Thoughts On Replacing Traditional Marriage In A Post-Scarcity Society

If we reflect for just a moment on human nature with all its in-born capriciousness and greed, we understand that a system where everyone stays in any kind of permanent alliance must be fastened in place by necessity.

Traditional marriage worked as a foundation of society when most people made a living growing their own food and going hungry if you screwed up in life was a real possibility.  Most people’s priority was achieving a state of security and holding onto it at all costs.  Kids naturally fit into that mission as free farmhands and as a retirement policy.  Most people lived in rural areas where there was a limit on the number of people they encountered and therefore a limit to temptations.  

There’s no precedent for even poor people wallowing in unlimited junk food or going online to window-shop for mates from the entire array of the human race—or a society that is majority urbanized where most people meet dozens of strangers every day and kids are just an endless suck of time and money.

In this dyamic environment, it may be that bringing back traditional marriage as the founding institution of society is untenable.  Already, as many people still bother to get married, it is in practice a 5-7 year alliance to raise a kid or two past infancy and move on.  Only for the upper middle classes and above does it remain a somewhat stable way to build wealth in a polite society.

Ironically, our better health and sanitation conditions disincentivize parental investment in offspring below the middle classes.  Until modern medicine child mortality had always been very high even with both parents putting in their best effort.  With the survival of children practically assured, the life-long union with its extreme opportunity costs becomes strategically obsolete.

Of course, nobody calculates like a Darwinian robot when they make life decisions and culture informs their perspective as well, but sexual strategies that are no longer evolutionarily optimal for most people must steadily lose market share even if no one knows quite why.  

The traditional marriage asks the female to get married young to have all her offspring with a single man who is unlikely to be her best possible option.  Or even if he were highest quality, she might still want to diversify her portfolio so her genes survive even if one type of Galapagos finch gets wiped out by a freak disaster.  When we remember a typical woman has less than 6 rounds in her revolver with all the forces of nature arrayed against the continuation of her line, the least she can do is have different types of ammo against different adversaries.  Or at least, she weighs the benefits of sibling inclusive fitness against the advantages of genetic diversification.

Men, meanwhile, are asked to bring home the bacon their whole lives and to stand by for decades as their wives get old instead of searching for a “younger model.”  The ability of females to defect any time and take the kids, or take his money and then get impregnated by another man without consequence undermines even what diminished rewards he enjoys.  
He too instinctually wants a variety of mates to spread his line to prevent a single disaster from wiping him out.  The modern high-information society means he can spend his energy trying for multiple low-investment sexual partners instead of sinking all his resources into one insecure prospect.

Neither sex really wants to restore traditional marriage under present conditions.  Tellingly, aging pickup artists are now among the biggest promoters of turning back the clock.  Many people still get married, but only under pressure as they start to get their first grey hairs and wrinkles.  When scarcity of resources isn’t enough to make people have weddings only scarcity of time suffices.  If we were young forever, successful pickup artists would be forever unrepentant.  It’s only when we worry about ending up without children or unpaid companionship for the last 4 decades of our lives that we’re suddenly willing to make the huge sacrifices marriage requires.

It has been pointed out for years in the manosphere that traditional marriage is a game for young people, especially young women at peak fertility.
People have been using the word “traditional” for a reason because the present institution bears little resemblance.  The old arrangement means cashing in your chips at the start of the game.  The modern version means playing the game as long as you can and then rushing to cash in at the last moment.  So if we draw a clear line in our definitions, we can see outside of some rural areas, real marriage has already been dead for decades.

The question then is how we might begin to organize mating markets in an urban, post-scarcity, semi-nomadic society, unless of course, we are counting on a collapse to “rescue” us.
Presently, we are faced with falling fertility rates and the costs imposed on society by single motherhood.
Also, monogamy serves as a truce between men so they can spend their energies collaborating against other groups rather than fighting among themselves over women. 

The reality on the ground already is the truce has been broken and we have seen a return to soft harems that would not have seemed out of place in the stone age with most women chasing a few chieftains.  This arrangement has already put society on a path to the intermittent warfare typical of hunter-gatherer societies.  There are simply too many men in our peaceful society.  Eventually, violence culls the herd until sexual market pressures are again tolerable.

