When the payoff for organizing violence at a large scale tumbles, the payoff from violence at a smaller scale is likely to jump.

the collapse of morality and growing corruption among leaders of Western governments are not random developments. They are evidence that the potential of the nation-state is exhausted. Even many of its leaders no longer believe the platitudes they mouth. Nor are they believed by others.

Whenever technological change has divorced the old forms from the new moving forces of the economy, moral standards shift, and people begin to treat those in command of the old institutions with growing disdain. This widespread revulsion often comes into evidence well

As the breakdown of large systems accelerates, systematic compulsion will recede as a factor shaping economic life and the distribution of income. Efficiency will become more important than the dictates of power in the organization of social institutions. This means that provinces and even cities that can effectively uphold property rights and provide for the administration of justice, while consuming few resources, will be viable sovereignties in the Information Age, as they generally have not been during the last five centuries.

The liberation of a large part of the global economy from political control will oblige whatever remains of government as we have known it to operate on more nearly market terms. Governments will ultimately have little choice but to treat populations in territories they serve more like customers, and less in the way that organized criminals treat the victims of a shakedown racket.

Just as monarchs, lords, popes, and potentates fought ruthlessly to preserve their accustomed privileges in the early stages of the modern period, so today’s governments will employ violence, often of a covert and arbitrary kind, in the attempt to hold back the clock.

Multinational companies are already having to subcontract all but essential work. Some conglomerates, such as AT&T, Unisys, and ITT, have split themselves into several firms in order to function more profitably. The nation-state will devolve like an unwieldy conglomerate, but probably not before it is forced to do so by financial crises.

As technology revolutionizes the tools we use, it also antiquates our laws, reshapes our morals, and alters our perceptions.

The good news about individual liberation and autonomy will seem to be bad news to many who are frightened by the transition crisis and do not expect to be winners in the new configuration of society.

a bald desire fitted with a moral toupee

Just as attempts to preserve the power of knights in armor were doomed to fail in the face of gunpowder weapons, so the modern notions of nationalism and citizenship are destined to be short-circuited by microtechnology. Indeed, they will eventually become comic in much the way that the sacred principles of fifteenth-century feudalism fell to ridicule in the sixteenth century.

The Don Quixote of the twenty-first century will not be a knight-errant struggling to revive the glories of feudalism but a bureaucrat in a brown suit, a tax collector yearning for a citizen to audit.

When the reach of lords and kings was weak, and the claims of one or more groups overlapped at a frontier, it frequently happened that neither could decisively dominate the other. In the Middle Ages, there were numerous frontier or “march” regions where sovereignties blended together. These violent frontiers persisted for decades or even centuries in the border areas of Europe. There were marches between areas of Celtic and English control in Ireland; between Wales and England, Scotland and England, Italy and France, France and Spain, Germany and the Slav frontiers of Central Europe, and between the Christian kingdoms of Spain and the Islamic kingdom of Granada. Such march regions developed distinct institutional and legal forms of a kind that we are likely to see again in the next millennium. Because of the competitive position of the two authorities, residents of march regions seldom paid tax. What is more, they usually had a choice in deciding whose laws they were to obey, a choice that was exercised through such legal concepts as “avowal” and “distraint” that have now all but vanished. We expect such concepts to become a prominent feature of the law of Information Societies.

Tags: green

In the new millennium, sovereignty will be fragmented once more. New entities will emerge exercising some but not all of the characteristics we have come to associate with governments. Some of these new entities, like the Knights Templar and other religious military orders of the Middle Ages, may control considerable wealth and military power without controlling any fixed territory. They will be organized on principles that bear no relation to nationality at all. Members and leaders of religious corporations that exercised sovereign authority in parts of Europe in the Middle Ages in no sense derived their authority from national identity. They were of all ethnic backgrounds and professed to owe their allegiance to God, and not to any affinities that members of a nationality are supposed to share in common.

the future is likely to confound the expectations of those who have absorbed the civic myths of twentieth-century industrial society. Among them are the illusions of social democracy that once thrilled and motivated the most gifted minds. They presuppose that societies evolve in whatever way governments wish them to—preferably in response to opinion polls and scrupulously counted votes. This was never as true as it seemed fifty years ago. Now it is an anachronism, as much an artifact of industrialism as a rusting smokestack.

Market forces, not political majorities, will compel societies to reconfigure themselves in ways that public opinion will neither comprehend nor welcome. As they do, the naïve view that history is what people wish it to be will prove wildly misleading.

If you fail to transcend conventional thinking at a time when conventional thinking is losing touch with reality, then you will be more likely to fall prey to an epidemic of disorientation that lies ahead.

In the new millennium, economic and political life will no longer be organized on a gigantic scale under the domination of the nation-state as it was during the modern centuries. The civilization that brought you world war, the assembly line, social security, income tax, deodorant, and the toaster oven is dying.

The collapse of Communism marked the end of a long cycle of five centuries during which magnitude of power overwhelmed efficiency in the organization of government.

