Accurate Assessment

 I hate to say this is accurate, but....  when too many stars align, power grabs become way too easy.  It's a proof of the truism "We're all serfs now"

Social Cohesion Capital Leeches

 You can either view most pop media as a new de facto, inquisitional type of priest class, or simply as social cohesion capital leeches.

I suspect the true believers are more the priest class type. Rachel Maddow and most BLM komissars come to mind here. Stetler, Cuomo and others seem to me more the leech type.  Pelosi and most Establishment types strike me more as grand inquisitors who do it for the power and sheer joy of power exercise.  True Stalinist personality types, who are at best rationalizing things 'for the greater good' as per most modern movie arch villains.

The leeches worry me the most.  You can't get rid of the spread of true believers and power hungry inquisitors.  Once you get too many leeches though, things fall apart quickly.  Social cohesion capital is a very slow renewing resource - akin to coal & oil.  You don't get it back in a generation. And once the civil wars get going and you fall down polity sizes (i.e. down to a lower adaptive group level of societal organization), you don't claw your way out of it easily.  How long did it take the Egyptians to get back on their feet after their post-kingdom collapse?  The Mayans?  The western Romans?  The eastern Romans?  It's something to look at.

The US got back on their feet after their Revolutionary civil war, and their 1860's civil war.  But, they had space to expand.  Right now they're in a much different space.  WHile some may see it as globalist growing pains, I tend to see it as empire collapse pains.  Time will tell which it is. Most of the markers strike me as growth of two new and distinct sub-contintental nations.  The tearing down of old national symbols, the growth of new national anthems, new meta-narrative histories (1619 project), the xenophobic rejection of competing ethnies, and the desire for new rule of law, all strike me as the hallmarks of nationalism.  These tendencies may be clothed in globalistic rhetoric, but I think its specific type of globablism is more akin to "expanding the size of one's dominion (and hence power)" more than it is true globalism.  The infighting between the religiously committed globablists and the "BLM" nationalistst will be interesting to see.   How that turns out will depend on how a power hungry figure like Pelosi, who in many ways resembles a cowardly version of Constantine, plays out.  Unfortunately, I don't see her or most like her as having any real moral backbone. Hence I think they will destroy, but won't have the insight to make it a creative destruction as per Constantine.

Nationalism as a result of Sufficient Internal Migration?

How did nationalism and nation states arise? Smith's standard text "Nationalism" presents the standard historical and anthropoligical views.  He even mentions kin-based biology and gene-culture co-evolution. Too bad he, like most historians and anthropologists dismisses it.

But, like all good books, most rewards come from the muses they inspire rather than the direct knowledge they impart.  Smith's brief description of Gellner's 1960's - 19080's theory of nationalism was one such muse for me.  From what I understand, Gellner's nationalistic origin theory is abased on reconciliation between an urbanizing proletariat and established urbanites (elites & proletariat).  When combined with a literate society, coordination took the form of nationalism and nation states.

From a gene-cultural multilevel selection lens, this actually seems OK.  Could sufficient migration levels within a loosely coupled ethnie during a religoius-political Great Awakening cycle produce an adaptive group and moral Big Brother (List & Pettit type) that was happy to stick to fixed boundaries?

I suspect internal migration, not based on expansionist conquest might be key.  Seeing loosely coupled people as part of the same adaptive group would require some sort of meta-narrative bind.  I'd suggest Scott Atran's work on religion makes sense here.  You need some quasi-factuals to bind people and serve as low cost commitment displays.  These would also serve as a guide to understand the moral Big Brother, provided of course you had a sufficiently primed cultural background to correctly do so.

The missing piece is non-expansionist tendencies....

Could this be where progressive religion comes in?  For instance, early Christianity seems to have made hay with the idea of Salvation and universalized divinity.  Everyone is a son of God. Everyone can be saved.  By treating others as yourself (or at least not like chattel) you then save yourself.  While this ideology eventually turned into imperialism, I would suspect it started out very pluralistic.  I also suspect this general class of cultural proclivity is highly adaptive as it sets up selection for higher levels of organization.

The problem comes from Progressivism's Pandora's box.  One everyone is seen as human as your in-group, then there's not much stopping you from destroying other groups for their own liberation. I think we're in that phase right now. That's the neo-catholic idea I discussed the other week.

