Let’s reword the penultimate sentence. Instead of, “If society found some way to restore sovereignty to nations, governments, and above all to human beings, the ecocidal, omnicidal new empire which depends upon blurred lines and ignored boundaries would be unable to survive ” let’s leave out the imaginary constructions of “nations” and “governments” and leave human beings as the sole recipients of the restored sovereignty.
Your essay about Syria does a good job of exemplifying the situation in which multinational corporations have taken over much of the world by infiltrating governments, but what brought us to this place? Has humanity been overtaken by a cabal of uber-evil people that never existed before, and they have instigated this power grab out of the badness of their hearts? Possibly, but I do believe that hypothesis is going to need a lot more data to underpin it. Why have these demonic people arisen at this point in history rather than at some other time? It strikes me as a ripe field for the religionists to jump into with passages from their favorite sacred books, but I’ll leave that to them since I’m not a big fan of hocus-pocus .
What strikes me as a more likely explanation is that we are witnessing a systemic failure in the institution of the State as an organizing principle for humanity. The corruption of democracy for the benefit of those with money is hardly a new thing; about a century ago, cops, the “keepers of law and order”, were using truncheons to bust union attempts to cut into corporate profits — just as a tiny example, and the giveaways of tax money as “subsidies” to well-connected corporations throughout history are too well documented to bother with here.
These sores have festered for a long time, in other words, and it is perhaps our fate to be here at a time when we can witness the disease rising to the level of fatal pathology.
Well, the biological metaphor only works so far. Nation-states are not, after all, biological entities; they are completely fictional creations of our shared thoughts. They only exist because we believe they do, and if we stopped believing in, them they would disappear like a candle flame in a gust of wind.
Nation-states are hardly the first of these imaginary creations. All their predecessors … kings, queens, warlords, Popes, czars, and so on … shared the same imaginary attribute, and their elevated status’ came to sudden ends when the dream became such a nightmare that the hypnotized subjects woke up.
So it is with the modern nation-state and its popular hallucinatory correlative: democracy. If it proves to be an unworkable system, there’s nothing to keep it there. We’ve been putting up with this sick system for a long time, and maybe it’s finally getting to the point where we’ll decide to chuck it in favor of something better. Drawing on another metaphor, if the nation-state host dies, the corporate parasites will die with it.
But what can replace democracy? Let’s go back to my amended version of your sentence: human beings. Humans can and will organize themselves peacefully and voluntarily if given the freedom to do so. That rarely happens nowadays, because as soon as people achieve something peacefully, the oppressive, violence-based nation-state steps in with guns and threats to co-opt and calcify whatever they have accomplished.
There are plenty of examples to illustrate this, but I’m deliberately leaving them out, both in order to keep this to a reasonable length and to avoid the inevitable devolving into useless, nit-picking arguments such as “what about the roads?” I only wish to make the point that the egregious neo-colonialism you are describing may be the sign of the imminent collapse of the whole sick system.
Provided enough people wake up.
