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The Origins of Citizenship
In 600 BC, the Greeks took something that was part of our biological proclivity and turned it into an explicit philosophical notion. The big breakthrough was that person replaced their primary allegiance to either someone that had blood ties or looked like them. And what that meant was for the first time there was an embryonic sense of meritocracy. Now we can see that people are retribalizing, and they're starting to identify with either their kin group, or their ethnic group, or religious group.