The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

Out of all the forms of societal organization (the tribe, bands, the  Kingdom, The City-State, The Empire, etc), the Nation-State seems to have been the most stable and successful way of human association. The competition was somewhat settled after WWI with the collapse of the last of the great empires, like the Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian one. But " most stable and successful " does not mean absolutely stable nor absolutely successful. Everything that's built by a human is bound to be flawed. From the concept of the family, to the effectiveness of vaccines, to the engineering of the Boeing 737 MAX . One of the most important functions of leadership in Nation-State is to keep stability. Without it, no society can sustain itself. Social stability depends on trust and legitimacy of its institutions. Economic activity rests on the bedrock of rule of law and contract enforcement. No one would venture to embark on a business if marauders will destroy your property on a whim...

Wars are no longer waged on the ground. Or at least not just there. Conquering Invasions are not necessary when what you need to  conquer is the mind . Inflicting human losses via bullets is so counterproductive. Dead people can't contribute to the monetization of online content, after all. Corpses can't be  groomed online nor harvested for profit , you see. Now, battles are waged in the ethereal realm of the internet. It is there where ideas spawn, linger, are nurtured,  get amplified , and most importantly, morph into radicalization. The decadence of traditional media (with the  disintegration of its grip  on the collective conscience), has given way to this new (and dynamically fluent) status quo: people get their daily dose of information from the internet. They interact with each other, and experience an increasingly broader share of their daily lives there. Physical interaction no longer exists. The public square is now dead. And so is the mall ....

" Postmodernism " started it all. That "liberating" doctrine initiated the quest for the exaltation of the self. I'm entitled to my own opinion. I will not be a conformist. Look how passionate I am!  Doing things out of anger (er, I mean, out of "passion") started being more important than accepting objective reality, because no one wanted to be the dull robot who followed the rules. Individualism --uniqueness-- was cool . There used to be a time when we accepted that we couldn't assimilate all the information available around us (because, logically, we couldn't  experience it all  for ourselves), so we outsourced that knowledge to a credible source. We took it from them, at face value. We trusted. But oh, no. Postmodernist gave us agency. We now know better. Our guts tell us so. With time and the inflated prominence of one's (and most importantly, one's opinions)  worth came the disdain for the un witnessed fact, and the privile...