Eight Predictions
- Attempts to restrain democracy with constitutional republicanism will not succeed. The modern democratic state will fail very soon, perhaps even during our lifetime.
- The geographically compact capitalist enterprises will survive, at least inasmuch as they contribute to the material culture. That is, hardware, power, construction, transportation and agriculture. The entire cosmopolitan supernational money-changing pseudoeconomy will crash.
- Security will be handled by an interlocking system of private security firms, insurance companies and neighborhood associations.
- Men will nourish their spiritual needs by congregating into religiously, and often nationally homogeneous villages. We'll see Catholic villages, Lutheran villages, Muslim villages, and Agnostic trailer parks, all with ethnic flavors. Places of worship will become universal centers that also provide education and meeting place.
- Consolidation of power will lead to expulsion of inassimilable minorities; the culturally compatible villages will develop trade and security relationship of trust.
- A class of town elders and warlords will emerge. That will be the new aristocracy. Their children will have the natural advantage of proximity to power, and it will be easy for most of them to inherit power. Likewise, the educated class will ensure its own comfort and stability by making itself indispensable to power. Rights will come from property ownership and so will be primarily inherited rights or contractual rights. Political rights will for the most part atrophy due to irrelevance. At this point we will enter the New Feudal Society.
- The public space will become property of the local warlord, first de-facto, because he is the owner of the security firm responsible for the public space, and then de-jure. These men will become new royalty and will distinguish themselves from other nobles, as they will have a responsibility for public order. They will preside in the royal court, and with time begin to appoint professional judges.
- Unlike the Middle Ages, the New Feudal Society will heavily depend on trade, because, of course, the outward life styles won't change, and we still will have cars, computers, washing machines, the Internet and all that other stuff that will not be homegrown. This will ensure stability through mobility, as those dissatisfied with the local government will find opportunities elsewhere. This is different from the Middle Ages where the lower classes had to make do with whatever land lord they were born under. It is therefore possible that the New Feudal Society will not collapse into absolute monarchism in the way the medieval feudalism did.
We are approaching that path.