A note from the author on An Empire and a Village
I’ve been thinking for a while now about Empire and Village. Not in terms of specific regimes, but in terms of an ongoing global impulse. Empire can never be a good thing. Because although it uses humans to function, it isn’t human. Empire needs a vast underclass to keep going. It needs various kinds of Us-and-Them conventions to optimise its operations. It subverts education to its service. It requires collusion and coercion to maintain stasis. It uses society and community, but is neither. It is in relationship to no-one. It breaks every rule in the book. And it exists within each of us or it couldn’t work nearly so well. I see almost all news and current affairs as drifts towards either Empire or Village. We all have Village in us too. But that often loses out, doesn’t it?