When the state/ empire loses the capability to recognize and resolve core problems of security and fairness, it will be changed by another arrangement that is more adaptable and proficient at fixing issues.
From a systems perspective, nation-states and empires occur when they are superior options to security compared to whatever arrangement they change: feudalism, warlords, tribal confederations, and so on.
States and empires stop working when they are no longer the service, they are the problem. As the book The Advantage of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization explains, when the dissolution of the state/ empire ends up being the pain-reducing option, the inhabitants withdraw their assistance and the empire loses its grip and ends.
As I describe in my new book, Global Crisis, National Renewal, states and markets are analytical structures. These structures fix problems by enhancing flexibility and advantageous synergies that strengthen one another as evolutionary advances.
The increase of the middle class is an example of beneficial synergies: as this new class gains access to credit, knowledge, trade, enterprise and pricing power for their labor, they have the ways to change their labor into capital by conserving earnings and investing the capital in assets, new business, and so on which then produce income from capital which fuels synergistic boosts in credit, knowledge, assets and income from investments.
States/ empires fail and expire when they elevate the deadly synergies produced by self-serving elites. Instead of encourage the characteristics of adaptation– competitors, transparency, accountability, experimentation and dissent– the elites reduces these forces as hazards to their monopolies, cartels and wealth.
Stripped of versatility and useful synergies, the state/ empire is no longer able to solve problems. It becomes the problem which can not be solved.
A key vibrant fueling deadly synergies is the hubristic self-confidence that affordable abundance is a birthright bestowed by the state/ empire, so resources can be endlessly squandered on excess and extremes of usage and waste. The state/ empire no longer concentrates on protecting the material sources of security (food, energy, etc) or the responsibility, competitors, dissent and transparency required to fix systemic issues.
Instead, the state/ empire dissolves into dissentious camps looking for to protect their minor fiefdoms and broadening their wealth at the cost of the population. The super-wealthy develop $500 million private yachts and palaces, political leaders trade on their positions to build up fortunes, and corruption replaces governance.
Markets spiral into deadly synergies as low quality services and products, speculative excess, extremes of monstrous consumption and blood-soaked entertainment become “development industries” while blackouts dim electrical grids and shop shelves empty of essentials.
The market option to everyone currently owning everything is to engineer prepared obsolescence into every product and form service-sector cartels that then remove services to the bone to juice profits, a.k.a. the crapification of all products and services.
The state/ empire also fails to preserve basic security and functions such as tax collection and a fair enforcement. Minor criminal offenses are made use of by those in power (civil forfeiture) while resistance to the state is significantly punished. There are two legal systems, one for the commoners and another for the elite.
The state/ empire safeguards those profiting from the status quo and then calls this profiteering a “service.” However this profiteering does not fix any issues; it is the problem, as self-serving profiteering safeguards its benefits by damaging the state, financing and the economy.
For its part, the marketplace looks for to take full advantage of profits in excesses of usage, predatory financing (student loans), the wholesale damage of quality by monopolies and cartels and extremes of speculation. Taking full advantage of earnings by any ways readily available has no moral structure; predatory student loans pay, odd medical billing pays, offering products designed to fail pays, stating software application dated pays, deceiving consumers pays, and so on, in an endless variety of substandard, unhealthy products, rapacious services, deceitful overcharges, etc.
Because issues go unsolved, things break down and the masses veer into extremes of derangement and magical thinking: fanaticism is substituted for friendship, cults abound, common ground disappears and all the failures of the system are papered over with Bread and Circuses, free cash, gaudy home entertainments and lifeless displays of noticeable consumption that expose the decay and deterioration.
Securing the few stripmining the system at the expenditure of the many is not problem-solving. It adds a layer of issues that the state/ empire is incapable of solving. Ossified, sclerotic, self-serving, corrupt, concentrated on virtue-signaling and the look of taking on problems rather than really resolving problems because some sacred cow would lose its opportunities and earnings stream, the state/ empire is the issue, not the solution.
When the state/ empire loses the capability to acknowledge and solve core issues of security and fairness, it will be changed by another plan that is more adaptable and adept at resolving issues. Artifice, dream, magical thinking, excuses and absurd cover stories are not part of analytical. Problems can just be resolved if reality is faced straight.
When truth is undesirable because it adversely impacts those stripmining the system for personal gain, the state/ empire is currently on its fatal spiral to collapse.
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