Yes, but make no mistake, the is much work to be down following "the storm" so that we may create a better future for humanity. With this in mind, I offer the following recommendation to those who can "see." A MUST READ: The Breakdown of Nations (1951) by Leopold Kohr
The following was excerpted from: http://thehealingproject.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/LEOPOLD-KOHR.-The-Breakdown-of-Nations.pdf
[words in brackets are mine]
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Although written in 1951, “The Breakdown of Nations” has diagnosed the essential pathology of the twentieth century, even before it developed into the universally sanctioned policies of globalization that now manifest in the cultural, economic and military Americanization of the world.
It is only in small [localized communities], Kohr suggests, that there can be true democracy, because it is only there that the citizen can have some direct influence over the governing institutions; only there that economic problems become tractable and controllable, and economic lives become more rational; only there that culture can flourish without the diversion of money and energy into statist pomp and military adventure; only there that the individual in all dimensions can flourish free of systematic social and governmental pressures.
[Kohr presents] a new and unified political philosophy centering in the theory of size. Wherever something is wrong, something is too big.
If the human body becomes diseased, it is, as in cancer, because a cell, or group of cells, has begun to outgrow its allotted narrow limits. And if the body of a people becomes diseased with the fever of aggression, brutality, collectivism, or massive idiocy, it is not because it has fallen victim to bad leadership or mental derangement. It is because human beings, so charming as individuals or in small aggregations, have been welded into over-concentrated social [collectives] such as mobs, unions, cartels, or great powers. That is when they begin to slide into uncontrollable catastrophe.
The solution of the problems confronting the world as a whole does not seem to lie in the creation of still bigger social units and still vaster governments whose formation is now attempted with such unimaginative fanaticism by our statesmen. It seems to lie in the elimination of those overgrown organisms that go by the name of great powers, and in the restoration of a healthy system of small and easily manageable states such as characterized earlier ages.
The hallmark of Western civilization is [the] love of personal freedom and personal accomplishment. [Its] common denominator has always been individualism, in contrast to that of the Orient, whose basis has always been collectivism. Though these designations have likewise a faintly geographic origin, they refer more clearly than the others to cultures, not to regions; to ideas, not to nations.
As Western civilization could not be conceived without the personal genius of those like Shakespeare, Voltaire, Rembrandt, Dante, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Beethoven, Kant, Goethe, or Socrates - theirs was a civilization created by persons fulfilling the purpose of their individual existence, not by communities or peoples joining in collective effort to reach a collectivized end.
Most nations, irrespective of their racial background, the stage of their civilization, their ideology, or their economic system, have managed to roll up an impressively similar record [of mass murder]. If similar [outcomes] occurred everywhere and in all phases and periods of historic development, the common denominator seems to be the simple ability, the power, to commit monstrosities. As a result, we arrive at what we might call a power theory of social misery.
If wars are due to the accumulation of the critical mass of power, and the critical mass of power can accumulate only in social organisms of critical size, the problems of aggression, like those of atrocity, can clearly again be solved in only one way through the reduction of those organisms that have outgrown the proportions of human control.
This means that, if the world is to be relieved of some of the pressures of aggressive warfare, we can do little by trying to unite it [as this would only] increase the terror potential that comes from large size. What must be accomplished is the very opposite: the dismemberment of the vast united national complexes commonly called the great powers. For they alone in the contemporary world have the social size that enables them to spread the miseries we try to prevent, but cannot so long as we leave untouched the power which produces them.