As greatly as Black culture is maligned, I have noticed it has been a preview of where the rest of society will be in about 20 years.  The word “game” itself comes straight from ghetto slang.  As the rewards and accessibility of being a career drone drastically dwindle for men, even the sons of respectable families try to adopt drug dealer swagger to signal status.  This is by its nature a strategy that signals low investment because high investment signals he has few options.

Since modern day marriage is associated with balding cubicle schlubs rushing to settle before it’s too late, the institution itself becomes uncool.  Even if all feminist legislation was done away with tomorrow there would be no grand reversal.  Doing away with no-fault divorce might actually send men running away even faster.

Traditional society rewarded men and gave them status but this also came with huge responsibilities that were expected to consume their entire lives.  So even as we see internet personalities indulge in nostalgia, hardly any of them actually take the plunge themselves.  Many of them talk tough about protecting any daughters they may have, but not a one of them wants to go back to asking the father’s permission to court a girl.

A workable new system might be one that secures mating rights for men with desirable qualities, but doesn’t force them to spend the rest of their lives breaking their backs so the wife can watch daytime TV.  Perhaps all the benefits a single mother currently enjoys would be conditional on having her kids with socially sanctioned men in good standing with the tribe.  If she bred with outlaws or blood enemies, access to benefits would be witheld and free abortions made readily available.  Most of them would get the hint.

Even in ancient Rome subsidies and legislation did very little to revive traditional marriage.  Once people aren’t afraid of starving, personal freedom and unfettered mate selection becomes priceless.  Women would rather work full-time to make their own money than have a provider if they think they can get the best genes that way.  As we can see with ghetto welfare, though, subsidies are highly effective at boosting fertility when they don’t require anyone to seal permanent alliances.

So, a future system might be structured around giving women the illusion of choice by carefully pre-selecting their dating pool.  Status is artificially bestowed on men easily enough.  A mediocre man has an officer’s badge pinned to his shirt-front and suddenly he’s never lonely again.  In the neo-tribal society, male status would be managed very deliberately along with subsidies to channel female mating choice in desirable ways even as she thinks it was her own idea all along.

As for paternal involvement, I learned a few things by listening to black co-workers talk about their baby mommas.  Smooth operators who were broke but had no entangling ties could move seamlessly from one woman’s house to another with as much access to his children as he desired.  This struck me in stark contrast to white schlubs who have to petition the courts to see the one kid they had with a woman who divorced him.

The married man’s need to beg makes him appear low-status even if he earns a good salary.  If he was free to withdraw his presence and his funds, he would be freely invited into her house.  High-status men would end up with multiple children by different women and he would be at leisure to identify his most promising offspring and invest in them most while still having time to focus on supporting the society.

Male sexual emancipation from the provider marriage might also serve some use in undermining overwhelming female political power.  As I have discussed previously, Western women already had extraordinary influence even before they got the vote because they had guaranteed access to husbands who were effectively chained to them.  Mycroft, one of my regular commenters, astutely pointed out that this position of total security from which to agitate was the cradle of the modern matriarchy and the cause behind millions of appeasing white knight males.  It may be necessary in a modern patriarchy to sever female relationship security so they cannot press relentlessly for their own selfish agenda without facing consequences.

With a tribal dating pool, some men would effectively have harems, but there would be a clear obligation among the brotherhood to get even the stragglers laid from time-to-time—if loyalty is to be expected of them.  The core idea would be that the mating market reflect the male hierarchy. 

Of course, not everything can be done with incentives and loose controls, but the trouble with a system of hard coercion is it is more energetically expensive by far and requires diligent upkeep to sustain.  So the question is that which kings often asked wandering scholars back in the Chinese era of warring states: What is the softest touch by which effective rule can be implemented?
Failing that, though, there’s always Islam waiting in the wings.

Defining the Alt-Center: Neo-Tribalism

An alt-center is not moderate—it is alternate—that is, opposed to the discredited establishment.  It doesn’t try to be exactly in between, grey, or neutral.  It is a synthesis taking the best of different mindsets and ideas to put together the pieces in a way that makes sense.  