Human cultures have blind spots. We have no vocabulary to describe paradigm changes in the largest boundaries of life, especially those happening around us. Notwithstanding the many dramatic changes that have unfolded since the time of Moses, only a few heretics have bothered to think about how the transitions from one phase of civilization to another actually unfold. How are they triggered? What do they have in common? What patterns can help you tell when they begin and know when they are over? When will Great Britain or the United States come to an end? These are questions for which you would be hard-pressed to find conventional answers.

Every social system, however strongly or weakly it clings to power, pretends that its rules will never be superseded. They are the last word. Or perhaps the only word. Primitives assume that theirs is the only possible way of organizing life. More economically complicated systems that incorporate a sense of history usually place themselves at its apex. Whether they are Chinese mandarins in the court of the emperor, the Marxist nomenklatura in Stalin’s Kremlin, or members of the House of Representatives in Washington, the powers-that-be either imagine no history at all or place themselves at the pinnacle of history, in a superior position compared to everyone who came before, and the vanguard of anything to come.

The more apparent it is that a system is nearing an end, the more reluctant people will be to adhere to its laws. Any social organization will therefore tend to discourage or play down analyses that anticipate its demise. This alone helps ensure that history’s great transitions are seldom spotted as they happen. If you know nothing else about the future, you can rest assured that dramatic changes will be neither welcomed nor advertised by conventional thinkers. You cannot depend upon conventional information sources to give you an objective and timely warning about how the world is changing and why. If you wish to understand the great transition now under way, you have little choice but to figure it out for yourself.

Peddlers of “news” seldom are partisans of controversy in ways that would undermine their own profits. They may be partisan. They may even be outrageously so. But they seldom report conclusions that would convince subscribers to cancel their subscriptions and head for the hills.

Any decisive swing in patterns of behavior and values is invariably a response to an actual change in the conditions of life. In this sense, at least, people are always realistic. If their views do change abruptly, it probably indicates that they have been confronted by some departure from familiar conditions: an invasion, a plague, a sudden climatic shift, or a technological revolution that alters their livelihoods or their ability to defend themselves. Far from being the product of human desire, decisive historic changes more often than not confound the wish of most people for stability. When change occurs, it typically causes widespread disorientation, especially among those who lose income or social status.

The concept of megapolitics is a powerful one. It helps illuminate some of the major mysteries of history: how governments rise and fall and what types of institutions they become; the timing and outcome of wars; patterns of economic prosperity and decline. By raising or lowering the costs and rewards of projecting power, megapolitics governs the ability of people to impose their will on others. This has been true from the earliest human societies onward. It still is.

The key to unlocking the implications of megapolitical change is understanding the factors that precipitate revolutions in the use of violence. These variables can be somewhat arbitrarily grouped into four categories: topography, climate, microbes, and technology.

Topography, in conjunction with climate, had a major role to play in early history. The first states emerged on floodplains, surrounded by desert, such as in Mesopotamia and Egypt, where water for irrigation was plentiful but surrounding regions were too dry to support yeoman farming. Under such conditions, individual farmers faced a very high cost for failing to cooperate in maintaining the political structure. Without irrigation, which could be provided only on a large scale, crops would not grow. No crops meant starvation. The conditions that placed those who controlled the water in a desert in a position of strength made for despotic and rich government.

Climate also helps set the boundaries within which brute force can be exercised. A climatic change was the catalyst for the first major transition from foraging to farming. The end of the last Ice Age, about thirteen thousand years ago, led to a radical alteration in vegetation.

The population of hunter-gatherers had swollen too greatly during the Ice Age prosperity to support itself on the dwindling herds of large mammals, many species of which were hunted to extinction. The transition to agriculture was not a choice of preference, but an improvisation adopted under duress to make up for shortfalls in the diet.

A modest understanding of the dynamics of climatic change in past societies could well prove useful in the event that climates continue to fluctuate. If you know that a drop of one degree Centigrade on average reduces the growing season by three to four weeks and shaves five hundred feet off the maximum elevation at which crops can be grown, then you know something about the boundary conditions that will confine people’s action in the future.

the past, governments have been overthrown when crop failures extending over several years raised food prices and shrank disposable incomes.

It may also be no coincidence that mercantilism predominated in the seventeenth century during a period of shrinking trade. Economic closure was perhaps most pronounced at the end of the century, “when a terrible famine occurred.”21 By the eighteenth century, especially after 1750, warmer temperatures and higher crop yields had begun to raise real incomes in Western Europe sufficiently to expand demand for manufactured goods. More free-market policies were adopted. This led to a self-reinforcing burst of economic growth as industry expanded to a larger scale in what is commonly described as the Industrial Revolution. The growing importance of technology and manufactured output reduced the impact of the weather on economic cycles.

The interaction between humans and microbes has also produced important demographic effects that altered the costs and rewards of violence. When fluctuations in mortality are high due to epidemic disease, famine, or other causes, the relative risk of mortality in warfare falls. The declining frequency of eruptions in death rates from the sixteenth century onward helps explain smaller family size and, ultimately, the far lower tolerance of sudden death in war today as compared to the past. This has had the effect of lowering the tolerance for imperialism and raising the costs of projecting power in societies with low birthrates.