This essay is a good starting point for bringing up to speed those less aware of how we got to this point in our trajectory (sadly including most of the politically active class in the USA, at the very least).
It needs a few more dimensions added to explain the last century or so, particularly those related to supranational great powers (corporations), economics and control of the USES of natural resources vs. merely having them within some arbitrary border.
The deliberate sabotage via ethnic/religious contention of many incipient nation states by the most "effective" imperial power (the one with the oldest intelligence apparatus) during their overt withdrawal of political control is a factor in many ongoing struggles, they (metaphorically) lit a fire in the basement before handing the keys to the new owners, intending to prevent them doing too well...
The ongoing and well known policy of the major successor to/effective replacement of said past empire in preventing even the possibility of a peer competitor developing ANYWHERE, EVER needs recognition, particularly as their own intelligence services were heavily influenced by that past empire which showed the seeds of so many present post imperial conflicts.
The effective political subjugation of the last empire to a constellation of supranational financial power structures/corporations who find most profitable dealing with small, weak (and ideally, desperate for any financial scraps at nearly any cost) nation states, and have the means, motives and opportunity to generate such conditions needs to be addressed. It's hard to put out fires when the management at your fire department makes more money and gets lucrative real estate deals by pouring gasoline on them.
The post WWII analyses carried out among the empire's state intelligence/foreign policy/corporate financed NGO economic planning nexus of world natural resource extents, quality levels, physical availability and ROI along with the probable effects of their use by & for those (nominally) now in possession rather than continuing to be exploited mostly by & for the new de facto empire also needs to be considered as it truly was the driver of executive action by the imperial control structure since WWII, not the overt politics & ideology being sold to the masses. See PDF at link:
A couple of things. I always thought that the borders drawn by European colonial powers during the 20th century were designed to keep the inhabitants split along different lines. Primarily to allow them, predominantly France and England, to manipulate these countries politically and economically. I don't see any reason to think this wasn't the plan from the outset.
Also the chaos and violence that leads from this, both intra and inter national, isn't a bug but a feature of their plan for neocolonial domination. Nothing keeps money flowing to the City of London like a ongoing skirmishes in Africa or West Asia.
Yes. The British Empire was VERY experienced at setting up and managing the territories they had expropriated/incorporated into the empire such that local ethnic groups would be too occupied contesting with each other to ally and work at evicting their new colonial masters. The "drawing of lines" frequently wasn't an accident of geography/where HM's army had got to, nor done purely out of ignorance of the likely strife ensuing, these outcomes of their colonial system were FEATURES, not BUGS.
And they somehow managed to have the descendants of peoples they so treated still want to send their children to Oxford or buy an English great house? Amazing.
Sparta actually lasted for 700 years, not bad for a tiny city state. And if not for the Romans who steamrolled through the whole Mediterranean, could have lasted a bit longer. I don't disagree though - *a bit* of cultural diversity won't do a lot of harm, but certainly not on today's scale.
If he (and you) are too dumb to see that the Serbs were the first victim of NATO and Russia the second, there’s no point in pretending to be an “intellectual”
Thanks for the historical perspective… unfortunately, you have missed an important layer, financial/political economy/(i.e. who gets to control the ledger in this brave new digital World Wide Web?)
Add a dash of peer-to-peer electronic cash into your stew and I think you will find something more than merely palatable (permissionless for 16 years now… in the most adversarial of environments… this truth machine literally does not care one jot about the identity of anyone using it… the reason for proof-of-work hashing that you so easily dismissed in 2022!)
Very good essay. I wonder if the European Union has a medium-term plan to dismantle the European nation-states as we know them, which emerged more or less "organically" through alliances, marriages, and conquests, and create the European Union Empire with the nationalities reverted to their pre-Imperial state (pre-Hispanic Empire, French Empire, Holy Roman Empire, etc.). If they have already been disintegrated in Yugoslavia, and de facto in Belgium (Walloons and Flemish), in Spain a long way is being covered with Catalonia and the Basque Country, which seems to be joined by a nascent Galicia, depending on how they want to inflame it politically. Is the Europe of the Regions a successive step towards the current disintegration of the nation-state? Would it facilitate the coexistence of the multiple European nationalities, many of them crossing the current borders?
