by R.J. Jacob
“The thought of you tribal thugs “bringing down the state” is fucking disturbing.” –Anonymous commenter
T
rouble stirred up by Jack Donovan and yours truly at Disinfo.com.
More hysteria here.
Let’s face it, the significant differences between Americans are so great and beyond resolution that the only way to reconcile such irreconcilable differences would be to break up the US federal government by means of pan-secessionism and decentralizing politics and economics into a system of decentralized systems.
Unfortunately, Democrats and Republicans want to stay together for security reasons.
The desire to feel secure through large structural systems is a thing of modernity. There are so many reasons why people run to the state but fear is the main reason — fear of poverty, crime, racism, hate, violence, terrorism, war, being a minority, and so forth. Bruce Schneier in Beyond Fear does a pretty good job explaining how modern man makes tradeoffs based on the feeling of security, not the reality of security. It’s no coincidence that we have today a therapeutic nanny welfare state partnered with a massive big sister security industrial complex doing CYA and aiming to make people feel more secure.
Contrary to popular feeling, the state is a security crisis. States tend to evolve beyond their original intentions to institutionalize the very things they were designed to keep from being institutionalized in the first place. As the state expands and becomes larger, humans are presented with baffling security realities that force them to make the wrong decisions in real time, learn the wrong lessons from scary events, select the wrong targets, turn themselves into bitches, and generally move in an anti-biological direction.
If we want to stay in control of things I think small, strong, relatively anarchistic polyglot confederations are the way to go. Smaller is better. Would you rather be running Craigslist or UPS? A small system is secure because it’s strong, not because it is big. Small and strong means able to remain adaptable and make adjustments when the enemy or competition changes. It also means putting some skin in the game and keeping the ruling classes at sword length.
This is not to say all bigness is necessarily bad. I think virtues of smallness should be applied only where necessary. Humans do remarkable things and bigness can be beautiful in many ways. The multi-ethnic empires of the Ottoman Dynasty and House of Habsburg managed to provide a decent deal of independence and self-determination to many of its regions, communities, and ethno-cultural groups. But one thing is always certain, bigness does not stay intelligent for very long.