The piece that needs explaining is why the first nations would remain internally focussed.  I suspect the answer is in "just the right levels of internal migration relative to cultural disparities".  This seems akin to the very narrow solution space 1970's group selection needed to operate within in order to be theoretically possible.  I believe D.S. Wilson showed that this very narrow, improbable, solution band is actually where groups reside.  My guess is that some fitness (wealth) transfer from governments or elites back to commoners is part of the stabilizing solution. And, that pluralistic tendencies combined with just the right amount of inward focus caused by narrow-band migration levels produce the necessary solution space for non-expansionist Nationalism.

But I could be wrong.  However, while improbable, it just feels right for some reason....

The Protestant revolution did something 

Moralized Quasi-religious Politics

 It's nice seeing smart thinkers finally coming around to fuller understandings of how politics has now been infused with religion - specifically the next great evolution in world religion, Wokeism.

Destabilization is often a feature not a bug

 

Destabilization often isn't a problem - it's a feature. You just have to look at it from the right lens, and over the right time frame.

Think Mao, Stalin, Luther, Constantine, AOC, BLM,

https://www.revolver.news/2021/07/south-africa-riots-looting-critical-race-theory/

Nation Building - By Splitting US' Old Weak Federal 'Empire'

 The latest book Ive been reading on nationalism is Anthony Smith's 2nd Edition of Nationalism.  I like it a lot more than Hazony's Virtue of Nationalism.  But, the two are very different beasts. 

Here's a quote from Smith that makes me think that the fracturing of America down tribalized political lines is not a simple flash in the pants idea...

"The nation, in the eyes of nationalists, can be described as a community of history and destiny, or better, a community in which history requires and produces destiny - a particular national destiny.  This idea of destiny carries far more emotional freight than notions of the futures....  For nationalists, the nation's destiny is always glorious, like its distant past; indeed, the golden past, hidden beneath the opporessive present, will shine forth once again, through the regeneration of the tru spirit of the nation by the yet unborn."

In evolutionary language, Smith is describing a grand (moral) meta-narrative.  More specifically, I think, it is a grand meta-narrative quasi-fable that also encodes the 'scripture' necessary for List & Pettit moral Big Brother alignment.  That is to say, the stories nationalists tell about their nation contain enough moralized "data points" for the emergence of a strong Big Brother group agent.  If you don't understand the cultural milieu in which the stories are situated you probably won't pick this up.

I suspect this is what is happening with the Democratic Black nation in the States.  They are heading down the road of nation building within the US' imperial carcass.  That is the deep reason you see Trumpists labelled as insurrectionists and deplorable 'others'.  It's not just superficial racism (equity).  It's part of the evolutionary process of weak empire splitting. 

In fact, the more I read in Smith, the more the US' current politicalization reminds me of Protestant Catholic splits in the1600's.  There Protestants created a new meta-narrative fable out of the ashes of imperial-Catholic feudal empires.

Eating Their Own Just Means You Need a "Unifier"

 The study of the use of Christianity to win ancient Rome's intra-elite conflict is very apropos today.  The big lesson is that Constantine, an outsider from Britain, used Christianity to purge his political opposition and filter out the elite classes by taking advantage of a Great Religious Awakening cycle and turning it into a politicized inquisition.

Thus when you see Woke groups devour their own, don't get cocky, it just means that someone will soon figure out how to become a unifier in chief, taking the opportunity to bring various sects / cults together along a strategic path of their own choosing.  The politicalization of Christianity (in its various political epochs) went the same way

Implications of our new Compliant Natures

 Gene-culture dual inheritance theories suppose that stabilization to major polity size changes occur as a result of stabilized gene-cultural traits.  In other words, Scots accept English rule once enough fiercely independent people get selected out of the population (due to war) and a critical mass of more compliant traits stabilize in the population.  Stabilization may occur just on the cultural level. But long term polity size stabilization usually requires a decent amount of selection at the genetic level (i.e. a sufficient frequency of "agreeableness" genes (or at least the genes which directly or indirectly correlate with agreeable personalities) in the population).

