Motus Mentis

I’m browsing my old posts, to see how much of our current state of affairs was visible in prospect years ago. Here’s a long excerpt from something I published back in 2012.

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… Democracy works well enough for a while, I suppose, while a nation is young and virile enough to value opportunity over security, and while its people can muster up enough self-confidence, social cohesion and unity of purpose to agree upon national goals, and to make a serious effort to achieve them.

We are not such a nation any more — lean, athletic, vigorous and hungry. No, we are now in late middle age: weary, obese, weakened by cultural self-doubt and existential guilt, too fond of comfort, too wary of risk, exhausted by corrosive metabolic disease and the collapse of our immune system, sapped by parasites, and all but immobilized by all the clutter we’ve created and accumulated. We can hardly get off the couch even to look after our own most basic needs, and resent the idea that we should have to. We can hardly bear to look in the mirror.

What are the exceptions? They are to be found in small, agile, self-organizing entities that are lightweight enough, and focused enough, and cohesive enough, and intelligent enough, to move, to act, to create, to <em>do</em>. They must be nimble enough to live in the shadows of tottering behemoths without being trampled, or eaten — but the great, slow beasts are dying now; their time is nearly over.

When I visited Singularity University in April, one of the speakers (I think it was Paul Saffo) said that he thought that modern nation-states were becoming obsolete, and wouldn’t be around much longer. I can’t recall if he mentioned that this is particularly true of democracies, but to me it seems it must be. Will there still be a United States of America, as presently constituted, thirty years from now? How? Why?