The idea of a nation or country as an organizing unit of human society is a new thing in human existence. In the Bronze Age there were city-states organized around the palace economy system. A ruling clan could control multiple cities, but each city-state operated as independent entities. Each one had a palace through which the economy flowed. More important, the people in those polities identified with their respective city-state.

The last time I bothered to read up on the history of the nation-state, it was pretty clear that historians did not agree on much of anything anymore with regards to the birth of the nation-state. The way I was taught in school was that the nation-state was born with the Peace of Westphalia. The Westphalian System was the first time Europeans had what we would consider to be nation-states.

A nation was defined as a sovereign state with defined, internationally recognized borders populated with people sharing a language and culture. More important, the ruling authorities had exclusive dominion over domestic affairs. The rulers of France would coin their own money, manage their taxes and laws, arbitrate disputes between its citizens and maintain whatever political institutions it found appropriate.

For the West, this has been the definition of a country for 367 years.That’s a long time but it is still an exception in human history. The Roman Republic lasted 482 years. The Roman empire lasted 400+ years. Put another way, the nation-state system has been in place for about 5% of human civilization. City-states and empires have been the norm, along with ad hoc temporary groupings along geographic and tribal lines.

This summer, the Westphalian System, as a practical matter, has been ended.  Greece no longer possesses the things one uses to define a country. The “Europeans” now control the financial system and the currency. They will manage the national budget, setting spending limits and priorities. They will dictate the laws and regulations. More important, the national parliament no longer has any say over these things.

Greece is not a ward of the state. Greece is a ward of the new global technocracy. The alphabet soup of international organization were just ad hoc councils until now, as they had no real power, other than what the participants agreed to do with one another. In July 2015, for the first time, a supra-national organization has taken over a country. Greece is now a territory, a possession of the EU.

That’s the only way to read what has gone down over the last week. The deal Greece “negotiated” with Europe is a full and total renunciation of its status as a free and independent country. Tsipras admitted as much right after the deal was agreed to on Monday. “We managed to avoid the most extreme measures,” Tsipras said. “Greece will fight to return to growth and to reclaim its lost sovereignty.”

In another age, a trouble maker country like Greece would face invasion by other countries. If the Germans wanted the gold they lent the Greek king, they would have to take it by force. Today, they invade their financial systems and take the money that way. Of course, they are not really taking the money. They are simply transferring what’s left in the banks to the bankers in Europe. They will keep doing that to make sure future interest payments are met.

It’s a fascinating thing in that most people, including me, thought the Greek crisis was a threat to the EU model. It is turning out to be a confirmation of the model. Maybe the Greek people will revolt. Maybe there’s a Greek Gavrilo Princip waiting for Merkel somewhere. I don’t see any indications of that, but who knows what the future brings. For now it looks like a stunning coup for the Germans and their vision of Europe.

It is also a glimpse of what our rulers have in mind for the rest of us. Participatory government is not very useful in the global age. The Dutch East India Company had good reason to not go around the world spreading Dutch republicanism. It is a hindrance to doing deals. The modern global economy is for cloud people, through supranational organizations, to make deals. Voters just get in the way.

The next thing to watch is how Greek politicians and the Greek voters respond in future elections. If you’re a Greek voter, you have to know voting in local elections is pointless. Years of that exercise have only made your situation worse. Similarly, the young ambitious pols have to see that courting voters is a waste of time. Snuggling up to the technocrats in Brussels is the key to success.

Something no one in the major media bothers to discuss, because it is hard, is how the loyalty chain is supposed to work in this new global world. Kinship is the most basic form of loyalty. It is based in biology. You increase the odds of your genes carrying on by working with the people in your kin group. It is a basic evolutionary strategy. Similarly, the tribe is just an extension of this as is the clan. National identity is just the same concept scaled to its maximum.

The thing is, loyalty is both vertical and horizontal. The head of a family has duties to his family and his family has duties to him. These duties and loyalties are also between members of the family. In larger groups, these become more formalized in customs, rules and, when you get big enough, laws and religions. Still, even at the nation level, the call of blood is still there. Francois Hollande is loyal to France as a Frenchman. Merkel is loyal to Germany as a German.

How this is supposed to work in a global technocracy where the rulers are floating around in cloud cities, disconnected from the people they rule, is a mystery. How can Greeks have loyalty to Brussels? How can a Dutch technocrat working in a cubicle somewhere in Europe feel any loyalty to a grape farmer in Tuscany? To one another, they are not people, just numbers on a page.