We in the West often think “why can’t they all just get along?” When can a people put their history behind them and try to make peace with their neighbors? Will ethnic conflicts never end?
While a majority of us may bemusedly wonder "why can't they all just get along?", several numerically small but very powerful groups among us work to ensure that those people DO NOT "put their history behind them". They use our tax money to do so and greatly benefit certain corporate interests thereby. They even publish about their strategies openly at times.
"Minorities were difficult to assimilate, and it was often safer just to expel them: in 1871 the Prussians demanded that the French inhabitants of Alsace and Lorraine either renounce their French identity or simply leave, something that would never have happened previously when provinces changed hands freely. "
This seems to underpin your argument. Unfortunately, it's historically incorrect. The "option" to retain French citizenship was only taken up by 10% of the population. Only a third of those actually emigrated, in this historical case including their property or the money value of the latter. The remaininig 110.000 Alsatians stayed and received German citizenship. As much as I value contrarian thinking, it is important to keep your facts straight.
I do share however your genereal point about the effects of the nation state, Eastern and Central Europe after WWI being the prime example. The end of German presence in the East is the prime example, a devlopemnt which is not primarily caused by Nazi crimes during the World War but rapidly escalates after WWI, look at the example of the city of Thorn, famous for its son Kopernikus.
This essay points me to David Graeber's book "Debt, the first 5000 years". I strongly suggest reading it as it explains a lot of the relationship between violence and human species.
Cool screen name- Bitter & compounded from complex ingredient list?
---------
Yes, economics are a major factor not explicitly called out in the OP. I took a stab at mentioning some economic factors in the last 80 years or so in my above comment...
There's a couple of remaining assumptions that I have a quibble with: how was "the growth of European states [was] organic"? Organic seems once again to pick up on the whole "nature" vs. "culture"/"artifice" binary. I'd argue European state formation was in no way organic, rather perhaps in contrast to post-colonial nation-states the speed and acceleration of various processes of social change was different. This is not to say that at various points in time the speed of European state formation was not radically accelerated! E.g. The French Revolution and nation-state formation: certainly very speedy creation of an imaginary community centered around reeducation around core republican ideology and the French language diverse peoples had to learn?
I appreciate highlighting the agency of various urban elites in Africa, yet in many ways the argument seems to reproduce the diffusionist model of transplanting the nation-state. I'd argue that in many ways the processes were more complex and different actors negotiated various practices in the forming of post-colonial states. Were the actors from various tribal communities merely silent or did they negotiate with the educated urban elites, who themselves probably did not wholesale accept any model for a nation-state?
Anyhow, just some critical points to consider in observing the processes of transculturation of "empty signifiers" such as nation, ethnicity, culture, nature, and their local "manifestations" into institutional and imaginary frameworks...
Organic, apllied to "historical nations" in Europe, means that was some ethnical homogeny already existing that make easier the creation of the National identity once the structural process necessary for the emerging of Nation-State (including myth-symbolic complex throug education as you mentioned) were ready.
In Spain, all the people were catholic and spoke romanical languages easibly understanding with similar moral codes (yes, I know "Annals historians" about that people don't spoke french in France until education, but was a similarity). The power was concentrate it on the King and this allow the gradual transition. In Afganistan, we have sunni pashtun (durrani and ghilzai), we have hazara (xiit and persian languages), we have sunni tayik and other minoritary groups (the sincretic nuristanis, for example). Also, in Afganistan weren't the minimum structures for making a functional state (money, roads, tecnhologies, institutions. burocrates...). That will be the difference, more or less. Pahstuns has tryed to make a Pashtuni State, but that died definitely with the Durand Line (now are just the 40% of Afganistan) and never has close to succees. The period with more chances of sucees were during 1933-1973 and the democratical and secular reforms were a cause of this failure (were iatrogenical). In multy-ethnic States happen the "security dilemma": one ethnie see any power of an other as a risk to itself. In Afganistan, the attempt of making a civil law superior to the pashtunwali (the code of pashtuns) was seen for the pashtuns an a risk to their way of life. In Ethyopia right now (I am afraid about a civil war in there) we have a similar issue between the oromians, the ahmarians, the poeple in Tigray, all shocking with the attempt of the creation of a Pan-Ethyophian identity. In Africa, in general, many conflicts are between pastors and farmers for simple survival, and the guerrillas just build and take advantatge of that issues (that's why people support them) with their own agenda and will of power, of course.
