The Inadequacy of the Nation-Based System

Suppose someone comes to you and asks you to join a club, which has thousands or millions of members. By becoming part of this club you can identify with it and have the status of belonging to it; you can take pride in the club’s history or culture, display its symbols, and enjoy a commonality with other people.

As a member, though, you will be alienated from people in other clubs, and be treated as ‘foreign’ by them. You must support and may have to take part in gang wars between clubs. You would only be able to move freely within an area that the club has claimed for itself, and would need permission from other clubs to venture into their claimed lands. Your human rights will be subordinated to the club, and you will have only those rights which the club charter grants you. You must place the interests of your club above the good of all society.

Obviously no sensible person would agree to this. It is the most ludicrous bargain you would come across. But you are not given an option. You must belong to some club, or they will imprison you in squalid detention camps and deprive you of practically everything in life.

So then you would check out all the clubs, trying to determine which one gives you the best rights and opportunities. But again, you don’t have a choice. You were allocated your club at birth and are stuck with it.

This is what the world is today under nationalism. Hereafter in this paper I shall continue to use the term ‘club’ for a nation, to indicate that it is merely an association of humans and not their master.

One would expect the system described above to be overthrown by the people. Unfortunately, they have all been indoctrinated so deeply with nationalism that it closes the mind to the notion that this system is unfavourable, and that there could be other ways of organizing the world that better serve humanity’s interests. People of the world, open your minds beyond nationalist passions and seriously consider other options.

In the national system the collective of humanity is lost in the tussle between clubs. The world’s situation is like a party of greedy kids: each child (club) tries to take for itself the largest slice of the cake, while the cake itself (the world) is ruined. People in different clubs are so alienated from each other that they hardly see a common humanity, and view everything in terms of these clubs.

From this alienation of people in clubs arise some of the greatest problems humanity faces: war, insecurity, displacement of people etc. and the lack of action on other challenges: environmental destruction, poverty, diseases, illiteracy, natural disasters etc. These specific issues will be discussed in the next paper. For now, we can conclude based on the above discussion that the nationalist method of organizing the world is neither in the best interests of the individual and nor of humanity.

And there are other options, which are far more favourable, involving the unification of humankind. Rather than being forced to accept the ridiculous club bargain, we can get rid of the clubs altogether. We can build an inclusive society for all humans instead of a society of exclusive identities.