/biz/ - Business & Finance

/XMR/ general weekly book club - WEEK 4 being late edition

I messed up to a degree. I had an uncorrected typo saying chapter 10, instead of chapter 9 and forgot to update the main site. Hopefully, everything is in order in this post. Also posting this late because, I hoped to wait till the thread is over, so discussion wouldn't be cut off/split between threads. Without further ado, let's get to the actual book.

This is the fourth week of the book club, entailing chapter 9 of the book "The Sovereign Individual" by Sir William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson.

Now the description:

>Chapter 9: Nationalism, Reaction, and the New Luddites
>He writes, “Continuing intensification of communications and transport, instead of favoring national consolidation, has begun to work in a contrary sense, inasmuch as its range transcends existing political and ethnic boundaries.” 2 As the world “becomes smaller” and communications improve, the accidental and “intrinsically absurd” claims of nations and nationalism are bound to weaken.
The title does a pretty good job of describing the contents. Staring off, it presents how "sharp discontinuities" will manifest themselves as we transition to the Information Age. Afterwards, the authors examine nationalism and societal duties from a biological viewpoint, explaining how sentiments from large hunter-gatherer tribes were translated under the nation-state and why it is ultimately just a tool for consolidating power. Applying this logic to the transformation of the Information Age provides a clear understanding why nationalistic and protectionist sentiments were able to rise alongside progressive ideals, with both serving to ease the masses' discontent from the coming transition's negative effect. However, this won't suffice for long as politics is not the ultimate power that many desire it to be, ultimately resulting in the masses of people with dropping real wages and governmental benefits to turn violent.