And I agree with Aurelien in one thing: we don't know very well how to develop funciontal States that were created in a spontanious way during centuries. And I agree with you: all this process, if we increase the zoom, are even more complex, with individual interests of power and trivial issues involved (your grandfather stole my goat, for exemple). In Spain, it is well known that during the Civil War, in rural areas, people say that his neighbour was "red or blue", just for disputes of land properties or because he married with the pretty girl.
PD: I hope my Englihs could be understood. The other day I made a summary of two pages for myself abouth Ethyopia. If you I can put it here.
Your written English is quite good and your thoughts were well presented, no need to apologize! The occasional reversion to spelling certain nouns phonetically or in the fashion of your first (European?) language merely lends piquancy to your English prose, your grammar is better than most Americans, who (allegedly) speak English.
I try to avoid checking the dictionary in order to improve (some times I use) and has a good epistemic effect: you go to the content and don't worry so much about the exact words.
"Piquancy" (picante in Spain Spanish, were I am from) and "allegedly" new words that I didn't know taken with me after this nice interchange.
I learnt in the school, and I use it in my work (I work in a hotel, no remedy xD). I always read the articles translated into Spanish, but this autumn I started to read books in English that I couldn't find in Spanish. With the first I had the phone closer for use the dictionary, but I don't needed. This surprised me then, but for the context I was able to understand almost everything. Probably, with narrative I would need it more.
What I haven't learn yet (as you could see) is how the hell write without using constantly the "I". It sounds egotic, but in Spanish the pronoun is already in the verb conjugation.
Ah, you must be Irish? I can sympathize, having scotts-irish ancestry filtered through their expatriate communities in North America.
I propose that the price to be considered is that which will be inevitably be extracted from the individuals of EVERY racial, religious and cultural sub group, not that which might be offered them piecemeal to resettle/assimilate them into a congenially homogenous "nation state". Namely, we're all going to die, or worse.
Our technology presently offers at least 4 effective methods of triggering and accomplishing either outright human extinction or the destruction of so much of the species as to extinguish the body of knowledge and culture beyond hunter/gatherer/pastoralis/neolithic farmer levels which, to myself, really represents what we are- and the knowledge/technical abilities to implement at least two of these are already far out of the bottle & never will be contained save by removal of desire to implement them by some aggrieved or aggressive groups.
Basic nuclear engineering and the chemistry & physics required to accomplish a nuclear weapon are available to any country OR CORPORATION with the political will, access to a mid 20th century level chemical industry & a few million $s. Basic recombinant genetic technology and the much less costly hardware to engineer pathogens are available to ANY group with the will and a few PhD students in biology among them, probably for less than a million $s. Once any actor starts the chain reaction which use of either technology will unleash and other powers/groups follow, say goodbye to homo sapiens or at least most of their cultural & technical "library".
The kinetic/non nuclear method (drop a big rock from orbit on a continent you don't like) and the hybrid kinetic/nuclear method (drop a large enough mass into the sun when the half of the world you wish to sterilize is facing that direction) could conceivably be contained for a while, just keep everyone from escaping past geosynchronous orbit & accessing/accelerating large masses in dangerous directions... But with 3? great powers space capable and more or less active presently, I don't think the capability could be contained for long.
So, is there a good use for billionaires? I think we might suggest that they buy themselves effective sainthoods? If they convert their holdings into whirled peas for all rather than spending it on space ships, personal mars colonies, electronically simulated immortality or such?
