Why the Nation-state Was Doomed

The nation-state was doomed from the start. It was invented during the era of the Enlightenment but everything about it goes against the core Enlightened values.

The Enlightenment began the process of divorcing power from birth, inheritance, and blood. Gradually, everything became about individual achievement, and not even the most dense today believe in dragging the frumpy old aristocracy out of its dusty corner and investing it with power over our lives.

Belonging to a nation-state, however, is based on nothing but the accident of one’s birth. That something so major should be decided based on blood, creating yet again an aristocracy of birth, is enough to make the hair of any Enlightened thinker stand on end.

The nation-state can only exist if people reject reason in favor of a completely irrational form of emotional attachment. And reason is the driving force of Enlightenment.

In the nation-state state, the individual is sacrificed for the sake of the collective and self-interest is thrown out of the window. “Ask not what your country” is as anti-Enlightenment as it gets.

The imaginary borders that are so crucial for the nation-state go against the Enlightened belief in the unstoppable nature of science and technology.

From the very moment it was invented, the nation-state was in mortal battle with the philosophy that created it. Ultimately, science, technology, individualism, self-interest, and cynicism won. And the nation-state can no longer be sustained.

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34 responses to “Why the Nation-state Was Doomed”

lamestllama

December 14, 2014

The nation state serves to allow ideas like those of the enlightenment to be kept safe from those that have less enlightened ideas.

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musteryou

December 14, 2014

And yet people are not yet mature enough yet to understand a new basis for power/freedom/action etc. Shamanism is that basis. If I have developed the individual/personal capacities needed to lay claim to an identity, only then do I have a right to that identity. Otherwise I do not. Shamanism is the training to lay claim to self-identity (on one’s own terms).

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Anonymous

December 14, 2014

This post is absolutely brilliant, Clarissa.

The problem is that new ideas never get widely adopted overnight. People understand and adopt the easy bits, while remnants of the old ideas remain everywhere. That’s why well in the 21th century there are still people in the developed world who hold on to almost medieval religious beliefs.

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Clarissa

December 14, 2014

Thank you. 🙂 As you can imagine, I talk about this all the time. At first, people look at me like I’m crazy but then they get used to these ideas and even retell them to others.

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cliff arroyo

December 14, 2014

Well….. I don’t think this is unique to nation states. That is I think any human social arrangement (besides the default) will have inherent contradictions leading to its destruction. Human beings have too much contradictory programming for any consciously designed system to work for long.

The default type of human organization is some version of the extended family (which might include caste, clan and/or tribal affiliation as well) where the group a person is born into provides protection from life’s uncertainty in exchange for absolute unquestioning loyalty.

That is an extremely strong and robust structure that can be found with small variations throughout the world and it is probably the model that humans revert to when other models fail.

It totally sucks for things like innovation and economic development because as the individual is protected from uncertainty they are also assailed by unending debt and obligation to the group and conformism prevails stifling unconventional thought.
It also tends to produce lousy social conditions because it divides the world starkly into ‘us’ and ‘them’ and ‘them’ can never be trusted.

The nation state was an attempt to refocus loyalty away from a small family unit into a larger unit and its great contribution to human development was social trust (pretty much not found in other social models).

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musteryou

December 14, 2014

There is a lot of truth to this too!

As I said, the psychological model I was brought up with was very much a nationalist model and here are the comparisons between the strong militaristic nation state and the liberal democratic state:

In fact this depiction far from idealizes either of these societal organisation patterns, which are also taken on as the patterns for the individual’s psyche.

In the first image we can see that the lack of sufficient (in my view!) ego buffering between the undifferentiated self and the autocratic power principle at the top of the pyramid (the uppermost reaches of the psyche) leads to a unity of purpose and social solidarity — but also to individuals being sacrificed, because they do not sufficiently count themselves as individuals. A lack of ego buffering, or ego mediation between the two levels of the autocratic power structures and the diffused or naive self is something I find quite problematic.

