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October 13, 2022

Back in the 1980s (yes, a long time ago), I wrote a science fiction story set somewhere between contemporary times and the Star Trek era. I imagined humans having the run of our solar system and breaking out a bit further in the Milky Way.

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Since human development isn’t stagnant, I knew that I needed to invent a novel political system for the future I was envisioning. I decided that the political actors would not be nation-states, but commercial enterprises that, having transcended geographical boundaries on Earth, would compete in space to expand their “market share” of wealth and power.

That’s not so far-fetched. Merchants formed guilds in the Middle Ages. The commercial classes advocated for representative assemblies, which eventually displaced monarchs as the dominant factor in governments’ evolution. I merely projected forward commercial interests’ continued development.

But I also understood that governing institutions, representative or otherwise, require an ideology to assure the allegiance of citizens and subjects. So, I assumed that the transnational corporations warring in space would have competing ideologies, like the USA and the USSR.

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I was correct in one respect. The major political event of my Baby Boomer lifetime wasn’t President Kennedy’s assassination, Vietnam, or 9/11. It was (and is) the way the largest commercial entities have shaken off the constraints of the nation-state. Some have more economic power than nation-states. Most have the resources to purchase the votes of lawmakers and collusion of functionaries here and abroad to impose policies favorable to their interests. In this way, the transnational actors have begun to usurp the nation-states’ sovereignty.

But I was wrong as far as the warring ideologies. That may well arise in the distant future. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the transnational actors are only making war—a cold, subversive, war—against the nation-state and not each other. The World Economic Forum represents the moment the transnationals found their ideology for the present struggle. It’s a single, uniform ideology, made to order to finally wrest sovereignty away from the nation-state. I’m referring of course to the left/progressive/neo-Marxist amalgam of climate emergencies, critical race theory, and the familiar diversity-equity-inclusion and environmental-social-governance platforms.

Image: Internet meme; creator unknown.

It’s made to order because the left/progressives, too, want to replace the nation/state, particularly the United States. They differ from the hard-nosed commercial interests only in the assumption that a world government would be wonderfully utopian.

Ironically, the very ideology that strengthens the cause of the transnationals is simultaneously the weakness of their whole global enterprise.

Here’s why:

First, the utopian assumption. Human nature encompasses a spectrum of attitudes and behaviors ranging from the heights of benevolence and self-sacrifice to the depths of depravity and bestiality. We’re just an eyeblink of history away from an era in which getting folks to refrain from killing one another on the Sabbath was a major accomplishment. We’ve progressed to rule to law, which still doesn’t exist everywhere on Earth and, in certain instances (as in the summer of 2020), not even in our own country. It may take thousands of years of evolution for humans to advance to the next stage, rule of conscience.