What happens to a nation when its shared startup culture, social trust between its people, and continuity in the sense of history and shared vision mission and values, are weakened by elite capture, financialisation and large-scale immigration?
Can such a society - our society - still function as a genuine national community, rather than a mere economic machine, as Ray Dalio calls it?
To be administered, exploited, extracted from, by a governing elite.
And operated, on the elite's behalf, by its admin class of political, technical, managerial and media?
Table Of Contents
1. The Nation And The Social Contract
How nations form, what binds them together, and why legitimacy matters.
2. Elite Capture And Political Drift
How power shifts from communities to economic and institutional elites.
3. Financialisation And The "Hollowing Out" Of The Real Economy
Why finance replaces production, and the consequences for society.
4. Mass Immigration, Culture, And Assimilation Limits
How scale and continuity affect cultural cohesion and integration.
Glossary Of Terms
Nation
A Social Contract
Elite Capture
Financialisation
Real Assets
Financial Assets
Mass Immigration
Assimilation
The Corporate State
The Economic Machine
1. The Nation As An Extended Family
- A nation begins as an enlarged family bound by shared culture, values, history, sense of identity and mission, and mutual trust between members. This is not far from the idea of "tribe".
- Leadership originally grows out of this common social fabric, with rulers expected to reflect the moral standards and cultural identity of the people they govern, and the people to follow voluntarily; rather than have an elite that stands out and apart from its own people. Some people misunderstand this idea of organic leadership as "authoritarian" rule.
- This is all covered under the heading of "social contract". There are numerous posts on this website of the political philosophy behind this concept (#Philo).
- When this bond weakens, especially as rapid mass immigration dilutes a shared culture faster than it can be absorbed or assimilated, the sense of national continuity and belonging erodes.
- So what holds such a society together once that common culture is lost? Some people mistakenly think that "liberal democracy" will fix this.
2. Cultural Breakdown And The Western Case
- Western societies illustrate what, as a result of intense globalisation, happens when this organic bottom-up model breaks down and is replaced by what you might call top-down spectacle and excess.
- Political leadership increasingly reflects consumerism, financialisation, and cultural fragmentation, rather than shared civic norms; while large-scale immigration accelerates cultural incoherence instead of reinforcing a stable national identity and in-step advancement.
- So is it surprising that politics becomes theatrical and polarised rather than grounded and unifying?
3. From Community Leadership To Oligarchy
- When a nation no longer draws its leaders from a culturally cohesive people, power tends to drift away from a native people of origin, towards those sections that possess wealth and influence instead.
- Economic elites fill the vacuum left by weakened communal bonds, using money and media-reach to select leaders who resemble themselves, not the population at large.
- But if leadership now answers to capital rather than culture, whose interests are really being served?
4. Nation Recast As A Corporation
- The end result is a nation treated less like a shared home and more like let's call it a "managed enterprise".
- Citizens become customers, cultural inheritance and dissenting viewpoints get cancelled leaving only yes-men, and mass immigration is framed purely in economic terms as pro-growth reducing labour input costs, even while the original social contract holding everyone together gets dissolved.
- So how long can a country survive when identity, loyalty, and continuity are all reduced to economic short-term transactions?
5. Glossary Of Concepts
Elite capture. The interests of the sub-elites take the place of those of the nation as a whole.
Financialisation. Where investment goes into financial products rather than physical, which produces outsized returns for those who own the assets. Aka the K-shaped economy.
Financial products are tradable contracts where returns are generated from what some might call "usury", ie from irreal or financial contracts on real assets, like lending, interest, claims on future income, price movements;
Real assets. From using PPE (not politics philosophy and economics ;) - property plant and equipment) and commodity-type inputs, to produce real physical outputs ie goods or services, for sale at home and abroad.
In practical terms, financial products include government bonds, corporate bonds, shares, derivatives, and structured products, all of which “turn over easily” because they are paper or digital claims, not tied to slow-moving physical assets. The trouble is success with investment in financial products depends on the endless expansion of the money supply (and empire?), consequent inflation, interest rates (up to suppress inflation risking to crash the economy rather than down to suppress interest on debt risking to crash the value of the reserve currency) and so the value of the reserve currency.
Triffin’s dilemma. A global reserve currency must supply the world with liquidity, but doing so undermines its own long-term value and stability.
Real and "irreal" or financial assets. Real produce value by being used; financial represent claims on value produced elsewhere, in the future; backed once the gold standard is broken by trust in the government's promise to pay, which depends on growth in the economy and the tax base.
Hubris and illusion. This separation from the real to the financial explains how, imho, we get detached from the real world and take off into delusional ideas about our omnipotence and perrenity, ie a detachment from the real world compounded by misplaced unwarranted (literally) confidence and hubris.
Large-scale immigration. An immigrant is not defined by separate origin or difference alone; immigration becomes large-scale when cultural inflows, volumes, are both numerically significant and also uninterrupted rather than in waves, overwhelming the host society’s capacity to integrate or assimilate newcomers into a common civic culture.
Also as well as quantitative consider qualitative differences ie how far from the native culture is the culture of the groups expected to a simulate?
Say an annual greater than 0.5 to 1% of a nation's population, and when foreign-born residents rise above 15–20 percent of the total population. At which point studies show that shared norms, language use, and social practices begin to fragment out eventually into conflict, rather than converge and assimilate into unity.
Western societies. Those held together by the transatlantic system of alliances and a common or International Rules Based Order with its institutions (which is now caduc).
Social contract. In traditional political philosophy, the social contract is the implicit agreement by which individuals surrender some freedoms in return for security, order, and shared rules under a legitimate agreed-upon authority.
In modern usage, it also includes the expectation that the state will manage economic welfare, equal rights, and redistribution, expanding the contract in terms of freedom from mutual restraint to ongoing provision and entitlement.
Economic machine. Ray Dalio’s model of the economy as a simple system driven by spending, income, productivity, and credit cycles, where debt amplifies short-term booms-and-busts around long-term growth.
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