'Countries' - The Fences Of Division.

Countries. Can there be a greater example of an entirely human concept that has served to mostly act as a tool to divide, since their very origins?

How arrogant are we, as a species? The planet has been here for some 4.5billion years, we, a nanosecond of that time, and yet, in our arrogance, we make up these boundaries, call them countries, and assume ownership of all that is within in. Yet, in the grander scheme of human history,the very idea of actual countries is probably a relatively modern one. Yet no one stops to consider whether or not this man made idea has actually proven to be be mostly good, or mostly bad.

Has it fed into those with a more tribal psyche?

Has it encouraged people to believe themselves different, better, etc, than those of other countries, irrespective of whether they have/are or have not?

Has it served as a useful tool for old Monarchs and modern politicians to use to get the working and middle class to go to war on behalf of their 'patriotic duty', when the hidden reason is usually something ignoble?

You see, we tend to conciously or subconciously place more stock in the life of someone from our 'own country', than we do in another. Yet, when you strip everything away, this is entirely due to the fact that the very concept of 'countries', has led you into the false belief that you almost should feel more for the suffering of people from 'your country', than that of another.

People from other countries then take on a new perspective, other than people. They are 'foreign'. And when Gov's decide they want to use the working class to attack this other country, they do it by demonising this other country, and it's people.

Had the creation of countries not taken place at all, and mankind had not drawn up borders, nor claimed the earth and it's resources as 'his', then it is entirely possible that this alternate path would have taken us onto something better than what we have today. No longer would we have the them v us mentality, at least not to the same levels, as there would be no country to wage war on another. It would be more difficult for evil men to take control of a nation's Gov, when there were no nations!

Moreover, rather than be socially conditioned to somehow place more stock in the life of someone 'from your country', if we had seen Earth as one big country, then we would have logically grown to place as much stock in one person's life as another, no matter the 'country' bit.

 

Ideally, there would be no borders and we could live as one species like in Lennon's "Imagine" song.

In reality, cultural and economic differences necessitate borders.

The difficulty of uniting different cultures under one banner is shown most blatantly by the recent turmoil of the EU.

 

That is different.

The EU is a forced concept, and not one of the people.

A movement to what I write would need to be 'organic', a dynamic shift by enough people to see that there is an alternative to repeating old mistakes, using flawed systems.

 

I understand where you're coming from, but I believe Nietzsche's untermenschen and ubermenschen ideas hold true.

Most people are followers by nature. They need capable leaders. Unfortunately, a lot of people who desire to be leaders are abusive or egocentric, and thus, corrupt governments are made.

Your idea either requires humans to be much more freethinking or for the leaders that arise to be more virtuous and compassionate than a lot of the ones that exist in our current reality.

Countries or tribes are often borne out of practicality or cultural conflict.

The recent creation of South Sudan is a perfect example of how decentralization is more common now than centralization. Overall, there is more of a push for humans to divide into smaller units than to unify as one people -- and this is even seen in Scotland as it pushes for more autonomy in the U.K.

I don't think this is a bad thing though. If enough of this happens on a wide scale, then people tend to be better represented in smaller communities.

In many ways, I view the further division of larger countries by ethnic lines as being an extension of Dunbar's number. We're essentially programmed to be tribal on a level that is so instinctual that I don't see us evolving past it unless we literally alter our DNA to a significant degree.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

 

Political divisions are human nature. Heck, even groups as small as a classroom (20-30 kids) soon divides up.

 

It would be great to live in a world without borders or nation states, but the powers that be would fight tooth and nail against it, even if you could convince a significant portion of the world population to abandon the concept of a nationstate....it simply won't happen.

However on a small scale level, people can always choose different ways to cooperatively own property and live off the grid. And many developing nations are good places to disappear into if you get tired of modern industrial society.

 

There are people I don't want to live with, so I like borders and structure ( national, socio-economic, and cultural).

 

Same here.

 

Or both.

Is that too much to ask for?

Hey, if such a nation existed like that, and it had a resource that the criminal mafia in Congress and Tel Aviv wanted control of, and the EU, they would be monsterous enough to start a hate campaign against it in the media, make up some reason as to why they needed to destabilise that system, and replace it with 'democracy'....


