In other forums, I’ve gone around and around with people about the future of extra-national entities like Europe or the North American Union. Everyone alive has grown up in a world of countries and nations. They think that’s the natural order and anything that runs counter to it is doomed to fail.

People believe the nation is the natural end point of human societal evolution. European history was taught this way in American schools when we still taught history so maybe that’s the reason it is embedded in people’s minds. More likely it is just the fact that we have known nothing else. Even places where “country” is barely recognizable like the Middle East, we insist on maintaining national boundaries.

My contention is that history shows a steady evolution toward larger and larger organizing entities. Britain is a good example. When the Romans arrived, the people were organized into tribes. When the Romans left, the island was organized into small kingdoms. By the middle ages they had the Heptarchy.  Eventually, all of Britain was unified under one banner and one identity. In a few years, Britain will be absorbed in the EU as a province of Brussels.

That seems to be the way to bet. Europe is becoming an amorphous blob of people from all over creation. What was once thought of as countries are becoming administrative districts. When the German district runs low on people, they import more from Turkey or the Balkans. The French district imports people from Algeria and Tunisia. Being a French citizen has the same value to the local government as being a citizen of Swaziland or Jupiter.

The TPP that Republicans are hell bent on passing for Barak Obama will create an extra-national organization that will decide immigration, trade, tariffs, taxes, environmental issues, etc. Just as with the EU, this organization will absorb more and more of the duties national governments used to manage. Over time, the US government will simply be an enforcement arm of various world governing authorities.

That sounds like bad theater, but it is already happening in Europe. The EU recently passed a rule requiring cars to have tracking devices. The responsibility for enforcing such a rule will fall to what we used to call national governments. Those government will, in turn, delegate some portion of their duties to provincial and municipal governments. Those governments don’t get a say in it. They just enforce it on whoever happens to be coming through their administrative zone.

You can vote yourself silly in local and national elections, but all you will be doing is picking the people responsible for enforcing the rules. You will have no say in the writing of laws and formulation of policy, because the people for whom you are voting will have no power to write laws. That’s on display in Greece right now. They can have an election every week and the facts on the ground remain unchanged, because the decisions are made in Brussels.

This means citizenship goes away, for all practical purposes. Citizens participate in the management of their societies because they share a language, customs and history with the people of their society. If you no longer share these things and have no way to participate in the management of your society, why have any loyalty to any of it? Why bother calling yourself a citizen? You’re just someone who happens to live in an administrative district named after what it used to be.

Of course, humans are not atomized, transactional creatures. We are social animals. Even when we find ourselves randomly dispersed, we coagulate into groups based on our natures. There’s a reason that in every school cafeteria in America kids self-segregate by race, sex and age. Kids have to be forcibly integrated, despite being marinated in multiculturalism.

So, people will still group together and have in-group loyalties and out-group hostilities. How the global elite figures on managing that is anyone’s guess. It works now as most people remain patriotic and participate in civic life thinking it makes a difference. Everyday, however, more people come to the realization that citizenship is a suckers game. At some point, the legacy institutions will be abandoned by even the most romantic and a new way of controlling the population will be required.

The most likely solution is the soft authoritarianism you see in the ghetto. The dependent class is kept in-line by a mix of the lash and the leash. When you rely on the state to supply your house, your food, your entertainments and your drugs, even the dumbest ghetto dweller figures out how to play by the rules. Those who can’t behave are rounded up by the cops, if they don’t shoot one another.

Maybe some new organizing ethos will fill the void, allowing people to rally in support of their rulers like we had with patriotism and tribalism. It’s hard to imagine what it could be, but maybe nationalism was unfathomable before The Hundred Years War. Alternatively, maybe the future is just a cleaner, more orderly version of the ghetto where everyone is running a scam, loyal only to their circle of confidants.

The word “why” is one of the more abused words in the English language. Today, the primary abuse comes via over caffeinated twinks from the millennial generation demanding the rest of us explain reality to them. Over the last half century, the word has been used as an excuse to overturn large chunks of Western Civilization in pursuit of an earthly utopia.

The real pity, it seems to me, of our era is no one seems willing to use the word “why” in the attempt to learn anything about human affairs. What I mean by that is right here in this story on German’s demographic collapse. The article details the drop in fertility and how that is playing out over multiple generations. The writer also covers the problems with regards to a custodial state suddenly overwhelmed with geezers.