What is imagined for us is a no-trust, transactional society where everyone is an economic man, whether he likes it or not. There will be no countries and therefore no citizens. Everyone will be a rootless, atomized cosmopolitan. The Greeks get to try it out first, but the rest of the world will soon follow.

I’m fond of pointing out that America has a lot in common with Iran these days. The fetishes and fascinations of our ruling lunatics are different from those of the Iranian lunatics, but the underlying motivations are the same. A group of fanatics is trying to force the rest of us into their fanaticism. Here’s a good example.

Local police received a complaint when a shopper discovered Nazi and Confederate merchandise at a popular flea market last weekend, according to Chief William Wright.

An officer responded to the Redwood Flea Market on South Turnpike Road Sunday to investigate the report and found Nazi and Confederate memorabilia for sale. He told the complainant, who is Jewish, there was nothing police could do because the merchandise was on private property.

“There was a table set up with this material,” Wright said, unsure of the exact amount, but speculating several showcases. “It’s not criminally illegal, but obviously it offended this person. It causes some people a sense of being uncomfortable. Certainly the owner could preclude this merchandise.”

The complainant, a town resident, feared possible backlash and asked to remain anonymous. He told the Record-Journal that in addition to several showcases there was Nazi merchandise, including German helmets with swastikas, images of Hitler, and Jewish stars of David, in a truck.

“I was shaking and almost vomiting,” he said. “I had to run. My grandmother had numbers,” he said, referring to the Nazi system of tattooing numbers on prisoners.

I doubt that this man’s grandmother had such a tattoo. The tattoo that looms so large in modern lore was not common. It was just not terribly practical. But, inter-generational transitive post-traumatic stress is still a big deal for many Jews. It’s an excuse to make a scene in public trying to get some grace on the cheap.

Ken Dubar, who owns and manages the flea market, disputed the man’s account of how much anti-semitic and Confederate merchandise is at the weekend venue.

“There may be some of those items, some collectibles and some might be counterfeit,” he said.

Dubar also emphasized police found no evidence of any crime.

Jason Teal, president of the Meriden-Wallingford NAACP, said he was not familiar with the flea market and had not heard any complaints about the merchandise being sold there.

“It’s difficult because it’s on private property and it’s considered free speech,” Teal said.

The man also contacted Mayor William W. Dickinson Jr., who immediately asked Wright to determine if any laws were broken.

“I had to check with the chief over what is actionable and what isn’t,” Dickinson said. “Unless something violates state or federal law, there’s no jurisdiction for government to do anything. We had to ask, is it something controlled by law?”

Unremarked here is the fact the local cop was not sure if there was a crime. That’s how far down the fascist hell hole we have fallen as a society. I’m old enough to remember when “this is a free country” was the default response to this stuff. Even lunatics like the guy making the complaint would have been tempered by it.

Today, it is just assumed that the lunatics have the whip hand. Everyone, including the cops, figured it is best to ask permission than to run afoul of the religious authorities. This is no different than what you would see in Iran or Saudi Arabia. People are more worried about the fanatics than the cops.

The irony here is the lunatic who made the scene not only will not be charged, but he is now pretending to be the victim. The newspaper is hiding his identity as if he has something to fear, when he’s the one making a nuisance of himself. That  is the real danger we face. These nuts are convinced they are defending themselves as they try to pull the roof down on all of us.

Every society is focused on four things: Security, Prosperity, Culture and Trust. Security is both external and internal. A primary duty of every society is to make sure it is defended from outsiders, but also from deviant insiders. Those who work against the internal order are just as much of a threat as the invader. It’s why traitors have always been held up for the worst punishments. They threaten the very existence of the society.

Prosperity is another focus of human society since settlement. Technology, after all, is all about increasing prosperity, which is why so much of our efforts are involved in advancing technology. Every society has its own take on what it considers prosperity, but the main reason for human society is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is a part of our group evolutionary strategy. It is expressed differently across groups, but it is as much a part of humanity as left handedness.

Despite what the lunatics in charge claim, preservation and advancement of the culture is a priority of every society. Culture, after all, is just the rolled up preferences of the individuals in society, handed down from generation to generation. It is a collective identity. It is also how essential knowledge is passed from one generation to the next. A few hours reading the Bible teaches more about humanity than four years in a college.

These three distinct priorities are strung together with trust. Clannish societies will place a premium on culture and security, forgoing prosperity in order to maintain the clan. Altruistic societies will focus resources on prosperity as their cultures are dynamic and adaptive. Swedes spend much more time worrying about prosperity than defending Swedish culture, while Arabs invest all their time in culture and live in squalor.