*already happened*

 

Which people, and how does that work when it comes to people you don't want to 'live with', who are already native to 'your' country? You can't live life in a bubble of people who approve of everything you like and think.

 

There are those that say that if there were no borders and countries, that 'all the poor would flock to the West'.

But they cannot see that the World's poor didn't get that way by accident, in the main. There is more than enough wealth to go around, there is more than enough food to go around, and had nations not evolved, then, imo, we would never have gotten to the position where large portions of the planet are populated by countries which are exploited to the point of evil, by other countries. The mentality would have been to see all as one. There still would be individuality of course, there is within a country, it's just that the mind does shift if you don't see so many barriers, and you actually begin to personalise others, rather than nationalise them.

 

The OP is an expression of incredible naivete. There should be borders between countries for the same reason that the United States are States.

There should be differences between areas, as determined by the residents of those areas. They should live by the rules which they deem are best for themselves. They should be able to defend these beliefs - with their lives, if necessary.

That the OP demands is poppycock fantasia. I have no interest in living in a country where there are myriad rules established because everyone has a different idea of what everyone else should be doing, and paying.

 

There has to be some kind of order and structure set in place. Not everyone across the world is the same and thus identify themselves by geographical boundaries - its all about the socialization of human beings.

IMO, it all comes down to identity.

 

Most countries that are poor in the world at some point in time were encroached on by western nations who forced the native people to abandon their indigenous ways and adopt a westernized lifestyle...more often than not because they needed to either exploit the natural resources of their land, or use the people as slaves.

And yes, national boundaries are completely imaginary. If you were born on this side of the line you are this person, if you were born on that side of the land you are that person. There is no real unification between all people within a geographical area, it is and always has been a way for societal elites to wrangle the mass of people and control their fate so that they can benefit from the labor and taxes of the masses.

People say America love it or leave it, but don't understand that it is incredibly difficult to renounce your citizenship. It would be nice if people could at least go to another country and renounce their citizenship and be accepted into the nation they enter.

 

Good post.

So many things created by early controllers and elites, that have served to divide us, century after century, man against man. Nations and religions being the main two culprits. No use people making excuses, and saying 'it's not actually nations or religion that are the problem, it's man', because the truth is, if it were not for man, those things would not exist anyway. It has been our imagination that has brought those things to life.

You would think there would be a shift toward getting tired of being used this way, yet there appear no shortage of useful pawns, ready to hate whoever the state and media tell them to.

 

What do you want to identify with?

Why must there be 'order and structure', when time and again, 'order and structure' has been shown to always benefit elites, and rarely the masses?

What use is having that as an infrastructure?

 

Do you have any idea how ironic those two sentences read, when said, one after the other?

What do you think you live in now, if not a world with an ever increasing number of rules, and guess what, they will tell the plebs they are all for our own good, and guess what, they usually aren't.

Besides, at no point did I propose a 'country with a myriad of rules'.

Sheesh, we have one guy going on about the need for structure,and now you, saying pretty much the exact opposite, yet both miss the point.

If nations had not been artifically created, you would simply not be thinking the way that you do now, be definition of the fact.

 

Well, I could go through the history of man and the evolution of government, and infrastructures (such as streets, lines of communication, and so on). One identifies with their geographic location, ie street address, city, county, province, state, country, continent, whatever.

Why need order and structure? Are you pushing for anarchy and moving back to tribes/roaming nomads? Do you want to go back to the Bronze Age?

You're afraid of corruption? Get rid of the corrupt. That was easy.

 

No.

I want to go forward to a new and progressive age, one free of perpetual war, the routine slaughter of innocents, and the removal of the layer cake of criminal mafia that control the US and much of Europe.

And their associated org's, which exist just to create more layers for them.

Anything wrong in that?

 

Taking away a name will not rid the world of war or crime.

 

What if it's the other way around? What if the borders necessitate cultural and economic differences?

 

That's clearly not the case, the differences already existed prior to any official borders that could be recognized historically.

 

Or at least acts as a breeding ground, to the stage that it is perpetually doomed to fail.

Good point, imo.

 

I am aware of that.

I was really speaking of how our mindset would be had the concept of countries and borders never existed...

 

We'd all still be tribal savages, I think I prefer the way it is now.