Yes, monkeys will certainly fly out my butt before oligarchs develop saintly virtue. But the means and the will to solve the conundrum need to be found very soon, before we "solve the Fermi paradox by inspection".
Pay them off with filthy lucre to move on and then carry their issues with them to other locales that already have similar or greater problems of their own to solve? Yeah, that's the ticket.
The solution seems to be much more basic than that, which the article spells out quite nicely, I think. Which is to wake up and realize that this "bigger is better" consolidated world model we've adopted in the past 250 years or so is clearly failing and will continue to do so with ever more disastrous results until we wake up and work to reverse it. All of which will only happen through the one tried and true method that humans have proven time and time again to prefer: catastrophic bloody collapse and reorganization, hopefully - but not necessarily - keeping the above in mind.
It's also notable that empire seems to be a uniquely Western preoccupation of late, or perhaps it's just that the western versions are so uniquely virulent? Most likely both. Exponential growth and limits conundrums will do that for you.
This essay is a good starting point for bringing up to speed those less aware of how we got to this point in our trajectory (sadly including most of the politically active class in the USA, at the very least).
It needs a few more dimensions added to explain the last century or so, particularly those related to supranational great powers (corporations), economics and control of the USES of natural resources vs. merely having them within some arbitrary border.
The deliberate sabotage via ethnic/religious contention of many incipient nation states by the most "effective" imperial power (the one with the oldest intelligence apparatus) during their overt withdrawal of political control is a factor in many ongoing struggles, they (metaphorically) lit a fire in the basement before handing the keys to the new owners, intending to prevent them doing too well...
The ongoing and well known policy of the major successor to/effective replacement of said past empire in preventing even the possibility of a peer competitor developing ANYWHERE, EVER needs recognition, particularly as their own intelligence services were heavily influenced by that past empire which showed the seeds of so many present post imperial conflicts.
The effective political subjugation of the last empire to a constellation of supranational financial power structures/corporations who find most profitable dealing with small, weak (and ideally, desperate for any financial scraps at nearly any cost) nation states, and have the means, motives and opportunity to generate such conditions needs to be addressed. It's hard to put out fires when the management at your fire department makes more money and gets lucrative real estate deals by pouring gasoline on them.
The post WWII analyses carried out among the empire's state intelligence/foreign policy/corporate financed NGO economic planning nexus of world natural resource extents, quality levels, physical availability and ROI along with the probable effects of their use by & for those (nominally) now in possession rather than continuing to be exploited mostly by & for the new de facto empire also needs to be considered as it truly was the driver of executive action by the imperial control structure since WWII, not the overt politics & ideology being sold to the masses. See PDF at link:
https://www.nefp.online/_files/ugd/63d11a_136d0855070647ba803e05cea0bc4c83.pdf
A couple of things. I always thought that the borders drawn by European colonial powers during the 20th century were designed to keep the inhabitants split along different lines. Primarily to allow them, predominantly France and England, to manipulate these countries politically and economically. I don't see any reason to think this wasn't the plan from the outset.
Also the chaos and violence that leads from this, both intra and inter national, isn't a bug but a feature of their plan for neocolonial domination. Nothing keeps money flowing to the City of London like a ongoing skirmishes in Africa or West Asia.
@abcdefg
Yes. The British Empire was VERY experienced at setting up and managing the territories they had expropriated/incorporated into the empire such that local ethnic groups would be too occupied contesting with each other to ally and work at evicting their new colonial masters. The "drawing of lines" frequently wasn't an accident of geography/where HM's army had got to, nor done purely out of ignorance of the likely strife ensuing, these outcomes of their colonial system were FEATURES, not BUGS.
And they somehow managed to have the descendants of peoples they so treated still want to send their children to Oxford or buy an English great house? Amazing.
Yeah, and African states are examples of how 'great' diversity really is.
@Certorius
Sparta was the original homogenous, non diverse state power... And they were left in the dust. You can ALWAYS have too much of a good thing.
Sparta actually lasted for 700 years, not bad for a tiny city state. And if not for the Romans who steamrolled through the whole Mediterranean, could have lasted a bit longer. I don't disagree though - *a bit* of cultural diversity won't do a lot of harm, but certainly not on today's scale.