By contrast, we have the second pyramid in the picture, which I think represents the liberal democratic state in the throes of extreme capitalism. It seems to me that this is the situation we have right now, where there is virtually no autocratic control or difffused self, but rather the normalization of the competitive ego as the dominant principle of existence. Without a difffused self, however, there is no receptivity, which means no intellectual life. A diffused self is a disinterested self, which simply takes in the world as it happens to be, rather than setting up a war between the facts and the individual’s own interests. The diffused self may seem passive, but it is also open, reverential and receptive.

When people are too competitive, they are not at all open or receptive, but view everything in the light of “what’s in it for me?” Without any receptivity to novelty, or reverence broader reality simply because it happens to exist, the consciousness that is purely individualistic makes the world seem very small indeed. We can’t have science, we can’t have religion, we can’t have a realm of the intellect, because the narrow individual cannot see how these things serve individualistic competitiveness directly. (And, in truth, they do not, as they serve the collective of society or humanity only indirectly.)

Also in a liberal democracy dominated by late capitalist competitiveness, the minimisation of any commanding structure leads to social incoherence (on the societal level) and/or a lack of discipline (on the individual level), which cannot always be made up for by the will to compete against others more effectively. A pill popping society where everybody blames everyone else for what ails them is one of the symptoms of an overblown middle level of the psyche.

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1. aglaonika
  
  December 14, 2014
  
  I have slightly different views on the contemporary western society. I don’t think there’s no autocratic control any more, rather the current holders of authorative power use passive-aggressive forms of control. In former societies people and groups were controlled by actively aggressive methods. With the rise of human right movements these methods have become softer and softer, but didn’t cease to exist. Today people are intimidated by broader social control and subtler rules. Someone without the right references or a criminal record or a bad track record can’t get a normal job any more, not to talk about what a bad credit history can do to someone’s life. A company has to be transparent and responsible, for example has to offer its financial and other data for public inspection (these control structures didn’t exist before), and have such rules in every imaginable area from accounting to hiring that requires an incredibly responsible planning and management. One can’t operate any more without following the rules, and most people in western societies actually obey the law and meet the requirements of the broader society because they well know that otherwise they would soon end up as chanceless outcasts.
  
  “When people are too competitive, they are not at all open or receptive, but view everything in the light of “what’s in it for me?” ”
  
  I think that’s always been like that. Humans have always done everything for themselves, only the ideology behind changes. When people helped each other more frequently and were more concerned about the interests of their larger group they did it either because they were intimidated by the more powerful, or because they wanted to gain social capital through higher reputation (which can be converted to other forms of power) or had religious endeavours like going to heaven or things like that (which also have an egotistical background).
  
  “We can’t have science, we can’t have religion, we can’t have a realm of the intellect, because the narrow individual cannot see how these things serve individualistic competitiveness directly.”
  
  Scientific and intellectual life and religious freedom have never been so strong and widely spread like today. Individualistic competitiveness drives everything. Broader social endeavours are also led by the competitiveness of individuals. The one who can form the life of others and the future of the society has the utmost power, and people always want power. Even saints wanted power. Love itself is a form of individual power. Procreation is also primarily led by a desire for power.
  
  “Also in a liberal democracy dominated by late capitalist competitiveness, the minimisation of any commanding structure leads to social incoherence (on the societal level) and/or a lack of discipline (on the individual level), which cannot always be made up for by the will to compete against others more effectively.”
  
  The prevalence and the senseless bloatedness of social welfare leads to the lack of discipline not capitalist competitiveness. If one wants to remain competitive in capitalism he or she has to have quite strong self-discipline on the individual level.
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    December 14, 2014
    
    aglaonika: congratulations, you will thrive in the new state model. In my experience, people from Eastern Europe, those who witnessed the fall of the Iron Curtain and lived through the 1990s there will do great with this new model. My husband, for instance, is very unimpressed with my stories of the new state model. He compares everything to Russia in the 1990s, that’s his frame of reference, and nothing I can tell him about the new state model even remotely rises to the level of the transformations he witnessed there.
    
