Sunday, March 4, 2012

The End of National Allegiances

On Deception Watch describes the convergence of global issues that necessitates the creation of a new world governing paradigm. The current model, active since the dawn of recorded history, territorial, patriarchal, and tribal, is no longer up to the task of fulfilling the social contract whereby the people governed acquiesce to be governed in return for protection from alien intrusion, unlawful or anarchistic threats to local and personal security, and a modicum of assurance to at least marginal food and shelter. That contract, in the age of global communication, immediate access to almost the entire fund of human knowledge, and the rapid globalization of what once were merely local crises and opportunities, is proving less and less relevant. Loyalties are becoming less and less directed to traditional political symbols and institutions. Allegiances and self-interest are moving rapidly towards economic power centers and away from political power centers.

Accountability in this age of the global super corporation has become more and more invisible, more and more opaque. Power is no longer derived from the people, willingly or unwillingly. Power is more and more becoming centered around economic algorithms and those who manage the application of those algorithms. Markets are global. The algorithms are global and national governments are becoming simply one of the many variables to be manipulated, measured, and rewarded or punished.

It is the new world of the illusion of government while the real power works behind the scenes rewarding with the opiate of the means to political power or punishing with the withdrawal of those means, closely followed by a swift spiral into public oblivion.

Nothing is as it seems, which has always been true. News media are businesses and businesses have an agenda that supports that business and so the news supports the agenda that supports the business. Government purveyors of information are part of a business, the business of preserving access to the prerogatives of government. They have an agenda to support the government that provides the prerogatives. And all sources of information and opinion have one thing in common: the will to deceive. The world is complicated and the lure of deception is partly traditional (how do you tell if a politician is lying...?) and partly the result of the need to deceive because the truth is too complicated.

This and the near future (thirty to fifty years) is an age of transition. The tangling alliances of global economics have only two paths to take. The alliances evolve into a world governed by protocols that manage self-interest by nourishing a unique global unity, a world of "all us and no them", a world of coerced inclusion or they evolve into uncontrolled chaos. So the only sustainable path (not to mention the only profitable path) for the alliances is to accept the new allegiance to a global economic structure, its governing algorithms, its economically incentivized system of rewards and punishments, and constitutions (real and alleged) replaced by a mission statement and a business plan.

On Deception Watch proposes how this new world order comes to be. The sequel, a work currently in progress, will bring the reader to a closer examination of this transition stage, the beginning of which we see all around us, from The People's Republic of China being the creditor of last resort to the melting of the Arctic Ocean in the summer. The global imperative is all around us and is the focus of the second in the series of World Federation novels.