Family, clan, tribe, city, state, nation… What comes next? And how soon is it coming? How soon before political entities have become obsolete as the drivers of human organization, and corporate entities take over the management of… well, everything?
In fact, are we now living through the turning of the tide, that terrible, turbulent time of old resisting the inevitable new.
The world right now is ‘blessed’ with an over-abundance of authoritarian heads-of-state, the worst kind of ‘leader’ who governs from personal agenda and impulse, who disregards the needs and wishes of the nation’s citizenry, who inflicts on them his/her own whimsy and caprice, and is in every way incompetent to do the actual job of governing. This kind of leader does not comprehend the differences between governing and controlling; between domination and dominion; between ownership and stewardship.
They rule with the support of those who think to gain personally from such an administration, who enable the tyrant while thinking to keep the tiger on a leash.
But this never ends well for anyone, because there are always The People, the massive base of the power pyramid, who reach their limit of acquiesence, of tolerance, even in societies with free speech that allow for the occasional venting off of building heads of steam. But the steam builds, even there, and people gather, and they look around and they do the basic math: There are more of Us than of Them. Lots more. The young do their own calculations: We will outlive you.
Righteous indignation grows to fury and hysteria. Then comes revolution, the unleashing of all the forces of chaos, panic, and the determination of the individuals, all millions of them, to survive no matter what.
Besides the Earth’s own reactions to the over-reaching of humankind, there are all these untenable regimes, unsustainable habits and assumptions, and the conservative tendency to resent change and cling to obsolete solutions to current problems: the old tide struggling to deny and resist the inexorable flood of the new. Call it catastrophe or course correction, or re-balancing, it is as inevitable as earthquakes in the Ring of Fire.
Vine Deloria Jr proposed the idea in the 1970s that corporations are tribal entities, and now, Kenichi Ohmae is saying that those tribes have grown to world-wide entities that will be taking over management overtly in the not-distant future. Nations will no longer be defined by geographic boundaries, but by economic interest and control.
Being non-human entities, these corporate nations will have no natural empathy or humanity: only that which the humans in positions to influence it may provide. Their basic interest will be their own viability. Hopefully, they will see what authoritarians do not: that the top of the pyramid needs the base of the pyramid to hold its position in the clouds.
www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kenichi-ohmae/the-end-of-the-nation-state/
LOOSELY SPEAKING... 