The rulers scour the landscape for whom the true believers are following. Having zealots and fanatics on one's side is a double edge sword, but there's always postponing the day of reckoning. No one is really ready for Judgement Day, when it comes.
Wittgenstein was more of the "every day is judgement day" school, but you couldn't say that quiet part out loud a lot. I've followed Wittgenstein since first exposure in the 1970s (he died before I was born).
How do we ceremoniously and with gravitas create more autonomy for ourselves, whoever we are? Many ethnicities would enjoy their own nation, or so they tell themselves, or at least one of the tribal kind from which the concept first emerged ( in conjunction with "race" in Social Darwinism).
The "tolerant" nation of many tribes working together is more an adaptation of the Iroquois Federation and Roman Empire memes, with the UK on the template of the latter. Arab empires also allowed for local folk religions and even stole (borrowed, appropriated) the best ideas (likewise the Catholics are known for this).
Many who long for a nation are hearkening back to something tribal, not a federation of any kind. A federation comes across as more abstract, more aloof, and more secular, in the sense of not being programmed exclusively by the locals, of any region where it occurs. That's often what the independently minded are seeking to escape, just such an aloof and removed government.
When it comes to joining a Federation, topological questions of contiguity enter the picture. The United States counts a smattering of non-state members, such as Puerto Rico and the military base at Guantanamo. What if another far flung island wants to join the federation, not as a state, but as another protectorate? What if it's not an island? What if the District agrees the new territory would be a welcome addition? What is the process and are those wheels too rusted, in this day and age, to ever turn?
The anthropological question before us is one of invocation and declaration. On the one hand, you have schools telling us the nation state heuristic is inevitably fading, given the only logical dimensions to this puzzle are planetary, whereas on the other you have elaborate mechanisms, steeped in ritual and ceremony, designed to do social engineering, as an official responsibility. What is reinventing itself, and what is breaking down more permanently? This is always the question at the institutional level.
We may be clearer on what it takes to "break away" versus "join" e.g. the two republics at the center of the current military fiasco. When a central government is shelling your civilians on a daily basis, one may seek a diplomatic solution, or declare independence, find allies, and choose war. Given the close proximity of an existing federation (the Russian one), the phenomenon of breakaway republics is no surprise. The other side did not want diplomacy either, trusting in its military advantage.
We also talk about centrifugal forces within the North American federation, of Lower48 + the Canadian provinces + Belize & Baja, Mexico. The sanctions imposed by the District, on its western states especially, has criminalized most of the population (think Prohibition) and forced the entire cannabis economy to short circuit the banking system.
Various accommodations with the tax code were negotiated, as what rusty old machine is going to turn down more fuel (revenue)? Obviously no one in "power" has the power to stop this particular runaway train. People notice these things.
An effect of the Drug Wars has been to motivate a psychological breakup that has no real mirror in the paper trail. The melodrama of everyday television hints at these chthonic tensions, but no narrative snowballs, gathering inertia.
This has the effect of melting whatever snowballs are already out there, as the message internally is "how can those snowballs matter if mine never does?" i.e. "what makes their narrative so privileged?", typically a precursor question to some upsetting of the apple cart. Viewers tune out whole networks, when the content producers never focus on the relevant stories. They vote with their remotes.
If you check an atlas, you'll likely find that Oregon ranks highly in both Russian and Ukrainian speakers. Migration patterns are such that we have very old school in a mix with newcomers. The same goes for ties to the tribal nations of Japan, Korea, China and so on.
I think of Portland as a Pacific Rim city, a gateway to Eurasia (or just call it all Asia) if you're coming from the American side, where the American side includes all the Americans (from Canada, Mexico, Panama, Brazil and so on).
What this means is a lot of de facto citizen diplomacy (aka university collaborations, businesses), not only between Oregon and the Americas, but between Oregon and Asia. Like any world municipality, Portland is a switchboard, a router, even a CPU / GPU on Motherboard Earth.
Finally, for this blog post, let me remind readers of the focus on Virtual Nations in the 21st Century. These are nation-like self governing semi-autonomous, but without the contiguous borders that would make them United Nations style nation-states. Some may have a Vatican-sized campus here and there, and may fly a flag, but they're not agitating to issue passports in most cases, or do so as a sales gimmick, without monkeying in international law.
Will future VNs do more with ID? Naturally. Behind VNs are webs of blogs, logs, vlogs and databases, and maybe even a currency or two.
If you think this idea of VNs is unrealistic, consider Shell and Nestles, consider Disney (when it comes to Vatican-sized campuses or bigger). Consider that VNs go way back by other nomenclature.
Consider universities going forward, and the federations they may form.
Supranational circuitry is nothing new. Global shipping companies have a similar sheen, in that their logos show up everywhere, yet few imagine them on a world map.
Given these many circuitry overlays, facilitated by more of a shared file system, the question becomes whether bureaucracy itself needs a new space in which to operate. I'm not talking about global government (science fiction) so much as global infrastructure (a fact).
What's chipping away at the power of the old guard, while empowering an avant-garde, is the unwillingness of the old ideologies to think globally, a limitation designed in on purpose. The District refuses to consider the security concerns of rival federations as a foreign policy guide. That's what "self interested" is supposed to mean (to them).
But at what point does the bureaucracy itself discover it couldn't force itself to think that way even if it wanted to? The bureaucracy has gone global even if the chief functionaries stick to obsolete rhetoric.
When I say "systems have a half life" I'm not saying "because other systems will destroy them". On the contrary, the model of radioactive decay is a "from within" phenomenon. Alpha and beta particles leak away. Atoms do in fact change species. They "fall downhill" in a way that major stars counteract.
Star cookers will fuse together atoms of very high atomic number. But at a certain size, they're not really meant for this universe, and they start to break down.
Ideological systems display similar limitations, in coming up against laws of physics, more than anything man made.
I make this distinction because it helps counter the "commie under every bed" boogeyman paranoias that seek to explain systemic degradation of one kind or another. Circling a natural process prompts the realization that nature herself plays a role, and yes, humanity is a part of nature.
The circuity in question encompasses the ecosystem, not just the human "value added".
The erosion of nation-state aesthetics need not trace to a tiny cadre of committed activists or anything like that. No one has to lift a finger with that specific intent. On the contrary, the predominant intent has been to foster and bolster nationhood, in the face of mounting odds.
