Maybe the Current Trend For Society is Fragmentation

October 22, 2017

image from blade runner

I’m reading about the situation in Spain, where we’re basically talking about secession.

We had Brexit.

Now we have the U.S. being torn apart from within by Trump, Russia, and its various internal factions.

I wonder if there isn’t a clear overall trend here, which is something like:

  • Income disparity and limited resources cause tension.

  • High immigration in Europe, the U.S., and Canada mean the groups there fail to blend in with the country and those populations of Asians, Africans, Eastern Europeans, Hispanics, etc., become extensions of the mother country instead of immigrants integrating into a whole.

  • As Europe, the U.S., and Canada become more self-conscious about its colonial past, they become even less inclined to talk about any central identity for those countries, because central identity to them reeks of facsism. So they take the easy road of letting everyone just be themselves.

Add up these three numbers and the sum is easily predictable. Fragmentation. Balkanization. Strife.

The question is, how do the groups break up? What are the partitions? I think the answer is two-fold: race and money.

Races will band together because it’s the most primitive of bonds. And then the rich will also band together because they’ll largely share a worldview and won’t really be able to communicate with the proletariat.

Governments will largely fail because they require national identity to be powerful, which leaves us with corporations as power centers.

Now add in the fact that corporations will largely be laying people off and moving to a contractor and gig-based economy, and you have a very strange future indeed.

I’m not a professional historian, or social scientist, so maybe I’m missing something major here. This is just speculation based on reading a lot of books and thinking a lot.

Would love to hear other factors and interpretations.

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