What you will not find in that article is why, after a 1,000 generations or more in the middle of Europe, these Germanic tribes decided to stop having kids. It is a conscious decision as there’s no evidence that women are suddenly infertile. Contraception sales are better than ever. Men and women of these tribes have simply decided to not have children. If reports like this one are correct, Germans are not even willing to have sex, despite the mountains of free contraceptives.

It is telling, I think, that no one thinks about this in the same way we look at fertility of other species. Armies of humans are involved in understanding why the giant panda stopped reproducing. If the population of the long-nosed fly gorilla ant drops even by one percent, the full force of the federal state swings into action to find out why. People across Europe have stopped reproducing and no one is the least bit curious.

The closest we get to an answer is the old trope about educated people having fewer children, as if self-extinction was the height of genius. Never mind that the smart fraction used to have loads of kids by custom. Then you have the hooting lunatics claiming that what worked just fine for thousands of years is suddenly killing off the species. Otherwise, no one thinks it is important to know what is causing Europeans to die out.

David Goldman, also known as Spengler, wrote a book called How Civilizations Die in which he tried to answer the question. His main argument is that the West has lost faith in itself by losing faith entirely. People who truly believe that there is a reward in the next life for living well in this life will inevitably be optimistic about the future and willing to bring children into the world.

The West, in Goldman’s formulation, sees nothing but a pointless dance to the grave and therefore sees no purpose to life. Not having children is the same as saying you wish you had never been born. I doubt anyone thinks of it in those terms, but the old Greek saying is true. Societies grow great when old men plants trees in whose shade they will never sit.

At the same time, Islam’s violent response to encroaching modernity is a reaction to the spiritual nullity that is modern Western consumerism and materialism. Muslim leaders talk about this very fact. They see their own sudden downturn in fertility as a consequence of Western materialism destroying their traditional societies.

The book is well worth reading, even though I’m not entirely convinced. The biological imperative is what makes life possible. Men will not suddenly decide to overrule their most basic desires just because their churches have fallen to rubble. Even in the darkest days of humanity, people still got it on and made new people. There’s a reason why September is the most common birth month in the northern hemisphere.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if Goldman is not mostly right about what’s driving this trend. The inspiration has died so the aspiration has died too, replaced with the cold, transactional ethos of the modern technological state. Orwell may have been wrong about the brutal austerity of the future, but the custodial state imagined by Huxley is just as sterile.

There’s also the central tenet of multiculturalism which has infected the West. That’s the argument that no society is better than another and to think so, much less say so, is about the worst thing you can do. Pride in your people is a big part of that biological urge. Men risk their lives for their people because to do so means their essence will carry on through others.

If “your people” are no better or worse than any other people, there’s no reason for you to sacrifice in anyway for “your people.” At the same time, if you cannot count on your people to look after your descendents or even associate with your descendents, why bother having descendents? The egalitarian, multicultural society is one where no one has any regard for anyone, beyond the material transactions of daily existence.

In politics, the electorate always has the option to not vote. Often, it is the next to last resort. Millions of white people have stopped voting in America because no party represents the interests of traditional core Americans. That scales up to people declining to show up for the future when the direction of their cultures is headed to a dead, sterile end. The future belongs to those who show up and the West has decided the future is not for them.

This comment from ErisGuy raises an interesting question.

Islam means submission. In their hearts they have submitted. Christianity means salvation. They know longer know “from what.”

Has the character of Western people changed in the last fifty years? Science tells us that large scale shifts in culture are going to take multiple generations. Those changes in culture will change the people in some way, but the sluggishness of the biological process puts a natural brake on things. The national character of Britain in 1959, for example, was not all that different from that of 1859.

But, it is hard to get around the fact that 80% of people in the Anglosphere went to Mass on Sunday just a few generations ago. Today, 80% would be hard pressed to name the nearest church. America is more Christian than Britain, but that’s changing quickly, it seems. Along with that change is a whole basket of social customs that were considered deranged a generation ago.

Of course, fifty years ago it was hard to broadcast propaganda to the whole nation. Not impossible, but not easy. Television was too new and even the power of radio was not fully understood. Governments were still using the old mass rally approach to propaganda, but adapting it to the new technology. It is only within the last thirty years or so that the ruling class has become skilled at the use of mass media.

