Guns, Germs, and The Future of Us - Wyatt Edward Gates - Medium - 0 views
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nation nationalism in-group moral imagination border war fascism
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ared Daimond’s seminal work Guns, Germs, and Steel has many flaws, but it provides some useful anecdotes about how narrative and consciousness shapes human organization progresses
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Past critical transformations of thought can help us see how we need to transform ourselves now in order to survive the future.
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something both ancient and immediate: the way we define who is in our tribe plays a critical role in what kind of social organization we can build and maintain
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You can’t have a blood family of 300 million, nor even a large enough one to do things like build an agrarian society
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In order to have large cities built on agrarianism it was necessary not only to innovate technology, but to transform our very consciousness as it related to how we defined what a person was, both ourselves and others
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Instead of needing to have real, flowing blood with common DNA from birth, it was merely necessary to be among the same abstract family organized under a king of some kind — a kind of stand in for the father or patriarch. We developed law and law enforcement as abstract disembodied voices of the father. This allowed total strangers without any family ties to interact in the same society in a constructive and organized way. Thus: civilization as we know it
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Those ancient polities have developed finally into the Nation, a kind of tribe so fully abstracted that you can be of any blood and language and religion and still function within it.
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So, too, are all other forms of human separation — and the opposition and conflicts they spawn — illusory in nature. We moved beyond blood, but then it was language or religion or fealty that made it impossible to work together, and we warred over that
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we’re told these borders mean everything, that they are real and urgent and demand constant sacrifice to maintain.
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We’re stuck in a mode of thinking that’s no longer sensible. There isn’t a reason for borders. There never really was, but now more than ever we have no utility for them, no need for them
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What humanity has to do is wake up to the reality of post-tribalism. This means seeing through all these invented borders to the truth that we are all people, we are all fundamentally the same, and we can all learn to live with one another.
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It was the idea of necessary conflict based on blood that preceded the fights that appeared to justify the belief in that blood-based conflict.
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Nations have saturated the entire globe. There are no more frontiers. It’s all Nations butting up against one another.
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We are all people of a similar nature and we do have the option to relate to one another as people for the sake of saving our shared homes and futures. We all hunger and thirst and become lonely, we all laugh and weep in the same language. Stripped of confounding symbols we are undivided.
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There are a lot of people upset about the illusion of borders. They want a different reality, one in which there are Good Tribes (their tribe) and Bad Tribes (all the other ones).
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There are no firm foundations for defining this tribe, however, so he’s left to cobble together some kind of ad hoc notion of in- and out-group. Like a magpie he collects ways of dividing people as appeals to his caprice: race, sex, Nation, etc., but there’s no greater sense to it, so it’s all arbitrary, all a mess.
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No amount of magical thinking from conservatives can change the reality of globalism, however; what one Nation does to pollute will affect us all, and that is according to the laws of physics. No political movement can change those physics. We have to adapt or perish.
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a key part of it is a simple lack of imagination. He just doesn’t realize there’s an option to not have borders, because his entire consciousness is married to the idea of of-me and not-of-me, Us and Them, and if there is no Them there can’t be an Us, and therefore life stops making sense
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What has to be true if there are no tribes? We have no need to discriminate among who we may love. Loving and caring for all people as if they were blood family is the path forward
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There needs to be a new story for us to share. It’s not enough to stop believing in the old way of borders, we have to actively seek out a new way of thinking and speaking and living that reflects the world as it is and as it can be.
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there are others who have more tangible investments in borders: Those who have grown fat off the conflicts driven by these invented borders don’t want us to see how pointless it all is. These billionaires and presidents and kings want us to keep fighting against one another over the borders they so lazily define because it gives them a means of power and control.
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We have to be ready for their opposition, however. They’ll do what they can to force us to act as if their borders are real. We don’t need to listen, though we do need to be ready to sacrifice.
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Without a globally-coordinated response we can’t resolve a globally-driven problem such as climate change. If we can grant the humanity of all people we can start to imagine ways of relating to one another that aren’t opposed and antagonistic, but which are cooperative and aimed at harmony.
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This transformation of consciousness must happen in our own hearts and minds before it can happen in concert.
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the Nation has already been shown to be unnecessary because of social globalism. Pick a major city on earth and you’ll find every kind of person living together in peace! Not perfect peace, but not constant and unavoidable war, and that is what counts.
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We can’t keep pretending as if borders matter when we can so clearly see that they don’t, but we can’t just have no story at all, there must be a way of contextualizing a future without borders. I don’t know what that story is, exactly, but I believe it is something like love writ large. Once we’re ready to start telling it we can start living it.