I asked for a grande iced Americano at our campus Starbucks and instead got a piping hot venti Americano and a lukewarm venti Americano. I could have waited for the correct third version but there is a limit on how much Americano even I can ingest.

I know there’s some cool metaphor hiding within the Americano adventure but I’m exhausted and can’t find it. The exhaustion is actually the reason for the Americanos.

What bothers me about the foreign policy of the US is how reactive it has become. I don’t see any evidence that there is a concerted plan, a goal that this country is trying to achieve with its foreign policy. This is why everything it does in the realm of foreign relations these days seems so weak and confused. 

“Let’s wait and see what Putin does. OK, this is what he did. Right. Now let’s wait some more and see what he does next. And for good measure, let’s warn him that we are gravely concerned and about to do something. Let’s see what he does next. . . and next. . . and next. . . and then for sure we will do something.”

Substitute ‘Putin’ with ISIS or Hamas or Israel or absolutely anything at all, and the result will still be the same.

The way I see it is that a foreign policy, in order to be successful, has to be guided by a goal or a set of considerations or, ideally, a philosophy of “our being in the world.” Then there would be no need to sit here, scratching our noodle, while everybody else is pursuing just this kind of actual philosophy. 

Putin has a philosophy. He wants Russia to be to the world what the US was in the XXth century. Ukraine has a complex and interesting foreign relations policy. Gosh, even ISIS has a concrete and specific goal. Yes, the Caliphate is an idiotic goal, but at least it is an actual plan. 

Even a bad goal is better than nothing. With a bad goal, people could argue, discuss, work to modify it. “Let’s use everybody in the world like a disposable piece of Kleenex to enrich ourselves and have a grand old time.” That’s, at least, a concrete philosophy people could choose to work for or against.

And I have a proposal for a much better philosophy of “being in the world.” I think it would make sense to dedicate ourselves to preventing the scenario of “the imagined community of the aggrieved and the sulky getting together and lashing out against those who are not as intimidated by the rapidly changing world.” Yes, that would involve taking a stand and actually having the courage to say “we” and “they.” While we are sitting here, wriggling in the polite terror of hurting somebody’s feelings, the less sensitive among the world’s players are creating real terror that will be visited upon us irrespective of how sensitive and polite we are.

Gosh, even W. with his “evil-doers” now makes me feel nostalgic after Obama’s endless “folks” and “whatever is happening.” 

P.S. Has anybody noticed how brilliant my recent posts have been? It’s like one flash of brilliance after another, if I say so myself.

Reader el asked if there is a worst-case scenario for the post-nation state. Yes, of course, there is.

Benedict Anderson famously referred to the nation-state as an “imagined community.” A nation is an imagined community because there absolutely no possibility for the citizens of even a very small nation to see the entire country and meet every single citizen. This is why, for the nation to exist and have meaning, we need to imagine and re-imagine it every single day.

Now, the worst-case scenario for the post-nation state is that the collapse of the “imagined community” will be followed by the “imagined community of shared grievance.” I can’t remember for the life of me who coined this brilliant phrase but that genius was not me. Global media of communications enable everybody around the globe who feels vaguely aggrieved and left behind by the rapidly transforming world to get together and join in the hatred of those who have run too far ahead.

In case this sounds too cerebral, here is a real-life example. We are all seeing Russians nursing an extreme sense of grievance right now. They are obviously not even sure what they are  so upset about: NATO, EU, USSR, the West, their own miserable existence – who knows? They are upset and they are acting out. And do you think the vaguely aggrieved Russians might have something of value to give, say, to the similarly vaguely aggrieved ISIS?

This is the worst-case scenario of post-nationalism. The imagined community of the aggrieved and the sulky getting together and lashing out against those who are not as intimidated by the rapidly changing world. 

I’m being asked if there is anything good about the new state form. Of course, there is positive and negative in most things.

The new state will be highly fluid on every level. Fluidity means insecurity, instability and anxiety on the one hand, and an enormous, unseen burst of opportunity on the other hand. The shackles of collective identities are falling off. Everything is temporary, everything is in the state of flux. Of course, the rate at which this change is occurring differs among different societies but my blog’s readers are all in the places where these changes are happening already.