Again spouts anti-Serb propaganda.
It was ok to expel 500k Serbs from Croatia because they were detritus from empire?
He’s done it numerous times.
If he (and you) are too dumb to see that the Serbs were the first victim of NATO and Russia the second, there’s no point in pretending to be an “intellectual”
The question mark is appropriate, because I see nothing of Aurelien supporting the expelling.
Thanks for the historical perspective… unfortunately, you have missed an important layer, financial/political economy/(i.e. who gets to control the ledger in this brave new digital World Wide Web?)
Add a dash of peer-to-peer electronic cash into your stew and I think you will find something more than merely palatable (permissionless for 16 years now… in the most adversarial of environments… this truth machine literally does not care one jot about the identity of anyone using it… the reason for proof-of-work hashing that you so easily dismissed in 2022!)
And, likewise, compare and contrast with the “empire” that is the bank of international settlements (with all its’ associated “colonies”)!
… and if you have the courage for it:
https://primal.net/a/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzq4rqjpyzsnf2z5wgma397sxr382z8mg90l80jf7m3z2k628z9wsrqythwumn8ghj7ct5d3shxtnwdaehgu3wd3skuep0qythwumn8ghj7cnfw33k76twv4ezuum0vd5kzmp0qq68g6r994ehqmrfde6x2unwv46z6argv5kkgetpw35z6mmx946xsefdvfhhyer9wfkx2umn945kuar9wfhx2aqq38ee5
Kudzai is on fire!
https://primal.net/e/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzq4rqjpyzsnf2z5wgma397sxr382z8mg90l80jf7m3z2k628z9wsrqythwumn8ghj7ct5d3shxtnwdaehgu3wd3skuep0qythwumn8ghj7cnfw33k76twv4ezuum0vd5kzmp0qq08qetjd45hxumfdahz66tn946xsefddejhwttrw4e8yetwvdus4nuaw5
Thank you for this. A wonderful essay situating us in the great swaths of history, a reminder that there is always more than meets the eye.
Very good essay. I wonder if the European Union has a medium-term plan to dismantle the European nation-states as we know them, which emerged more or less "organically" through alliances, marriages, and conquests, and create the European Union Empire with the nationalities reverted to their pre-Imperial state (pre-Hispanic Empire, French Empire, Holy Roman Empire, etc.). If they have already been disintegrated in Yugoslavia, and de facto in Belgium (Walloons and Flemish), in Spain a long way is being covered with Catalonia and the Basque Country, which seems to be joined by a nascent Galicia, depending on how they want to inflame it politically. Is the Europe of the Regions a successive step towards the current disintegration of the nation-state? Would it facilitate the coexistence of the multiple European nationalities, many of them crossing the current borders?
Hello Eurovision!!
Lugano, Arnhem, Prague and Azores are calling!
" ... only republican Empire since Rome."
Are you sure? If not empires, then what were the Venetian Republic and the (dutch) Republic of the Seven United Provinces?
Rzeczpospolita entered the chat too
My italian translation, here:
Strato su strato.
Un alternarsi di Imperi dappertutto.
https://trying2understandw.blogspot.com/2025/07/strato-su-strato-un-alternarsi-di.html
We in the West often think “why can’t they all just get along?” When can a people put their history behind them and try to make peace with their neighbors? Will ethnic conflicts never end?
@Mary Eddery
While a majority of us may bemusedly wonder "why can't they all just get along?", several numerically small but very powerful groups among us work to ensure that those people DO NOT "put their history behind them". They use our tax money to do so and greatly benefit certain corporate interests thereby. They even publish about their strategies openly at times.
"Minorities were difficult to assimilate, and it was often safer just to expel them: in 1871 the Prussians demanded that the French inhabitants of Alsace and Lorraine either renounce their French identity or simply leave, something that would never have happened previously when provinces changed hands freely. "
This seems to underpin your argument. Unfortunately, it's historically incorrect. The "option" to retain French citizenship was only taken up by 10% of the population. Only a third of those actually emigrated, in this historical case including their property or the money value of the latter. The remaininig 110.000 Alsatians stayed and received German citizenship. As much as I value contrarian thinking, it is important to keep your facts straight.