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  2. musteryou
    
    December 14, 2014
    
    Yeah, but I think most of this is missing my point, especially the part that says, “People have always been like this” when I am pointing out that the soul structure is different. I mean it would be nice if I could see my point was first understood for what it is, before being disagreed with and denied, othewise it would seem like I am simply unobservant or idealistic, making things up as I go along.
    
    By the way, my point has nothing to do with ideologicallly criticising capitalism. I’m suggesting that it is necessary and possible to stand outside of a competitive viewpoint that would tend to posit that any and all positions are primarly or innately competitive and self-interested. If this isn’t done, then it will seem only as if I am making an ideological statement, which would have to be assumed to be self-serving, as all ideological statements are. But I’m very much NOT AT ALL interested in having a left versus right debate, especially in the terms fixed by current ideological denizens. My paradigms are intellectual and abstract, not ideological, and have to be addressed as engineered structures, not ideological propositions. That is, we need to take the sense of competition out of what I am putting accross in order to understand the structures in a purely scientific or intellectually disinterested way, not in a way that makes the world seem all too narrow by viewing reality solely in terms of ideological propositions.
    
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2. aglaonika
  
  December 14, 2014
  
  “aglaonika: congratulations, you will thrive in the new state model. ”
  
  My partner always says the same :-). He keeps to say this new world is designed to people like me, and how happy he is that he won’t get lost in it. Life with my personality type would have been terrible in the communist era, I’m happy it ended before I reached adulthood.
  
  “My husband, for instance, is very unimpressed with my stories of the new state model. He compares everything to Russia in the 1990s, that’s his frame of reference, and nothing I can tell him about the new state model even remotely rises to the level of the transformations he witnessed there.”
  
  I know, many people have a strong nostalgia towards the former regime in Eastern Europe, even in the younger generations. It ensured people a more calculable life, and it’s hard to get rid of the desire for it.
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    December 14, 2014
    
    “Life with my personality type would have been terrible in the communist era, I’m happy it ended before I reached adulthood.”
    
    – Same here! I would probably have killed myself before the age of 25 if the USSR hadn’t collapsed. I don’t consider that a life worth living for me.
    
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3. aglaonika
  
  December 14, 2014
  
  Oops, I misunderstood the second part about your husband. Firstly I read your comment as he doesn’t like the changes and prefers the system in the former Russia. But I read it again and realized that you actually mentioned that what he experiences now in the new state model is nothing compared to what he experienced before, and he can easily adapt. I should read more carefully :-).
  
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4. aglaonika
  
  December 14, 2014
  
  “I could see my point was first understood for what it is, before being disagreed with and denied, othewise it would seem like I am simply unobservant or idealistic, making things up as I go along.”
  
  I tried to understand your model, but as I didn’t agree with some points of your assumptions (which I enlisted in my previous comment) I couldn’t reach the conclusion based on assumptions I found problematic.
  
  “My paradigms are intellectual and abstract, not ideological, and have to be addressed as engineered structures, not ideological propositions. That is, we need to take the sense of competition out of what I am putting accross in order to understand the structures in a purely scientific or intellectually disinterested way, not in a way that makes the world seem all too narrow by viewing reality solely in terms of ideological propositions.”
  
  Your paradigms are based on anti-individualism which is a quite strong ideology, however that’s true that they don’t offer concrete ideological propositions. Engineered structures need to deal with reality, not with ceteris paribus reasoning. As competition is a significant part of a societal and economic system like the post-nation state model we can’t take it out of the equation. Society is not a sterile laboratory where one can remove certain parts of the ongoing conditions, as this kind of method creates an artificial environment which is basically unreal. Besides I think that the ego force you mentioned in your model was much stronger in the autocratic nation state than in the contemporary modern state. Okay I get it that people didn’t have well-developed and easily distinguishable individual characters, but it doesn’t mean they weren’t driven by their ego.
  
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  1. musteryou
    
    December 14, 2014
    
    That’s great! You have me corrected. I see.
    
    I ought to address reality more in my paradigms in future. I will do my best.
    
    If my paradigms are based on anti-individualism, I will internally examine myself to see if I can find any of that ideology lurking there, and if so I will certainly correct it!
    