The alt-right understands that people are not equal and can be categorized quite accurately by race, ethnicity, sex, status, and intelligence.  It is hamstrung though by favoring the continuation of a Hobbesian nightmare and tragedy of the commons.  Many vanilla republican politicians would readily agree with this stance when it comes to economics and social policy.  In this respect, the alt-right is not alternate.

The alt-left understands that you can’t have a real society unless people have a sense of belonging and investment.  People cooperate much better if they know there are safety nets if they stumble.  It is hamstrung though by failing to understand people vary widely in character and capability.  An indiscriminate system of aid quickly degenerates into a tragedy of the commons.  The alt left is not alternate in this sense because plenty of the the entrenched technocratic elite share their egalitarian views.

Both alt-right and alt-left retain ideological ties to the conventional platforms they’ve departed from, so in a way of thinking, alt-center, can be thought of as a true-alternate point of view that reaches on both sides and snips the last ties to prevailing political traditions.

On the right, the propaganda of rugged individualism and not taking “handouts” is used to manipulate atomized consumers into letting corporations and wall-street run rampant.  The left shrewdly critiqued this view by coining the term “corporate welfare.”
On the left, the shrill politics of victimhood combined with socialist attitudes is a cynical ploy to drain resources from the republican middle and working classes to buy the votes of a teeming underclass that depends on their largesse.  The right astutely points out that the leftist elites are trying to “elect a new people” through mass immigration and welfare babies to keep them in power forever.

An alt-center rejects poisonous propaganda positions from both fake sides.  It is a complete rejection of the authority of rulers who have long since lost the mandate of heaven through their incompetence and greed, whatever irrelevant side of a made-up spectrum they claim they’re on.
The alt-center recognizes these ideas are just deception used to herd political opinion by parasite-kings and prevent any dangerous(to them) mixtures of ideas from taking place.  

Is free healthcare a “left-wing” position when we’re just giving it to members of the tribe we identify with and jealously witholding our wealth from openly-declared blood enemies?  What made this stance left-wing is that it was charity without judgment.
Is it “right-wing” to adopt protectionist trade policies when doing away with “free competition” to make sure the newly created jobs go first to people in good standing with the tribe?  What made this stance right wing was competition without context. 
When we no longer assume an atomized society, to even ask these questions is meaningless.  We find ourselves with something different.

Alt-centrism then might be called neo-tribalism, an authoritarian system that maximizes liberties and benefits for cooperators with basic safety nets for all members, generous formal privileges for the best, but treats outgroups as other countries, or within the context of empire as auxiliary associates who are explicitly 2nd class.  More important than individuals becoming billionaires would be the ability of society itself to preserve wealth and build assets.

The neo-tribal alt-center understands there is no more nation-state in an age of instant mass communication where hardly anyone farms the land and where we live as semi-nomads drifting from job to job.  People, not lines on a map are the territorial borders.  Wherever the people set up camp their nation resides in them.

Female Power and the Vote

Before female suffrage there had already been a huge and influential temperance movement for decades.  It was partly the cause of sanctimonious WASPs trying to sabotage the finer things in life for Catholic immigrants.
More importantly, though, it was staunchly backed by legions of matronly housewives who resented their husbands spending money at the pub instead of on her kids.

The prominence of the temperance movement shows us that women had great political influence long before they got the vote.  Not to mention, history is replete with concubines and mistresses who molded the most iron-fisted emperors to their wills.
Average Joes were like play-doh in their hands when it came to pursuing a political agenda.  Moral pontificating from ladies’ associations backed by sob stories about drunk and abusive husbands was enough to trigger vast armies of white knights into action.

Female suffrage, then, was overkill.  The temperance movement grew from an already powerful political lobby into an overwhelming force that banned alcohol altogether, with disastrous results.  With females given the vote themselves soon afterwards, they were all but crowned as empresses.

As we would expect, the West has become a de facto matriarchy.  Women bloc vote more than men since they are by nature more collectivist and can recruit the millions of white knights who are already under their control.  