I do share however your genereal point about the effects of the nation state, Eastern and Central Europe after WWI being the prime example. The end of German presence in the East is the prime example, a devlopemnt which is not primarily caused by Nazi crimes during the World War but rapidly escalates after WWI, look at the example of the city of Thorn, famous for its son Kopernikus.
This essay points me to David Graeber's book "Debt, the first 5000 years". I strongly suggest reading it as it explains a lot of the relationship between violence and human species.
@Angostura
Cool screen name- Bitter & compounded from complex ingredient list?
---------
Yes, economics are a major factor not explicitly called out in the OP. I took a stab at mentioning some economic factors in the last 80 years or so in my above comment...
Great essay again!
There's a couple of remaining assumptions that I have a quibble with: how was "the growth of European states [was] organic"? Organic seems once again to pick up on the whole "nature" vs. "culture"/"artifice" binary. I'd argue European state formation was in no way organic, rather perhaps in contrast to post-colonial nation-states the speed and acceleration of various processes of social change was different. This is not to say that at various points in time the speed of European state formation was not radically accelerated! E.g. The French Revolution and nation-state formation: certainly very speedy creation of an imaginary community centered around reeducation around core republican ideology and the French language diverse peoples had to learn?
I appreciate highlighting the agency of various urban elites in Africa, yet in many ways the argument seems to reproduce the diffusionist model of transplanting the nation-state. I'd argue that in many ways the processes were more complex and different actors negotiated various practices in the forming of post-colonial states. Were the actors from various tribal communities merely silent or did they negotiate with the educated urban elites, who themselves probably did not wholesale accept any model for a nation-state?
Anyhow, just some critical points to consider in observing the processes of transculturation of "empty signifiers" such as nation, ethnicity, culture, nature, and their local "manifestations" into institutional and imaginary frameworks...
Organic, apllied to "historical nations" in Europe, means that was some ethnical homogeny already existing that make easier the creation of the National identity once the structural process necessary for the emerging of Nation-State (including myth-symbolic complex throug education as you mentioned) were ready.
In Spain, all the people were catholic and spoke romanical languages easibly understanding with similar moral codes (yes, I know "Annals historians" about that people don't spoke french in France until education, but was a similarity). The power was concentrate it on the King and this allow the gradual transition. In Afganistan, we have sunni pashtun (durrani and ghilzai), we have hazara (xiit and persian languages), we have sunni tayik and other minoritary groups (the sincretic nuristanis, for example). Also, in Afganistan weren't the minimum structures for making a functional state (money, roads, tecnhologies, institutions. burocrates...). That will be the difference, more or less. Pahstuns has tryed to make a Pashtuni State, but that died definitely with the Durand Line (now are just the 40% of Afganistan) and never has close to succees. The period with more chances of sucees were during 1933-1973 and the democratical and secular reforms were a cause of this failure (were iatrogenical). In multy-ethnic States happen the "security dilemma": one ethnie see any power of an other as a risk to itself. In Afganistan, the attempt of making a civil law superior to the pashtunwali (the code of pashtuns) was seen for the pashtuns an a risk to their way of life. In Ethyopia right now (I am afraid about a civil war in there) we have a similar issue between the oromians, the ahmarians, the poeple in Tigray, all shocking with the attempt of the creation of a Pan-Ethyophian identity. In Africa, in general, many conflicts are between pastors and farmers for simple survival, and the guerrillas just build and take advantatge of that issues (that's why people support them) with their own agenda and will of power, of course.
And I agree with Aurelien in one thing: we don't know very well how to develop funciontal States that were created in a spontanious way during centuries. And I agree with you: all this process, if we increase the zoom, are even more complex, with individual interests of power and trivial issues involved (your grandfather stole my goat, for exemple). In Spain, it is well known that during the Civil War, in rural areas, people say that his neighbour was "red or blue", just for disputes of land properties or because he married with the pretty girl.