Covid lockdown compliance has sown us just how compliant modern populations are to hitherto egregious authoritarianism.  It's hard to imagine a 17th century Scot agreeing to Sydney's "only one person can leave the house each day" policy.  Nor can one imagine 1940's American's agreeing to universal mask mandates for an illness with a 0.002% fatality rate for 20-49 year old folk.  The Swedish epidemiologist responsibilty for that country's voluntary restriction strategy was stunned at how easily people across the classically liberal world went along with Covid authoritarianism.  I have to say, it stunned me as well.  You think there would have been at least a few spectacular immolations as crazed individuals were fined and jailed. Indeed, the most chilling part of Covid is the awareness that 1930-1950 illiberalness wasn't an aberration.

Indeed, I think it is safe to assume that Covid compliance suggests that the gene-cultural traits required for a new level of governmental authoritarianism are broadly prevalent in Western society.  Some countries, like the US, remain uncertain, but that is likely a function of US's de facto status as a dual confederacy under a dying weak federal empire.

This has some major implications.  It means that the next polity shift, presumably into pan-nationalism, is more ready than almost everyone supposed.  Meme's like "there is no planet B", and "we're all in the climate fight together", have unexpectedly fertile ground upon which to play and evolve.

But the gene-cultural shifts which enable higher polity size changes don't unidirectionally produce benevolent governances.  Indeed, I'd suspect that insight into the "progressive" world's compliance means that a both good AND foul intentioned authoritarians will use newfound population level compliance traits for rather nefarious ends.

This seems to be the fear of "Great Reset" folk.  There is a real fear that a Trudeau fop will pull a Covid lockdown for "climate change" or some other pan-national issue.  The goal may be good. But it will be hard to disentangle moral intent from its illiberal smokescreens. "We'd love for you to all travel to the polls to vote, but because of Climate, you'll all have to do it from home.  And trust us on the results... We know BIPOC folk don't have tech access, so we'll just have to excuse some equity corrected fudges..."

In fact, I'd imagine there are hundreds of ways authoritarians will leverage newly discovered compliance limits.  The "my body my choice" wall is basically broken.  Adult seatbelt laws come to my mind as where this line first died.

Indeed, I wonder if in 20-50 years we might not look back on Nazi Germany, Communist Russian, and Maoist China as the first big signals into a new era of compliance enabled authoritarianism.  If so, Orwell's ideas of pan-national leagues "newspeaking" draconian policy changes at the drop of a hat isn't so far away.  You'll just believe it is for the greater good.  Most of those who would see otherwise are probably genetic relics who are only partially able to overcome the cultural pressure put on them to shut up.  But, even if their resistance comes through on occasion, the social platforms they need to be heard are locked up.  Even physical "town squares" are now locked up and permitted according to "right think" identities.  Proud Boys (or equivalent) can't protest, because "safety"! You know what Antifa (or equivalent) will with your identity-based instigation. It's your own fault for being so extreme!

Weak Empire Splits

 For a couple of years I've been mentioning how the United States, as a de facto weak empire is ripe for a split to smaller polities.  This is exasperated (facilitated?) by a rapidly growing population, increasing levels of diversity, tremendous draws on social cohesion capital, and a very long de facto border (due to foreign entanglements).

This survey seems to suggest the idea is getting more and more likely. 

A read through some liberal Mormon blogs got me convinced that fairly educated professor types have absolutely no inclination to compromise with respect to governmance and political morality.  Neither do Trumpers.

Other than very dramatic policy swings from one administration to another (like disbanding the FBI to purge it, then recreating another one every election swing), there really is no alternative.  You are going to have to kill one side to silence them.  The right currently thinks this is exactly where Biden's military purge, "extremist" databases and "Great Reset" are headed.  The racist anti-white genocidal language doesn't help much.  The other side is convinced Trumpists are authoritarian Nazi's who are only be held back by media righteousness and social peer pressure.

The only way to let each side be themselves is to split the country apart.  The best bet here is to produce two voluntary confederacies.  This would require some state border re-alignments.  For instance, eastern Washington, Oregon and north East California would go Red.  Parts of Arizona and New Mexico and maybe Colorado would go blue.  The rest is easy to figure out.

I'm afraid that is the only viable pluralistic option there is.  Neither side is willing to be subject to the rules of the other.

This stat shows how close to reality this likelyhood now is

https://www.mediaite.com/politics/shock-poll-two-in-three-southern-republicans-want-to-secede-from-the-united-states/