In today’s polarized red state/blue state America, the most common reaction to any sociopolitical problem now seems to be to decry it as just one more effect of the insidious stranglehold that the hated Other Tribe has established on the social order.

Depending on a person’s political orientation, the nefarious controlling entity may be perceived as greedy corporations raping the environment while hoodwinking and beggaring the gullible populace, or as a conspiracy of nanny-state neo-socialists crushing individual freedom and initiative--also while hoodwinking and beggaring the gullible populace.

It does not yet seem to have occurred to many of us that if both sides feel that forces beyond their control have taken over just about everything, maybe the problem isn’t really the other side--maybe it’s something bigger than either of them.  And if hardly anyone even recognizes this as a pertinent line of inquiry, our chances of coming up with better ways to deal with the problem are not especially good.

Even if people could identify the central cause of their feeling dismissed or inconsequential, how would they propose to fight it?  The vastness of scale of contemporary life does not provide any more serviceable an enemy for contemporary channelers of public outrage than the Great Depression did for the Nazis.  The tribal imperative demands a more tangible enemy.

In the United States, unless we go in for causes like UFO conspiracy theories, we’re pretty well stuck with flogging the opposite side in the ongoing red state/blue state hostilities.

Elsewhere in the world, however, large numbers of people have found that if you can’t fight bigness itself, you can identify some entity that can plausibly represent it, and then fight for your own tribe’s right to break away.  Fragmentation has thus become the order of the day, with separatist movements sprouting up across the globe--from Quebecois, IRA, and Basque to Eritrean, Armenian, Kurdish, Chechen, Tamil, and Moro.  There is even a separatist movement in Alaska.