 If we look at the particulars of the female vote, we notice there is one great divide in the matriarchy.  Single and married women play a great game of tug-of-war over society’s resources.  Married women mostly try to enable the wellbeing of their husbands and families.  Single women, on the other hand, try to provision themselves by using government as an extractive proxy provider.  Worse, they form traitorous alliances with hostile outside tribes to pry even more concessions from the married woman side of the matriarchy and the masses of hapless male helots.

An eternal truth, though, is matriarchies last only until the next invasion.  A society that doesn’t make its men the primary shareholders, always loses.  As much as people like to speak of fairness and equality, women simply don’t have the same territorial impulses common in men.  Whenever some bereaved band of unfortunates comes begging at the gates, women evaluate the situation through the nurturing instinct rather than the male’s timeless drive to act as guardian.  The territory itself to some extent is naturally a male concept.  Females, in some sense, have no country, especially when they are young and single.  A conquerer who just butchered all the boys she grew up with will get her pregnant just fine.  He might even be an upgrade as far as her genes are concerned.

When the walled city is under attack, every man knows he will be killed or enslaved, his family dissolved, his property plundered if he’s on the losing side.  For young women, especially those without kids, the consequence of conquest has been the inconvenient shuffling from one sheikh’s tent to another’s.  Even older women are not expected to risk their lives on society’s front line as men are though they have outlived their immediate usefulness to mother nature.  Modern society erroneously continues to assume they are involved in nurturing young ones even as they age.  

Women simply don’t have as much skin in the game.  As a perpetually protected class they haven’t undergone the brutal culling of life and death struggle for power, status, and territory every male ancestor has survived through back to y chromosomal Adam.  Women just don’t understand high stakes and danger in the same way or with the same sense of urgency that goes down to every male’s very marrow.  The way women fear rape by undesirable men to the very bottom of their psyche, men fear being conquered and disenfranchised.  

First the tribe must protect its holdings, then other issues may be settled.
At the very least, we could recognize the incentives and natural tendencies that make single and childless women unreliable potential traitors and thereby strip them of the vote and bar them from political office.  Principles aside, we might hope this would sufficiently compensate for the vast underground reservoir of female soft power that has always been there.

When weighing whether someone should vote, whatever their sex, we might ask: “What happens to them and their own if the walled city gets sacked?” Beyond that, we ought to test for judgment and intelligence.  After all, weak and stupid men were pawns of women anyway back in the “good old days” before women could vote.  Maybe it’s better a competent woman who owns property, has kids, and runs a business can vote while a man of poor character and weak wits who she’d manipulate with ease loses his vote.  Perhaps then we approach a somewhat more balanced equation where soft influence and hard power coincide.  Though the tribe is founded and defended by men, the reality of female power might then be incorporated within reason into a functional political system.

There’s No Such Thing As “Free Markets”

Whenever I hear someone start to toss around phrases like “free markets” and complain about “big government” and “regulations.” I know I’m likely talking to a libertarian or neo-conservative shill making excuses for crony capitalism.  

The idea that there can be “free markets” in an anarchic capitalist society is a clever joke—a reality that dawns at some point on idealistic anarcho-libertarian undergrads that want to say they believe in something that sounds cool to say.  One day in between bong hits, it hits them—who pays taxes if no one makes them pay?  If you have no taxes how do you stop military invasion from even the most mediocre states?
Anyone pushing these ideas after age 30 are likely either fools or just sociopaths who want less rules so they can try to screw over everyone else.

Markets cannot exist without a state that uses the threat of force to guarantee property, profits, and contracts.  Thus the state has the implicit prerogative and responsibility to control the market.

Imagine what would happen to the local grocery if all police and soldiers disappeared.  The grocery would be forced to hire the local gang to defend their merchandise and before long, that gang would become the new state getting protection money(taxes) in exchange for their services.  Then, the guys with the guns, of course, get to call the shots.  

If the grocery owners hatch schemes to bleed the rest of community dry for their own benefit, the gangsters start to lose out on their neighborhood protection rackets.  The furious gangsters respond by threatening to shoot the store owners if they don’t follow certain rules.  Thus, we get regulations, which no market lacks.  The market itself is regulated into existence by the gangsters’ guns.

