Nation-states, happiness, identity, and rootlessness

“The nation state has taken the place of God. Responsibilities for education, healing and public welfare which had formerly rested with the Church devolved more and more upon the nation state ... National governments are widely assumed to be responsible for and capable of providing those things which former generations thought only God could provide - freedom from fear, hunger, disease and want - in a word: "happiness".”

― Lesslie Newbigin, The Other Side of 1984

There is, I think, a great deal of truth to this!

The problem is magnified still further now, though, by the fact that nation-states are under attack by stateless globalism which seeks to supersede them, and that claims to be driven by "progressive values" – but in fact is driven largely by economics (the progressives who have allied themselves with globalism are among the "useful idiots" of whom Stalin spoke, back in Soviet days).

Nation-states at least are / were somewhat organic, in most cases relatively local, with their own identity and cohesion. They share(d) ties of language, culture, ethnicity, and often, religion. Globalism promotes – ostensibly in the name of "equality," but actually because it makes people easier to manipulate – a stateless, rootless, amorphous mass of humanity, entirely lacking in cohesion, identity, and therefore the ability to successfully resist the strings of the puppeteers.

Now, the globalists may one day learn that a tool sometimes turns in the hand of its wielder; that amorphous mob may one day turn on them! But the result seems unlikely to be a return to "normalcy" as it used to be understood – depending, of course, on how far things have degenerated by then – but rather a further descent into a newer and truer Dark Age. I fear for the future of humanity...