There have actually been a reasonable variety of referrals to the subject of “phyles” in this publication over the years. This essay will talk about the subject in detail. Particularly how phyles are most likely to change the nation-state, one of mankind’s worst inventions.
Now might be a great time to go over the subject. We’ll have a nearly unremitting stream of problem, on numerous fronts, for years to come. So it might be great to keep a confident prospect in mind.
Let’s begin by taking a look at where we have actually been. I trust you’ll excuse my skating over all of human political history in a couple of paragraphs, however my item is to provide a structure for where we’re going, instead of an anthropological essay.
Humanity has, so far, gone through three main phases of political organization given that Day One, state 200,000 years ago, when anatomically contemporary men began appearing. We can call them Tribes, Kingdoms, and Nation-States.
Karl Marx had a great deal of things incorrect, particularly his moral viewpoint. However one of the intense observations he made was that the ways of production are maybe the most essential factor of how a society is structured. Based on that, so far in history, just 2 truly essential things have taken place: the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Whatever else is simply a footnote.
Let’s see how these things relate.
The Agricultural Transformation and the End of Tribes
In prehistoric times, the largest political/economic group was the people. In that guy is a social animal, it was natural adequate to be faithful to the tribe. It made sense. Almost everyone in the people was genetically associated, and the group was vital for mutual survival in the wilderness. That made them the totality of people that counted in a person’s life– except for “others” from alien tribes, who were in competitors for scarce resources and may wish to kill you for excellent procedure.
Tribes tend to be natural meritocracies, with the smartest and the greatest assuming management. However they’re also natural democracies, small enough that everyone can have a say on important problems. People are small enough that everybody knows everybody else, and understands what their weak and strengths are. Everybody falls into a niche of limited advantage, doing what they do best, simply because that’s essential to survive. Bad stars are ostracized or stop working to awaken, in a swimming pool of their own blood, some morning. People are socially constraining but, considering the numerous faults of humanity, a natural and helpful kind of company in a society with primitive technology.
As individuals built their pool of capital and innovation over lots of generations, however, populations grew. At the end of the last Glacial epoch, around 12,000 years ago, all over the world, there was a population explosion. Individuals began living in towns and depending on agriculture rather than searching and gathering. Large groups of people cohabiting formed hierarchies, with a king of some description on top of the load.
Those who adapted to the brand-new farming technology and the new political structure collected the excess resources required for waging prolonged warfare versus people still living at a subsistence level. The more evolved societies had the numbers and the weapons to completely accomplishment over the laggards. If you wished to stay tribal, you ‘d much better reside in the middle of no place, someplace without the resources others may want. Otherwise it was a safe bet that a close-by kingdom would enslave you and take your home.
The Industrial Revolution and the End of Kingdoms
From around 12,000 B.C. to approximately the mid-1600s, the world’s cultures were organized under strong men, ranging from petty lords to kings, pharaohs, or emperors.
It’s odd, to me a minimum of, how much the human animal appears to like the concept of monarchy. It’s mythologized, specifically in a medieval context, as a system with worthy kings, fair princesses, and brave knights riding out of castles on a hill to right oppressions. As my friend Rick Maybury likes to point out, rather accurately, the truth varies quite a bit from the misconception. The king is seldom more than an effective goon, a Tony Soprano at best, or possibly a little Stalin. The princess was an unbathed hag in a chastity belt, the knight an employed killer, and the shining castle on the hill the headquarters of a prisoner-of-war camp, with lots of dungeons for the politically incorrect.
With kingdoms, commitments weren’t so much to the “nation”– a nebulous and arbitrary concept– however to the ruler. You were the subject of a king, most importantly. Your linguistic, ethnic, spiritual, and other associations were secondary. It’s weird how, when people consider the kingdom period of history, they think just in terms of what the gentility did and had. Even though, if you were born then, the possibilities were 98% you ‘d be a basic peasant who owned absolutely nothing, understood nothing beyond what his betters informed him, and sent out the majority of his surplus production to his rulers. However, again, the gradual build-up of capital and knowledge made the next step possible: the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Transformation and the End of the Nation-State
As the ways of production changed, with the replacement of devices for muscle, the amount of wealth took a substantial leap forward. The average male still might not have actually had much, but the possibility to do something besides beat the earth with a stick for his whole life opened up, largely as an outcome of the Renaissance.
Then the game altered totally with the American and Reign Of Terrors. Individuals no longer felt they were owned by some ruler; instead they now offered their commitment to a new institution, the nation-state. Some natural atavism, probably dating back to before humans branched from the chimpanzees about 3 million years back, seems to dictate the Naked Ape to offer his loyalty to something bigger than himself. Which has delivered us to today’s prevailing norm, the nation-state, a group of people who tend to share language, religion, and ethnic culture. The concept of the nation-state is particularly effective when it’s arranged as a “democracy,” where the typical person is provided the impression he has some measure of control over where the leviathan is headed.
On the plus side, by the end of the 18th century, the Industrial Transformation had supplied the common man with the individual freedom, along with the capital and innovation, to improve things at a quickly speeding up speed.
What triggered the sea change?