Even most “free market” ideologues can’t claim to believe in actual completely free market.  They usually recognize the need to prevent monopolies and try to have a “level playing field.”  But they are slippery and try to blame the centralization of wealth into monopolies on “big government” ineptitude and corruption.  In fact, power tends to centralize over time whether we speak of political bodies or business enterprises.  In real life, big, powerful government is the only thing that keeps markets competitive.

The market is one of the most powerful and flexible tools known for organizing and channeling the creative power of humanity.  Used properly, it can give rise to prosperous nations.  But it is first a tool to improve society, not an end unto itself.  Business exists to serve the people and is fundamentally subordinate to the needs of the tribe.

When businesses are allowed to do whatever they wish while enjoying the protection of armed men, the state creates and aids the growth of competitors for its power to rule.  The market is a dangerous tool that must be handled with firm discipline.  

If the gangsters grow soft, the grocery store competes with them for money that would’ve gone into taxes and eventually has its own armed men.  If the gangsters lose the ensuing struggle, the grocery store becomes the new government.  Then the grocery store has to worry about staying in power just like the gangsters did.  

The worst possible state, actually, is when the market is let to grow out of control with no responsibility for governing.  Then business, which should be enriching the neighborhood becomes like a brood of writhing tapeworms bloating the collective body even as it starves from within.

There will always be corruption and ineptitude in government so long as governments are ran by people, or even by machines programmed by people—and therefore infused with human bias. It has been argued endlessly if government is good or bad.  What cannot be debated is whether government is necessary and those who try to say otherwise in favor of business are most likely traitors.

No Going Back to the 1950s – And What Lies Ahead

Some who celebrate (or mourn) Trump’s victory seem to think we will return to the 1950s status quo.
That won’t happen as never in history has any other historical period been revived despite the best efforts of thousands of years of reformers.  Erasmus always loses and even a successful Diocletian or Constantine end up creating something new rather than bringing back the old.
What we are left with is to figure out where we’re at and where the forces in play will take us.

To begin with, a majority of marriage age adults are now single and I do not foresee the trend away from matrimony will change anytime soon.  In practice a society of “free love” leaves a majority of males making free love to their hands but everyone dreams of having multiple desirable partners, the fulfillment of which always seems to be just a few clicks away.  Though most people will mathematically end up losers, the lure of being a winner is just too good to pass up.  Besides, the old system just isn’t cool.
Customs of matrimony require centuries, if not millennia of traditional reinforcement to establish and once undone require the right forces to coalesce once more.  Matrimony is reinforced by a pre-industrial world where resources are much scarcer and the long term pooling of resources between males, females, and their families is necessary for survival.  Marriage isn’t fun and it never was for fun.  It’s all about preserving resources in hard times and providing support for offspring whose survival was uncertain even with the best possible care.  So long as most people feel confident they’ll at least be able to eat and that their illegitimate kids will survive, it won’t change.  The combination of a steady basic food supply with low hopes of property acquisition, and social atomization that discourages pooling of family resources is an especially potent combination of disincentives.
Marriage will become much like it used to be, an institution that mostly serves the needs of the propertied classes.

The religion of the 1950s is not coming back either.  Even back then, it had been going steadily downhill in influence for centuries.  Christian religion requires faith in abstractions that is difficult to maintain in a world where information on every subject is abundant.  From now on, Christianity will only be useful as a value system for the prole classes, never again as the ruling ideology of a society with mass modern communications.
From now on, spiritual feeling will revolve around symbols and symbolic people that make abstract social concepts tangible.  We are seeing already a return to idolatry.  As people once imagined earthly human hierarchies in heaven and hell, they will return to a more primitive mindset of regarding earthly human hierarchies as heavenly.  Many only somewhat ironically refer to President Trump as God-Emperor.  They all know he is just a man, but they associate the idea of God-Emperor with the social and political forces he represents, just as Zeus represents lightning storms and leadership of his pantheon, or Hades stands for the land of the dead and riches mined from the earth.  
It may seem absurd at first but for human minds that cannot rightly grasp the magnitude of a million people any more than the size of a galaxy, godhood is the best concept to describe those humans whose barest whims affect the lives of millions.
The primary purpose of spirituality will not be to legitimize a moral philosophy but as in the days of cavemen to usefully describe the ethereal social sphere through concrete metaphor.

