On Unity

The troubling issue I see is a matter of nations fostering peace, creating unity, and essentially merging into unions. I see the European Union, NATO, even the United Nations as different levels in attempting to achieve this goal. The challenge of achieving this globally is necessary, since only through unity and global trust can disarmament be achieved.

But it’s not as simple as everyone agreeing to the common good and signing on to a union contract so that the world can put their atom bombs in museums and ride across the planet without fear or persecution. We simply cannot trust each other yet, and even if we could, the natural potential for people to organize and create power structures is as inevitable as people owning property or spreading religion.

Just look at the United States as it slowly becomes separated as its cultures grow more distinct and separate. It is not so much a matter of regional isolation these days, but a matter of ideological isolation in the environment of mixed media. It is still very much seen as one country, yet the uniform culture is beginning to change; what was established as a uniform trust in each other is beginning to be broken down, and in the vastness of the modern American population, culture has changed from a melting pot into a breeding ground for new cultures.

I feel like it is slow, but a divergence is taking place that is not for the better in America, and worse are countries such as Russia and China that manage their population’s media to prevent a dissolution like that which was seen during the fall of the Soviet Union, having little regard for the common human mission for freedom, peace, and empowerment but instead being locked into a nationalist ideology that puts geopolitics first with no real end game beyond expansionism.

I have thought on many issues only to find that all these things are hard to improve on given the hundreds of years of social progress that have occurred to adapt to the realities of the industrialization of nation-states. The current mode of Western ideology has for the most part been to resist reckless ideological change, favoring the formation of institutions that slowly guide us towards a moral center, which works for the United Nations, but it is questionable if it has worked on a national level.

Corruption of state institutions, the ideological inconsistencies of leaders in power, the general apathy and ignorance of the public, coupled with the fact of the futility of academics to grapple with the unfathomable nuance of the behaviours and needs of large, culturally diverse populations all create a series of problems with one common theme: human mismanagement stems from the very abstract nature of the human mind and the inherent human desire to be free to do so.

Everything we have built is built around the inevitable chaos of human cultural evolution—from creating democracies where we can change governments as ideas change, which are led by free markets driven by profit, to the security infrastructure needed to protect ourselves from our neighbors, their free will, and the unpredictability of their changing political state of affairs. Everything about modern industrial society is bottled chaos, uncertainty kept certain by the powerful having learned what it takes to keep a society afloat.

I keep leaving and coming back to the idea that it comes down to the formation of companies that promote the common good, something that has only come about because of labour movements that have created the middle class and lowered poverty. Companies are more rational than people and can be convinced to act morally and more consistently than single people can. They also structure a nation and set the stage for the wellbeing of the population.

As it stands, if there is any hope in making nations trust each other, it will be up to the companies within those nations to make environments where peace and prosperity can abound, and if there is anything people can do to make that happen, it will be through the same means as before: labour unions driven by ideological impetus to try and make the world a better place. I’ve come to this conclusion multiple times before, and the hardest thing to do as a creative is to realize that the solution already exists—it just needs some improvement.