How Nations Collapse: Disunity
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
They may just opt out of the whole insane charade and stop paying the mountains of debt and stop trying to prop up the deranging pretense of middle-class snobbery.
Though many blame Donald Trump for dividing the nation, the nation was already disunited. Trump’s election simply added day-glo paint to the lines that had long been hardening between disunited, disaffected camps.
As I’ve explained over the years, disunity is the systemic source of collapse— not just of nations and empires but of enterprises and families. In other words, disunity is scale invariant: it breaks down marriages, family fortunes, partnerships, corporations, nations and empires with the same dynamics.
When challenges arise–and challenges always arise–the unified family, enterprise, nation or empire can make the shared sacrifices necessary to meet the crisis head-on, and not just survive, but as befits an anti-fragile system (as per Nassim Taleb’s definition of anti-fragility), become stronger as a result of adapting to the crisis.
The family, enterprise, nation or empire fragmented by profound disunity is incapable of not just shared sacrifices but of a shared consensus on how to proceed against challenges such as famine, pandemic and economic depression.
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