That very broad outline is a useful way to view politics in western societies. The three main priorities shift up and down in the public’s hierarchy of importance. In times of plenty, the pubic will reward leaders promising to keep the party going. Alternatively, at the end of an up cycle, doubts about the impact on public morality may reward candidates that speak authoritatively to cultural traditions.

This is clear in the recent American elections. Barak Obama won in 2008 largely due to the other side getting blamed for the financial collapse and the bungling of the Muslim problem. Prosperity and security. In 2012, however, the public was uneasy about the deranged assault on the culture by Obama and went looking for an alternative. While Romney said all the right things on the culture, no one believed him. Trust is the shadow that hangs over everything.

Shifting over to Greece, we saw promises of prosperity trump all else in the rush to join Europe and the single currency. The public put aside cultural concerns, expecting the trade-offs to be economically beneficial and they were initially. When things went sour, the public switched from one main party to the next and then finally a coalition of main parties, all in an attempt to restore prosperity. When that failed, the middle collapsed and the fringe parties moved to the center.

Syriza, for all its blather about socialism and Marxism, is a populist party making a cultural appeal to patriotic Greeks. They have no plan for solving the debt crisis. There is no solution. What they have is a cultural appeal, which folds in neatly to an appeal to security. Greeks think Syriza is best to guard the culture and keep Greece safe from the financial vultures. Most of all, Syrza is trusted. They are what they say they are and that means a lot.

In the rest of Europe, security and prosperity trumped all else for forty years after World War II. Our betters like to say this was due to people recalling the horrors of fascism, but that’s not true. Fear of Soviet aggression (and nukes) was the top security concern. It trumped all else. Economic integration was, in part, a component of the security issues. It was only after the wall came down that economics become the top priority.

Ignoring the culture has worked in Europe for a long time, but that time is quickly passing as people begin to realize that Greeks are not Fins and Spaniards are not Brits. Just because everyone uses the same money and flies the same flag does not mean they are the same. Those differences will be expressed through culture, which inevitably shapes economics and politics.

In America culture is always in the discussion due to the Cult making war on traditional America, but it is a one-way discussion. The Progressives form up and start to pull down some important cultural institution and the Right tries to stop them. The only thing keeping the Right in business is as a fire department, called into to try and save what’s left of America. There’s not a lot left these days.

Of course, good times economically and no fear of invasion make sacking the culture possible. Cultural Marxism is a luxury good affordable in rich societies with loads of free time. China and Indian have made great strides economically, but they are still too poor to indulge in ethnomasochism. Like throwing away food, only rich societies in the West can afford to throw away their patrimony.

At least for now. Europe is seeing a collapse of its political middle as the cultural vacuum underneath the political parties grows. Across the Continent, mainstream parties treat their citizens as enemies, standing aside as invaders from the south flood into Europe. They heap private debts onto public balance sheet all in the name of a prosperity that is just over the next hill.

In the US, one party is racing toward a weird techno-fascism while the other party pads along behind them like a slow-witted little brother. Issues of paramount concern to the public are ignored in favor of the ridiculous and absurd.The full force of the state is brought to bear on behalf of homosexuals playing house, while no one can be bothered to halt the invasion from the south. For close to half the country, the political parties have nothing to offer, other than the satisfaction of voting against one of them.

It’s why Donald Trump is getting so much attention. Outsiders have always popped up in party primaries only to fade from the scene. Usually they have a novel idea or represent a narrow constituency. Trump would have been laughed off if he had not had the good sense to say what the public is thinking about taboos subjects like immigration. He’s an American Beppe Grillo.

The other side is not immune. American progressives may have been motivated by a hatred of core Americans, but they always thought of themselves as the righteous defenders of fairness and morality. Bernie Sanders is having success pointing out that the modern Progressive movement has more in common with Italian fascism than old school liberalism.  He does not say it that way, but he is tapping into the growing doubts on the Left over the direction of their movement.

At the start of this long-winded post I said that trust is what strings the three key social categories together. The people will naturally trust leaders with whom that naturally identify. It’s why colonialism ultimately failed. The foreign rulers may have done a better job bring peaces and prosperity, but they could never be trusted because they were foreign. People will take one their own, even if he is a screw up, over a foreigner, even if he is brilliant.

In the West, the ruling elite no longer identifies with their host countries. They see themselves as having evolved beyond national identity. Their actions over the last few decades has made them foreigners to the people over whom they seek to rule. When times are good and the world is at peace, people can overlook the culture gap. When peace and prosperity fade, that gap becomes a maw, collapsing the center.