Liberalism - power doing what power does
The most remarkable thing about western civilisation is its ability to absorb any object or idea, alter it, sanitise it, rebrand it and market it. Even ideas that are a threat can be co-opted and put to work. The Romans did it with Christianity - an ideology of the poor and enslaved that threatened the foundations of empire. When torture and murder became ineffective as deterrents, they simply embraced the idea and made it the state religion, rewriting the holy texts to suit their needs and rebranding it as a new system of control. In the same way that plants can be tweaked at the genetic level to become the intellectual property of one company and then replace all similar crops in a region, ideas can be re-engineered to serve the interests of the powerful. It's not a conspiracy; it's just power doing what power does.
The people may rise up against tyrants in the name of liberty, shattering the halls and towers of the powerful, but then the ruling systems will simply embrace the idea of freedom, tweak it a little and continue with buissiness as usual. Liberty becomes the right of land-owning white males to vote, then changes form again induct males of every class, then again to include female, and so forth. It constantly shape-shifts, eventually enshrining the freedom of corporations to make messes they cannot be held accountable for, to bribe governments to change laws allowing them to damage people and land at will, no matter who the people vote into government.
In this way, liberalism has been frequently rebranded to vanquish competing ideologies. The success of liberalism lies in its ability to wear whatever shape a population projects through disruption or dissent. Thus at the beginning of this millennium it remains the only show in town.
It is an illusion that currently dominates the globe.
This illusion has a pattern. Everybody follows the pattern, even if they openly oppose the tenets of liberalism or the system of nationhood in general. The most roguish of nations still must maintain their status as a nation, and to do so they must follow the blueprint. No matter where you go in the world, you will recognise elements from this template—if you chance upon a place that doesn't have those elements, you'll find that the people there have lost or are in the process of losing their right to exist.
Everywhere you go, there will be the same institutions, anthems and flags. There will be recognisable schools, banks, hospitals, councils and courts (no matter how poor or rudimentary) and there will be a dreary national anthem.
None of these things existed in a universal form a couple of centuries ago, but everyone has them now. The other element you must possess is a flag. It must be rectangular and utilise three colours somehow representing a unifying ideology and national identity.
In Aboriginal Australia, we are terrifyingly close to joining this recent madness as 'First Nations'. We have hospital-like and school-like community-led institutions, and we have a flag. In our defence, we need to comply with these things to ensure our right to exist. To date we have resisted settling on a national anthem, thank good-ness. The flag is interesting, though. It is understood by most of us as a symbol of defiance rather than compli-ance, as demonstrated by its proliferation in the cheeky graffiti of Aboriginal children. You don't often see other kids scrawling the Aussie flag on a wall instead of a dick and balls. This is because the Aboriginal flag represents a social system in direct opposition to the global order that requires the existence of flags in the first place.