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.
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Notes -
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.
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