How we got here

The nation state was conceived in 1648 to end Europe's religious wars. The Thirty Years' War, the most destructive of them, had killed as much as a third of the people in Central Europe. The peace treaties that ended it came to symbolise a powerful principle: one sovereign, one territory. It was a tool for keeping the peace, and for a while it worked.

But power never stopped concentrating. Over four centuries, it kept moving one way, toward the centre:

  • Small states absorbed into larger ones.
  • International bodies stacked on top of them.
  • Money pulled into central banks, then cut loose from gold in 1971.
  • The state growing until it reached into almost everything.

And the peace treaties failed at the job they were supposed to achieve:

  • They did not end war; they made war bigger, pulling whole populations into the deadliest conflicts in history.
  • Now it is coming apart from the other side, as cartels, corporations, NGOs, and private zones take over what the state can no longer provide, as excessive centralisation creates inefficiencies.

How the failure shows up

These failures have led to our current situation, and the same patterns recur across many countries:

  • Economies where work buys less of a life: wages have stagnated for decades while housing, healthcare, and education costs have climbed far faster, and homes that a single income once bought are out of reach for most families
  • Corruption as the normal condition: a captured centre serves whoever holds it.
  • Coercion rising as a system that can no longer earn compliance starts compelling it: global freedom has fallen for twenty consecutive years, according to the indexes that track it.
  • Public services that answer upward instead of outward: a monopoly provider is accountable to the centre that funds it, not to the people waiting on it, so consistently failing them never produces corrections.
  • An atomised population: people were bound together by what they had to handle together, and a centre that takes over the handling dissolves the bond.
  • Permission is required for simple things: building on your own, entering a trade, or treating your own illness.
  • People losing faith in government: across developed democracies, more people now distrust their national government than trust it.

Seen in the context of the history above, they are what a centralised system looks like once it stops delivering.

Where this is already heading

A failing system does not stand still. It degrades in two directions at once: it turns authoritarian, tightening its hold on the people it no longer serves, and it gets occupied, as whoever can actually do the job takes over the functions it abandons.

Examples of the tightening:

  • In the UK and Australia, speech is policed in ways that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
  • In China, the state watches almost everything, and those who can are quietly moving their money out.

Examples of the occupation:

  • In Mexico, cartels run checkpoints, collect their own taxes, and impose their own order in territory the state has lost; in the Sahel, armed groups claim and govern land.
  • In Nigeria, corporations like Shell operate with their own security forces and their own roads.
  • States everywhere cede functions on purpose, too: special economic zones hand law enforcement and taxation over to investors, and NGOs take over services that the state has neglected.

In this process the West is not exempt. The United States has lost twelve points on Freedom House's hundred-point scale in two decades, and in the latest report, it dropped three points in a single year. This is the sharpest fall of any of the eighty-eight countries still rated free, and its lowest score since the index began.

The exit most are offered, changing which party runs the centre, does not reverse the trend. One side expands the machine and gets voted out. The other keeps every expansion and adds its own.

Why you can't reform it, and why protest is not enough

People try two ways out, and both regularly fall short.

Reforming from inside does not work, as the process selects for the people who maintain the status quo:

  • The revolving door: 59% of departing US legislators who took private-sector work went into lobbying or influence consulting.
  • Or you get pushed out: 37% of federal employees who reported wrongdoing faced reprisal or the threat of it, up from 24% a decade earlier, with the rise arriving after the law passed to protect them.

Protest does is not a solution either:

  • Nonviolent revolutions used to work: over 40% succeeded from the 1960s to 2010, 65% in the 1990s. Since 2010, under a third.
  • The collapse came during the largest wave of protest ever recorded: more nonviolent resistance emerged in the 2010s than in any decade since 1900
  • 15 million people marched against the Iraq war on one day in February 2003, across 600 cities. The invasion began 33 days later.
  • There is no political vacuum: whoever is already organised fills the space a protest opens. Egypt removed Mubarak in 18 days and got the Brotherhood, organised since 1928, and then the army.

Closing idea

If the institutions people depend on are failing for structural reasons, and neither reform nor protest produces a replacement, one option is left: build the replacement yourself, alongside the thing that is failing, so people can rely on it instead when necessary.

That is a parallel society, and it has been done successfully before. The rest of this course is what it means, why it needs technology to survive, and what part you can play in building it.

Before you go on

One question, and it is the only one in this course that we cannot answer for you. Of everything above, where do you feel systemic shortcomings in your own life, and what would you want to see built to address them? Write it down somewhere you will keep it. In the last section, we come back to it.