In reading history, much of it consists in one social grouping seizing control over some larger set of groupings. Families dominate history in many parts of the world.
To take a largely random but still relevant example, Iraq has never really been a nation. It has been a conglomeration of tribes and clans and families which were contained within borders set, if memory serves, by the British. Much of the Middle East is like this.
Saddam Hussein took very good care of his tribe and people, and more or less wanted everyone else just to be loyal to him as the national leader. In the course of time, it may have happened that he was overthrown by some other group and their leader, which punished his group, and again took care of their own.
Nation states are historically and likely evolutionarily unnatural. We are meant to live in much smaller groupings, and within those groupings, it has often been the case that the leader who emerged–or leaders–were welcome and valued.
Two movies I have used often as examples of the romantic sense of the past and the possibilities of the future which the Socialists have tried to seize mythically are “The Last Samuri” and “Dances with wolves”. In both cases, 19th century refugees from large, impersonal military orders found themselves belonging in a more primitive, more natural, more comfortable, more abundant social groupings. These groupings were small enough that everyone knew everyone, and felt personal allegiance both to their tribe and its leaders. They knew them. They trusted them.
And self evidently the physical lives were more “primitive”, which no doubt fed the sense of romance, but this obscures what to me is the more important notion of belonging, of personal loyalty to people you know.
I was watching a Ted talk by Sebastian Junger a few days ago where he was arguing that a big part of what we call PTSD is really a social maladjustment to being back in a world without loyalty, where not much is won or lost (at such a cost, to quite Jaggers/Richards), where they feel they don’t BELONG.
Fascist leaders–and I include all Communist dictators in this designation–draw upon this need for order, for belonging, for loyalty, but given the size of the enterprises, true belonging is not possible. What is found instead is a mental and physical slavery justified by the “greater good”, an abstraction which acquires meaning only because of the overall sense of meaninglessness, of pointlessness.
Both Hitler and Lenin’s coups and reigns were preceded by social decay and dislocation.
We need to be much smaller. This is my vision for the future. And it does not need to be in conditions of much lower population. We simply need more local control, more freedom, and less coercion, mind control, and thoughtlessness.