The economy of the 1950s is not coming back either.  Trump will be doing the right thing by at least removing policies that make the problem even worse and buy us some time, but no one can change the underlying forces. Human labor will be ever less in demand as world economic growth becomes static.  The seemingly endless easy gains of the industrial revolution are coming to an end and we have been entering a sort of new dark age.
I have a saying “diversity is easy in times of plenty” because once you have a pie that’s either static or actually shrinking the need to survive combined with the extreme competitive pressures in a free sexual market reduces the whole world into two categories.
-People who increase your chances of securing scarce resources and social status.
-Everybody else.

The forces in play are pushing humanity back towards tight tribal associations.  We now see widening fault lines along ethnicity and class and that will continue—but ultimately determining allegiances will be complicated.  Especially as it becomes more permissible to analyze humans by intelligence and temperament just as if they were breeds of dogs, so will humans divide up by neurotype and form the basis of the tribe-state.

The basis of sovereignty will no longer be primarily by geographical territory, but by the existence of a group, the culture it shares, the wealth it controls, the political power it wields.  In any given state or city in the West there are representatives of every type of person we can imagine.  Secession as we once would have imagined it is impossible.  What we will end up with is nation-tribes doing business, making treaties, and when that fails making war, as often by buying up real estate and businesses or setting the doctrine in schools as by outright violence.

Right now, Trump is among the first generation of leaders of the Neo-Tribal dark ages.  He rose to power on class and ethnic loyalties with a persona of stripped of pleasantries appropriate to the norms of our more barbaric times.  He gives us a template of what leaders will look like from now on.  In a dark age, people believe leaders should have the biggest winning rather than the finest principles.  So from now on the people in charge will be aggressive, generous desert sheikhs flaunting the money and harems everyone else admires.  The most honorable man will be he who has many children, has slain many men in battle, and delivered bounties of plunder to his followers.  With the old social contract shredded to pieces the people will have no more patience for staid married family men who are frightened of saying anything mean.

The tears and screaming of Hillary supporters is not irrational.  They sense in their guts, correctly, that their social universe is going through the apocalypse.  The system they have devoted their entire lives to as virtuous cooperator acolytes with all its ritual jumping through credentialist hoops and saying the right things for status is beginning to crumble all around them.  They have massive investment and sunk costs all up in flames.  They do not even know of, cannot even begin to understand anything else.  Learning in one cataclysmic event that history does not always favor “progress” is like a sheltered true believer hearing someone say “God doesn’t exist” for the first time.  It is to face a horrifying void.  Against every doctrine they were ever taught once-invincible civilization is actually regressing.

We return to primitive norms because only the extreme pressures of civilization ever made us otherwise.  This is why civilizations always change overnight the moment people have enough wealth to have any alternative whatsoever.  Civilizations persist by keeping people secure enough but at bare subsistence enough that they cannot dream too far and therein lies its fatal weakness when confronted with the slightest taste of prosperity.  The real change this time, though, is the access individuals have to information—far more agile and orders of magnitude beyond what even the printing press could offer.  Societies both primitive and civilized require most people to be ignorant so they can be indoctrinated into irrational beliefs that hurt the individual while benefiting the whole.  The result of millions empowered to advocate in their own interests is a recipe for upheaval, and so we go forward into uncertain territory.

21st Century Nationalism Is Not The Nation-State

As we witness the rise of populist-nationalist reformers all around the world, there is much confusion about what this nationalism actually means.  I get the impression that many think they are going back to the nationalism of an earlier time, but there is no resurrecting the past.

