Sublime

This ungovernable “post-sovereign” world, in the words of the political scientist Wendy Brown, will go far beyond a sense of near-term fragility; it will be instead a long-term macro-trend toward deep instability grinding away over decades. The first result will be massive new concentrations of power and wealth that reorder society.

Alexis de Tocqueville

The fact that 115 million persons gave their lives fighting for nation-states in the twentieth century is stark evidence of the power of epigenesis.71 It shows that many did consider the survival of their nations to be matters of life-and-death importance. The question is whether that attitude will carry over into a new age with different megapolit

Archaeologists’ interpretations of premodern tribal borders have changed in the last forty years. Most pre-state tribal borders are now thought to have been porous and dynamic—frontiers, not boundaries. More important, most are thought to have been ephemeral. The tribes Europeans encountered in their colonial ventures in Africa, South Asia, the Pac

The technocracy attempted, however poorly, to address the condition of the collapsing African American family. No such concern is forthcoming from the technocracy today concerning the white working class.

Money emerges from uncertainty, capital emerges from money, and uncertainty emerges from capital.

The economy enters a period in which economic dysfunction becomes unbearable to one social faction, even while another continues to benefit.

The new economic crisis flows from the very success of the Reagan cycle, which generated a great deal of wealth but distributed it in the end, as it did in the beginning, with a focus on increasing money for investment. But as with all cycles, the problem solved in the current cycle generates the problem to solve in the next. The social problem tha