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5. aglaonika
  
  December 14, 2014
  
  “I would probably have killed myself before the age of 25 if the USSR hadn’t collapsed. I don’t consider that a life worth living for me.”
  
  I grew up in a town close to the Austrian border so firstly I would have tried that (of course with a cyanide pill fastened around my neck).
  
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  1. musteryou
    
    December 14, 2014
    
    I’m sorrry for your emotional distress.
    
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December 14, 2014

¿Quién eres? ¿Cuál es tu patria? –G. Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab.

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Jones

December 14, 2014

“The nation-state can only exist if people reject reason in favour of a completely irrational form of emotional attachment.”

This is very tenacious, as it turns out — I suspect many people operate on the basis of being “reasonable”, which means that they employ reason only to the point that it makes them appear to be cooperative. Sentimentality as well as nostalgia for imagined utopias never won manages to figure into this as well …

Otherwise, you didn’t fall for my bit about Islamic State being neither Islamic nor a State — you probably knew I was channelling Joe Biden in the manner of Joe Isuzu. 🙂

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Clarissa

December 14, 2014

Islamic State is so fluid, uncertain and supremely indifferent to the fate of the people it manages to overlap with that we can credit it with a good understanding of th ed new state model.

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Z

December 14, 2014

This is actually giving me an interesting paper idea on Sab and I do not know that I have time to write it. It seems that in this novel one must have a patria and the title character does not really. That is an essay prompt … somebody pick it up!!!

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1. Z
  
  December 14, 2014
  
  Hmmm I meant that comment to go with my original one on Sab, just above.
  
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Glenfilthie

December 14, 2014

LOL. This screed was brought to you by your otherwise unemployable liberal arts professors and scholars! Visit one near you today!

Yannow, I regularly get scolded by my moral and intellectual superiors because I can’t grasp the moral inversions that make homosexuality, feminism, and socialism desirable value systems. Please forgive my obviously retarded question, Clarissa…but what would you and your scholars replace the nation state with?

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Clarissa

December 14, 2014

It’s already being replaced. The name of the new form of statehood varies from post-nation state to market state. This is a transformation that is happening whether we like it or not. And actually, the first people to alert us to the approaching change were conservative thinkers.

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valter07

December 14, 2014

— I can’t grasp the moral inversions that make homosexuality, feminism, and socialism desirable value systems.

Apparently I do not have enough conservative friends – I cannot recall anyone in my presence ever before called homosexuality a “value system”, desirable or not… More seriously – but what is the viable alternative? What would the moral society of your dreams do? Derogatory labels aside – to what extent it would redistribute wealth from the richer to the poorer via taxes? How exactly it would treat women? What would it do to the homosexuals?

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1. n8chz
  
  December 16, 2014
  
  Apparently…Shoot them. With plastic guns. In cold weather. Indoors.
  
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valter07

December 14, 2014

I am not a fan of the current nation-state model. Mainly because nation-states became the vehicle of exclusion, they became a justification for “this state belongs to us (the majority), and you (the minority) have to adapt and be according to our tastes, however unenlightened those tastes might be… and solve our problems for us…”. But in the same time I am very ambivalent about the infestation of different spheres of life by anything resembling the “market-state”. This just substitutes one master for another, national elite for international one. There is no major evolutionary step in the psychology of the people or the elites. What is happening now reminds me more of ancient Rome with its “bread and circus” than of any kind of Enlightenment (admittedly, my knowledge about both Ancient Rome or Enlightenment is based on sources that may be biased).
Proliferation of unpaid jobs that you bemoan is a manifestation of the market-state. Middle-class jobs with some degree of creativity in the job description are becoming a privilege. Thus, unpaid internships (and, according to my daughter, internships where the intern pays for the privilege of internship) are rightfully treated as investment.
I am not suggesting forcing some kind of socialism on the people. But, on the other hand,market economy is not any kind of exception in the grand scheme of things. ANY system can lead to disaster if it does not match the psychological level of development of the people… Taking this line of reasoning a bit to the extreme – freeing the slaves is also a bad idea, IF the only thing the freed slaves can think of is how to become the new masters and get some slaves for themselves.
Returning to the “socialism” – I actually believe that eventually some more collaborative model of the society will develop on the ruins of the market economy. The latter will fight tooth and nail, trying to invent all kinds of demands and then satisfying them, and thus keeping the percentage of the unemployed below the critical threshold, but eventually the progress in robotics and peoples’ desire to have some meaning to their lives will catch up with it. But this must happen via evolution, not revolution by people eager to become the new elite.