What we have called nationalism is the philosophy of the nation-state that arose in the 1860s.  Whether in Italy, Japan, or America we saw a vast expansion of state power and centralization enabled by the industrial revolution era technologies like the railroad and the telegraph.  The basic idea was that the country was divided up into departments handled by groups of bureaucrats in the capital city.
Mass public education inculcated all the nation’s children in the same values and eradicated local dialects and languages in favor of the speech of the capital province.  Germany hadn’t been united in any meaningful way for about 1000 years, Italy not since the Roman Empire. Regions had distinct cultures and often spoke tongues that were not even mutually intelligible.

All those differences had to go so humanity itself could be reduced to standardized parts in the machine.  The 20th century with radio, television and its mass mindless herd wars marked the high tide of centralization.  What people like to call “globalism” is just a worldwide version of the 19th century style nation-state.  The present nationalism is actually a reaction to what they see themselves as continuing in some way!  No wonder they are confused about their identity!

The personal computer followed by internet has decentralized networks at a furious pace.  The 21st century is about unraveling the monoculture that has grown ever more uniform and dreary over the last 150 years.
Until modern communications, large clumsy bureaucracies always won.  Maybe 2 million men died because rubber stamps were put on the wrong forms, but the other 18 million would overwhelm the enemy.  In a world of telegraph and then radio there was no real counter to this zerg swarming strategy.

Now though, it is possible for even small, poorly equipped forces to outmaneuver clumsy centralized states indefinitely while inflicting a thousand paper cuts and letting the nation-state waste its energy throwing slow, painfully telegraphed punches at gnats until it gases out.  It’s like a claymation giant monster flailing around in vain to kill the heroes or Captain Kirk vs. the Gorn.  It’s a simple concept often called 4GW(4th generation warfare) to sound hip.
By the early 2000s poor Arabs with home-made road bombs could outmaneuver the richest empire in history.  In the 2010s smartphones lead to the Arab Spring and Occupy followed by the Islamic State.

What we are seeing is an increase in the size of 4G organizations until we are looking at something on the scale of nation state with the flexibility of a small organization.  As it matures, this kind of system obsoletes the 19th century bureaucracy-bound nation-state.
The nationalist vs. globalist struggle we see across the developed world is the clash of established nation-states with 21st century decentralized networks.  As soon as we understand this it’s clear why the establishment is on the wrong side of history and why in spite of their overhwelming power they can only flap about in furious teary rage as their world falls apart.  There is a Tao of the universe and those who try to fight it, no matter how mighty, only exhaust themselves.
The election of Trump is only the beginning of their woes as his momentum carries over and they find themselves under siege in Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, France, and even Germany.

There is a new age upon us but it will not be a peaceful age.  While steadily dwindling wealth remained above a certain line and there was a USSR to scare people, unity went without serious challenge.  Since the year 2000 or so we’ve sunk towards the next dark age with rapidly shrinking wealth, low trust, low innovation, and stringent orthodox persecution of heretical ideas. Furthermore, in a nation-state that treats everyone like replaceable parts from cradle to grave no one feels like they really belong or really matter.  They plug into an economy to crank out production points for most of their waking time alive with no purpose in sight.  This purpose vacuum was waiting for something to fill it and modern communication brought down a Berlin Wall built from bricks of mechanistic nihilism.

It comes as no surprise then that the new organizations arising are very much like tribes.  What others call nationalism I call neo-tribalism.  As always some will benefit from change while others perish.  An age of tribes promises to be a savage one defined by groups fighting over scarce resources in a world where most niches are already over-saturated.

The main discussion between allied emerging tribes right now is what uniting principles will define the new nation-tribe.  Some believe it is about a civic polity, those who can participate at a net benefit for the whole.  Others believe that ethnicity will be the core.
I think both are right about some things but neither grasps the whole truth.  Disembodied communication allows humans to associate by natural predisposition and neurotype.  Some tribes will form coalitions of mutually beneficial types and in those coalitions there will be hierarchies of tribes.  In time, the tribal coalition becomes a caste system.

Above all, this means the end is coming for enlightenment philosophy that reduces all questions of society to the individual.  In the future, society will not be treated as a machine made of atoms, but as an organism made of cells. Societies themselves will finally be seen correctly as competing organisms in the wild rather than lifeless structures that interchangeable atoms happen to occupy.