Pseudo Countries - belief based population realignment
Fluid Borders
What is logical reason to group people in the same geographical region together? One argument is that people that live near each other associate and interact with each other — thereby creating a consistent environment that molds society as people grow older. This environment would ensure people from the same region would be homogeneous in their beliefs and ideologies. This coupled with social power structures led by highly influential organisations such as the church or the government ensure that this environment continues to thrive. These organisations might even take corrective measures to bring society back “in line”.
Countries with influential organisations such as a religious body tend to have more homogeneous societies as a result. But this is also true in countries that are less religious. There is a certain legacy influence in all countries that still affects them — due to residual power that influential organisations hold or due to older members of society that propagate the influence. For example, there might exist older members who believe that the UK’s commonwealth prowess of the past were the glory days — a belief resulting from years of nationalist campaigns (corrective measures) administered to the public by the government in the past (This is not a suggestion that this belief is false)
This theory would suggest that countries in the blue in the graphic above that do not have alternative religious power structures or religious organisations that take corrective measures to influence people would start to see a realignment of their populations.
Population realignment will cause a paradigm shift. This is due to one big external influence — technology. Geographical proximity no longer dictates the environment in which people live. Each individual is now able to mold his own identity through books, the internet, television and various other sources of information. Each individual follows their own identity path and thus creates a unique identity and belief system for themselves. The population at a larger scale will realign along these experiences. From an actor network theory perspective, these are new connections formed between nodes that weren’t possible a few decades ago. This will cause huge rifts within the nation state kept together by arbitrary borders based on the assumption that people that live near each other are alike.
Population realignment can be seen in various countries — where people take sides with either the nation state (colloq. right wing) or the newer society (colloq. liberal). At this point in history, this realignment seems to be right along the middle on the political spectrum — a 50/50 split — be it in Catalonia, Scotland, wider UK, US politics etc. This is possibly the worst split.
One solution to this problem is a supranational state which will buy time. But people with similar beliefs and ideologies already form societies virtually on the internet. This will translate to the physical world soon.
The one advantage of persistence of the nation state is that it dilutes ideology which can intensify as populations realign and self affirm their beliefs — some of which can be rather toxic
