A lot of people want to characterize it all as a struggle between ‘order’ and ‘anarchy.’ But the truth is that it is, and has always been, anarchy. More precisely, order for the weak and anarchy for the strong. You can flip the table but it’s the same table. Another truth is that there will always be states, in some form, and anarchic collectives, same as there are large animals and small in nature. Same as it has always been. Human beings are all different, and want different things.
Where I think humanity, as a whole, went really wrong, though, is over the previous few centuries, where it traded experimentation and diversity for homogenization and a singular global order built on shared control, mostly through capitalism but also through various dogmatic social mechanisms. We don’t have nations or states, anymore. We have provincial zones of labor and resource control within a single empire, controlled by a stateless oligarchy.
We gave away the somewhat noble, if more often than not self-serving and disingenuous, pursuit of our utopias for what many call an ‘end to history.’ And in doing so we sacrificed opportunities to find better, more ethical, more sustainable ways forward, individually and collectively. We traded our humanity for a unanimity of exploitation and destruction, overseen by generations of unenlightened petty despots. No empire was or is or ever will be good for us.
Perhaps the looming, and very probably inevitable, collapse will give us, or our descendants, another chance to get it right. We were not meant to live like this.
Don’t misunderstand, it’s not the mixing and mingling and cooperation around the world I have a problem with. I’m not a white trashionalist. Hell, first time I signed onto a chat room as a kid in the ‘90s I learned more in an hour from the aliens than from my entire US public school career. That’s biodiversity. That’s good for us. We’re better together, especially me and the sexy foreign ladies. But our leadership class, in every place, has become a capital monoculture. And a sick one, at that.