It is said that Kennedy was the first politician to take advantage of TV, but his edge was accidental. He was good looking and his opponents were mugs. Nixon looked old even when he was young. Those who followed Kennedy did not build on his narrow use of TV. It was not until Reagan that we saw a politician employ the lessons of Hollywood and Madison Avenue to sell a candidate.

Team Clinton explicitly used Hollywood producers for the first time in a campaign. The highly polished campaign video is standard stuff now, but it was new in 1992. They also developed the idea of spin, whereby operatives would flood onto current affairs shows and monopolize the time chanting the campaign slogans. The idea of spin is common today, but it was Team Clinton that perfected it.

Has there been a more Riefenstahl-esque campaign than the selling of Obama? From beginning to end his was a use of mass media that the world had never seen. TV, radio, Internet, print, news shows, everything was saturated with the Obama message. They even had campaign videos automatically downloading to people’s DVR’s. I recall being in a party store and seeing Obama themed party supplies. Goebbels would have been gobsmacked by the efficient use of mass media by Team Obama.

What’s changed is not the character of the people, but the character of their rulers and their use of the institutions of social control. 200 years ago the state simply lacked the technological ability to monitor the daily lives of citizens. Instead, it had to be delegated. That put leadership down at the street level in every village and every block.

Compare Soviet Russia with modern China. In the Soviet Union, the party needed police on every corner to keep the population under control. That requires an enormous investment in bureaucracy, which ultimately bankrupted the system. China, in contrast, controls mass media and the currency. Both of which are possible in the modern technological age.

The Western managerial state is made possible through mass media. A single message can be broadcast to the whole public from a single source. More important is the ability to coordinate across platforms. Fifty years ago government had to politely ask Hollywood to support a war or social cause.

Today they seamlessly coordinate their efforts. The selling of ObamaCare is an obvious example as it was explicit. The White House had public ceremonies where they brought in Hollywood big shots and charged them with selling the program. At a more clandestine level, modern telecommunications makes coordination easy and seamless.

Of course, the fact that the great bulk of the public is plugged into the matrix most of their day makes it even easier to control public opinion. The people in charge wage multifaceted propaganda campaigns using TV, radio, social media, the interwebs and mobile devices. In a strange turn, all of us pay hundreds each month so the people in charge can give us instructions through our TV, the phone or the computer.

The question, of course, is whether the managerial state can survive mass media. The communications revolution may have let it flourish, but that does not mean it can arrest the mathematics. The crashing fertility rates in the West are what biologists would focus in on as a symptom of ecosystem decay. But, that’s over the horizon and I’ll be long gone by the time that question is answered.

George Soros spent $33 million trying to incinerate Ferguson Missouri, but the little city is still there. The problem is that he bet on a weak horse. While Ferguson is a vibrant example of post-racial America in the era of Obama, it lacks the sort richness and diversity of other cities. Try as they might, the locals just can’t take down a city, even a small one.

Soros should have invested more heavily in Baltimore where the locals really know how to put on a show. Since the police have went on an unofficial strike after the Freddy-Poo Gray incident, the locals have been celebrating diversity with a vengeance. This long weekend has seen 26 shootings and and 9 murders. Granted, it is a three day weekend, but it has been unseasonably mild of late so the murdering season is late starting.

What no one wants to say, but everyone knows is that the cops are now in their cop houses filling out paperwork and doing as little as possible. They see no reason to risk prison for a city government that would rather arrest cops than criminals. The gangsters know it is open season so they are doing what they do and that means taking over the streets, without fear of the cops.

Fundamentally, this is the problem with race relations in microcosm. Blacks did best when whites were completely intolerant of black culture. The talented tenth took the lead in keeping order in the black community, but quietly welcomed help from white society. It was not ideal, but black crime rates, literacy rates, illegitimacy rates and addiction rates were their best in the years before the Civil Rights movement.

Once those constraints were removed, all of the worst instincts of black America were unleashed, mostly on other blacks. That’s what’s happening in Baltimore right now. The cops were doing a good job keeping the problem contained to the ghettos. They were having some success policing the ghettos, lowering crime rates over the last decade. Now, the cage door has been swung open and all hell is breaking loose.