We’ll get to live several different, unstable, highly changeable lives instead of a single predictable one. It’s scary but fun. Some of the literature I have read on the subject refers to the new society as a society of opportunity. But there is no opportunity without risk and no freedom without the burden of choice. And of course taking the opportunity and turning to your advantage (and doing so every day for the rest of your life) will not be easy.

Suggestion: if you tend to suffer from anxiety, now is a good time to get rid of it completely. We are moving towards a society whether the division between winners and losers will be harsh (this is the bad part). And the line will be redrawn every day (and this is the good part). 

I decided to let go of my greed and not to request a teaching assignment for the summer. Instead, I will be working on my book.

The decision is making me feel nauseous.

Speaking about gay people during a Crimean government session on Tuesday, the region’s de facto leader Sergei Aksyonov said “we in Crimea do not need such people.” In comments reported by the Russian news agencies Interfax and Itar-Tass, Aksyonov said that if the LGBT community tried to hold public gatherings, “our police and self-defence forces will react immediately and in three minutes will explain to them what kind of sexual orientation they should stick to.” He added that Crimean children should be brought up with a “positive attitude to family and traditional values.”’

I’m really really curious who the Ian Welshes of the world find it in themselves to support this people-hating regime and still consider themselves Liberals.

Idiots abound:

For years, Ukraine’s once vaunted Soviet education system has deteriorated, with corruption taking a toll on the quality of education. Plagiarism is widespread and often goes unpunished, while bribes are often accepted to purchase grades, to pass exams and even to buy diplomas. Several Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, no longer recognize Ukrainian medical diplomas because of the sub-grade qualification level of graduates. The U.S. also doesn’t recognize Ukrainian medical degrees.

The author of this piece creates an impression that this corruption and deterioration happened after the fall of the USSR which is a vicious lie. I already shared on the blog how the graduates of the “vaunted Soviet education system” tortured me back in the early 1980s when I sought medical help as a very small child. The entire “vaunted Soviet education system” was predicated on corruption, bribery, plagiarism, and meaningless diplomas. Jeez, people, read Solzhenitsyn for a description of how garbagey Soviet diplomas were even back in the 1940s. And it only went downhill after that.

Of course, higher education in Ukraine and Russia sucks something fierce. But that suckiness was inherited from the Soviet times.

. . . then remember that “nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so” (c). There is no nation-state without people believing the most egregious lies known to humanity. Even just today, a blogger recognized that

any national history gauged more to promote skills of dispassionate analysis than to inculcate patriotism and civic virtue is bound to outrage a large subset of citizens with affection for said nation.

And it’s true. Nation-state’s existence as a model is predicated on people abandoning rational analysis and descending into the depths of emotional, unreasonable attachment to something that doesn’t really exist. And that’s all shades of pathetic.

It sounds like the new state form is all bad but that’s not true. Even if it seems like there will be more inequality in it, in reality it will be the same inequality but on a different basis.

How do you feel about the feudal system where you were either born a prince or a commoner and could do very little to change your lot? Stupid, right? But this is exactly how people 200 years from now will look at our nation-state system because it’s not that different.

In a nation-state, the circumstances of one’s birth still define destiny. This is maybe less noticeable because it occurs along state borders and not along familial bloodlines. But what is the difference, really?

The importance of borders radically diminishes in the new form of state and people become less circumscribed by the good or bad luck of being born in a certain place. We will see an enormous mobility in every direction and on every level. We are already seeing it.

As we discovered in the previous post, the state doesn’t have anything to gain any longer from ensuring everybody’s welfare. This means we are moving towards a model where nothing is expected from or offered to a significant part of the population. This large group of people will still have formal citizenship but will be de facto stateless. They will neither pay taxes not vote. In the US, this is already a very significant percentage of the population.

We are all making fun of the conceal-carry crowd, and they are very funny. However, they are sensing a great change happening: the interest of law enforcement agencies in prosecuting crime is waning. Police is getting militarized because its purpose is changing. It looks like an army because it is becoming one. This army is defending those with a functional statehood from the stateless-within-a-state.

Living during a tectonic shift is never very easy. Even people who are not entirely sure what a nation-state is feel disturbed by the news it is dying. And the changes we are seeing around us don’t look very attractive. But nobody ever gained anything from blindness. Besides, every state-form has both positive and negative characteristics. If we know what the new contract between the citizen and the state is, we will know how to adapt to it and won’t flail about aimlessly.