I’ll hypothesize it was mainly due to an intellectual factor, the creation of the printing press; and a physical element, the widespread usage of gunpowder. The printing press destroyed the monopoly the elites had on understanding; the typical man might now see that they were no smarter or “much better” than he was. If he was going to battle them (conflict is, after all, what politics is all about), it didn’t need to be just because he was told to, however since he was inspired by a concept. And now, with gunpowder, he was on an equivalent footing with the ruler’s knights and professional soldiers.
Today I think we’re at the cusp of another change, a minimum of as essential as the ones that occurred around 12,000 years back and numerous a century back. Even though things are beginning to look genuinely grim for the individual, with collapsing financial structures and increasingly virulent governments, I presume help is on the method from historical advancement. Simply as the farming revolution put an end to tribalism and the commercial revolution eliminated the kingdom, I think we’re heading for another multipronged revolution that’s going to make the nation-state a metachronism. It won’t occur next month, or next year. However I’ll wager the pattern will begin becoming clear within the life time of lots of now reading this.
What pattern am I talking about? As soon as once again, a recommendation to the evil genius Karl Marx, with his idea of the “withering away of the State.” By the end of this century, I suspect the United States and most other nation-states will have, for all useful functions, ceased to exist.
The Problem with the State– And Your Nation-State
Obviously, while I presume that a lot of you are considerate to that belief, you likewise believe the idea is too far out, and that I’m guilty of wishful thinking. Individuals think the state is necessary and– typically– good. They never ever even question whether the organization is permanent.
My view is that the organization of the state itself is a bad thing. It’s not a question of getting the ideal individuals into the federal government; the institution itself is hopelessly flawed and necessarily damages individuals that compose it, along with the people it rules. This declaration usually shocks people, who think that federal government is both a required and long-term part of the cosmic sky.
The issue is that federal government is based upon browbeating, and it is, at a minimum, suboptimal to base a social structure on institutionalized browbeating. Let me prompt you to check out the Tannehills’ excellent The Market for Liberty, which is readily available totally free, download here.
One of the big changes brought by the printing press and advanced greatly by the Web is that individuals are able to easily pursue different interests and perspectives. As an outcome, they have less and less in common: living within the exact same political borders is no longer sufficient to make them fellow citizens. That’s a big change from pre-agricultural times when members of the same tribe had quite a bit– almost whatever– in common. But this has actually been significantly watered down in the times of the kingdom and the nation-state. If you’re honest, you might discover you have extremely little in common with the majority of your countrymen besides superficialities and trivialities.
Ponder that point for a minute. What do you have in common with your fellow countrymen? A mode of living, (perhaps) a common language, perhaps some shared experiences and myths, and a typical ruler. But very little of any real significance or significance. To begin with, they’re most likely to be an active danger to you than the citizens of a presumed “opponent” country, say, like Iran. If you make a great living, definitely if you own a company and have assets, your fellow Americans are the ones who in fact present the clear and present risk. The average American (about 50% of them now) pays no earnings tax. Even if he’s not really a direct or indirect staff member of the federal government, he’s a net recipient of its largesse, which is to state your wealth, through Social Security and other well-being programs.
Over the years, I’ve discovered I have much more in common with individuals of my own social or economic station or occupation in France, Argentina, or Hong Kong, than with an American union employee in Detroit or a citizen of the LA barrios. I believe a number of you would agree with that observation. What’s really important in relationships is shared values, principles, interests, and philosophy. Geographical distance, and a common citizenship, is useless– no more than an accident of birth. I have far more commitment to a good friend in the Congo– although we’re various colors, have different cultures, various native languages, and various life experiences– than I do to the Americans who live down the highway in the trailer park. I see the world the very same way my Congolese friend does; he’s a property to my life. I’m always at odds with a lot of “my fellow Americans”; they’re an active and growing liability.
Some may read this and find a troubling absence of loyalty to the state. It sounds seditious. Professional jingoists like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Costs O’Reilly, or nearly anyone around the Washington Beltway go white with rage when they hear talk like this. The truth is that loyalty to a state, just because you happen to have been born in its bailiwick, is just dumb.
As far as I can tell, there are just 2 federal criminal offenses defined in the United States Constitution: counterfeiting and treason. That’s a far cry from today’s world, where practically every real and envisioned criminal offense has been federalized, underscoring that the whole document is an useless dead letter, bit more than a historical artifact. Even so, that likewise verifies that the Constitution was rather imperfect, even in its initial form. Counterfeiting is easy scams. Why should it be singled out particularly as a criminal offense? (Okay, that opens a whole brand-new can of worms … but not one I’ll go into here.) Treason is normally specified as an attempt to overthrow a federal government or withdraw loyalty from a sovereign. A rather odd proviso to have when the of the Constitution had done just that only a few years previously, one would think.
The method I see it, Thomas Paine had it right when he said: “My country is any place liberty lives.”
However where does liberty live today? Really, it no longer has a home. It’s become a real refugee since America, which was an outstanding concept that grew roots in a nation of that name, degenerated into the United States. Which is simply another unfortunate nation-state. And it’s on the slippery slope.