual crackdown by authorities could have handled it with one hand tied behind their backs. Riots happen all the time all over the world, they seldom lead to civil war or the downfall of society. I mean if I didn't have CNN I wouldn't have even known they happened.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link