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Clarissa

December 14, 2014

Of course, nothing is forever. The post nation-state, too, shall pass. And something else will arise in its stead. But since I don’t believe any of us will be around to witness that, I’m not going in the direction of offering any projections for such a distant future. Here I’m only discussing what we will all see with our own eyes. And when we see these changes happen, at least those 2, 000 of us who are reading these posts will understand what and why is happening and what it means. I find that the quality of my life definitely got better since I was first informed that the nation-state was dying. Not because I hate it or anything but because it’s better to know than to remain ignorant.

So basically, I’m trying to improve my readers ‘ quality of life with these posts. 🙂

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Clarissa

December 14, 2014

Paid internships – yes, that’s the future. I might rant and rave but they are unavoidable. And then again – I’m almost 40, my life design is done. And if the young people who are in the process of designing their lives are happy with this, it isn’t my place to spoil their fun.

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musteryou

December 14, 2014

It’s very important to realize that my paradigms are not ideological propositions about left and right or idealisations of certain state models. To understand what I am saying, it is important to remove the emotion out of the analysis and just view the models as an engineer would view a blueprint. I can’t emphasize enough that this is the only way to view my models.

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musteryou

December 16, 2014

Hmmmm…

Interesting. People don’t like to be told the meaning of what I have done. They like to create their own interpretations and make their own mistakes and not know what thing are intended to mean.

I welcome that approach. It’s deeply shamanic (if it succeeds) and also fits my other ideas along the lines of psychological eugenics (if it does not).

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December 14, 2014

What about Uruguay? http://truth-out.org/news/item/27932-uruguay-takes-on-london-bankers-marlboro-mad-men-and-the-tpp

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n8chz

December 16, 2014

The nation state is said by some to be a by-product of the Westphalia treaty.

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n8chz

December 19, 2014

Falkvinge strikes again: http://falkvinge.net/2014/12/16/bitcoin-is-to-credit-cards-what-the-internet-was-to-the-fax-machine-so-much-more/

The starkest explanation I have seen so far for why the nation state is doomed. His use of Cyprus (the canary in the coal mine among nation states) as an example is especially worth reading and re-reading. You also might like how language is used as an analogy for the blockchain.

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December 20, 2014

Haven’t read the article, but the question in the first sentence I quoted seems interesting:

What is a refugee if there is no nation-state? Can refugees really exist as a category if there are no effective governments in control of territory and the mass illusion of real democracy has faded away? Today’s refugee is a person seeking multiple refuges, not only from political violence but also from neoliberalism, a system that erodes every border to create ceaseless capital flows while erecting new walls to separate humans.
[…]
How do we see the person who is displaced by state or economic violence, whether from Syria, Palestine, Sudan, Detroit, Soweto or any other place? In addition to those driven away from their homes by war or poverty, climate disasters and environmental violence are forging new types of displaced people: oil refugees, nuclear refugees, bauxite refugees, water refugees. What name do we give to these emerging states of statelessness? For many years, the politics of the powerless largely centered on creating a state for them. What is the politics of today’s global stateless, left behind by governments at the mercy of corporations that transcend national laws and international treaties?

Perhaps we can say that we are all refugees now, even if we remain citizens, and in that mutual recognition and acceptance lies the power of the powerless. For us, borders are obstacles, but ultimately they are not meaningful: culture, language, food, ideas and politics cross them with ease. This is not a conclusion. It is a beginning.
http://creativetimereports.org/2014/02/03/what-is-a-refugee-if-there-is-no-nation-state-palestinian-syrian/

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