PD: I hope my Englihs could be understood. The other day I made a summary of two pages for myself abouth Ethyopia. If you I can put it here.
@Calda
Your written English is quite good and your thoughts were well presented, no need to apologize! The occasional reversion to spelling certain nouns phonetically or in the fashion of your first (European?) language merely lends piquancy to your English prose, your grammar is better than most Americans, who (allegedly) speak English.
Thanks, Billy,
I try to avoid checking the dictionary in order to improve (some times I use) and has a good epistemic effect: you go to the content and don't worry so much about the exact words.
"Piquancy" (picante in Spain Spanish, were I am from) and "allegedly" new words that I didn't know taken with me after this nice interchange.
I learnt in the school, and I use it in my work (I work in a hotel, no remedy xD). I always read the articles translated into Spanish, but this autumn I started to read books in English that I couldn't find in Spanish. With the first I had the phone closer for use the dictionary, but I don't needed. This surprised me then, but for the context I was able to understand almost everything. Probably, with narrative I would need it more.
What I haven't learn yet (as you could see) is how the hell write without using constantly the "I". It sounds egotic, but in Spanish the pronoun is already in the verb conjugation.
@Terence Callachan
Ah, you must be Irish? I can sympathize, having scotts-irish ancestry filtered through their expatriate communities in North America.
I propose that the price to be considered is that which will be inevitably be extracted from the individuals of EVERY racial, religious and cultural sub group, not that which might be offered them piecemeal to resettle/assimilate them into a congenially homogenous "nation state". Namely, we're all going to die, or worse.
Our technology presently offers at least 4 effective methods of triggering and accomplishing either outright human extinction or the destruction of so much of the species as to extinguish the body of knowledge and culture beyond hunter/gatherer/pastoralis/neolithic farmer levels which, to myself, really represents what we are- and the knowledge/technical abilities to implement at least two of these are already far out of the bottle & never will be contained save by removal of desire to implement them by some aggrieved or aggressive groups.
Basic nuclear engineering and the chemistry & physics required to accomplish a nuclear weapon are available to any country OR CORPORATION with the political will, access to a mid 20th century level chemical industry & a few million $s. Basic recombinant genetic technology and the much less costly hardware to engineer pathogens are available to ANY group with the will and a few PhD students in biology among them, probably for less than a million $s. Once any actor starts the chain reaction which use of either technology will unleash and other powers/groups follow, say goodbye to homo sapiens or at least most of their cultural & technical "library".
The kinetic/non nuclear method (drop a big rock from orbit on a continent you don't like) and the hybrid kinetic/nuclear method (drop a large enough mass into the sun when the half of the world you wish to sterilize is facing that direction) could conceivably be contained for a while, just keep everyone from escaping past geosynchronous orbit & accessing/accelerating large masses in dangerous directions... But with 3? great powers space capable and more or less active presently, I don't think the capability could be contained for long.
So, is there a good use for billionaires? I think we might suggest that they buy themselves effective sainthoods? If they convert their holdings into whirled peas for all rather than spending it on space ships, personal mars colonies, electronically simulated immortality or such?
Yes, monkeys will certainly fly out my butt before oligarchs develop saintly virtue. But the means and the will to solve the conundrum need to be found very soon, before we "solve the Fermi paradox by inspection".
Pay them off with filthy lucre to move on and then carry their issues with them to other locales that already have similar or greater problems of their own to solve? Yeah, that's the ticket.
The solution seems to be much more basic than that, which the article spells out quite nicely, I think. Which is to wake up and realize that this "bigger is better" consolidated world model we've adopted in the past 250 years or so is clearly failing and will continue to do so with ever more disastrous results until we wake up and work to reverse it. All of which will only happen through the one tried and true method that humans have proven time and time again to prefer: catastrophic bloody collapse and reorganization, hopefully - but not necessarily - keeping the above in mind.
It's also notable that empire seems to be a uniquely Western preoccupation of late, or perhaps it's just that the western versions are so uniquely virulent? Most likely both. Exponential growth and limits conundrums will do that for you.