The revolution in military affairs that won the Long War is currently bringing us the market-state. The emergence of this new form of the constitutional order will be accompanied by new forms of warfare. In these final paragraphs I should like to speculate about these new forms. In other words, if the current revolution in military affairs, taken in a broader sense than simply the latest technology, is a consequence of the threefold phenomenon of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, international telecommunications, and the power of rapid computation, and if the market-state is the constitutional consequence of this revolution in military affairs, what is the next revolution in military affairs that is a consequence of the market-state? I venture the guess that it will be a result of advances in biogenetics and that this development will challenge the meritocracy on which the market-state depends.
Thus the knowledge and techniques that will make biological super-weapons available to the market-state and its adversaries may ultimately bring about the new form that will supersede that state. First, the dispersal of these techniques to market actors—corporations that run hospitals, pharmaceutical labs, vast agribusinesses, and the like—will inevitably have the consequence of proliferating actual weapons to those who wish to destroy the market-state. Second, the open society on which the market-state depends and which it does so much to foster will find it more difficult than the nation-state to assert legal control over biogenetic knowledge and weaponizing. The public will call for measures that are highly intrusive and oppressive, and these too will undermine the ethos of the market-state. Third, the fundamental idea of the market-state—that equality means treating those equally endowed in an equal way*—will be shattered when the means of altering our natural endowment of intelligence, beauty, emotional stability, physical strength and grace, even sociability, is available at a price. The market-state will have to decide how to distribute such benefits, having thrown away the basis on which it was created to make such decisions, namely, the cultivation of natural merit. And this development creates a fertile environment for violent civil conflict.