From Tribe To Global Village

Until just a decade ago the most frightening and discussed conspiracy theory was about a one world government. The "New World Order" was, and still is to some extent, the nightmare of every freedom-loving individual. And the backlash was and is a retreat behind our own national borders, a call for more local production and suspicion and hatred towards anything foreign...

I agree with those who fear that one world government, but only under the current socioeconomic paradigm of neoliberalism and capitalism. I say that because there's nothing wrong with globalization in and of itself. Not only that; it's both necessary and the logical next step in human cultural evolution. There are many constants in our shared history, one of which is the ever growing size of our tribes. We are tribal creatures. For hundreds of thousands of years, according to our current understanding of human evolution, we have lived in tribes of a couple of dozen individuals, and most of our instincts, our gut reactions, were developed in that period. We stem from these mini-societies in which everyone knew everyone else. Since we're social creatures a large part of our mental abilities are dedicated to everybody else. We have remarkable abilities to estimate another person's intentions, moods and body-language, especially if we know them well. We're masters at facial recognition and we have the unstoppable intuition to see human faces everywhere and in everything.

When we discovered agriculture we left our nomadic and tribal past behind; we could now stay in the same place, as long as there's water and fertile ground. The tribe grew bigger and now became cities, city-states and eventually nation-states. Loyalty to the city, leader, state or nation and the fellow inhabitants, was a significant development in broadening the horizon of the traditional tribes. The loyalty (if any) you feel right now toward your fellow countrymen (and women of course) is a wonderful feat of mental plasticity; most of them you don't know and will never know, you'll never see them or speak to them, yet in your mind, in your guts you just know that your destiny is linked to theirs. The nation is a mental construction that's constantly being fortified in public discourse, but its ultimate purpose is obsolete because our practical lifestyles and real world technological advancements necessitate global cooperation; global problems require global solutions, it's as simple as that.

It's just practical to think the next step is a global civilization. Note that I didn't say global economy; that's exactly the problem we're facing right now. To make a mobile phone or a PC, you need ingredients from all over the world. Right now the assembly of such devices is left to the whims of a so called free market economy, where each holder of each ingredient tries to make the most profit from relinquishing said ingredient. All national politicians play their role in this game by agreeing on trade agreements that span many borders with the interests of the largest manufacturers in mind, instead of the interests of their respective people. And that's why, for a great part at least, we can't trust our politicians. They don't have our best interests in mind, but their own and that of the multinationals who own them. The "New World Order" is already here in a sense, but it's not a conspiracy. Instead it's the practical and predictable outcome of the prioritization of economic interests over human interests.

We've globalized the economy, but not the people. Money can freely roam around in a borderless realm of high frequency trading with limitless possibilities for profits and losses, but the people aren't free. In each and every nation of the developed world the citizens see the income gaps between the absurdly rich and the heavily taxed middle class growing; while the productivity of the working class has grown the national economies, they've seen their income decline, while the rich have seen their profits multiplied many times. This has been done, not because your government hates you, but because your government has played its role well in the globalized economy. When national governments make policy in service of globalist economic interests instead of in service of their people, the people will rightly feel abandoned. And when they simultaneously see their factories, their livelihood being shipped abroad to low wage countries, and people coming in from abroad to steal a percentage of the few jobs that are left, the blaming game begins. That's the nationalist, xenophobic and sometimes racist backlash we now see rear its ugly head in many western nations.

We live, as a consequence of all the above, in an age of deep distrust and suspicion. It surprises me not at all to see so many conspiracy theories roaming around the internet, but it makes me sad. Believe me that I understand and agree the general distrust of, let's say, the mainstream media and Big Pharma; they're both guilty of playing the for-profit globalist game, and playing it well. Be critical of them, be critical of your government, that I applaud. It's something else however to descend into a state of complete and total dismissal of anything coming from either of those institutions, and instead conjure up wild conspiracy theories about cultural Marxists taking over education or a global agenda out to destroy the nuclear family and family values. You can explain all those by just following the money and by realizing that politics, culture and most every aspect of human existence has been made subservient to globalized economic interests in an economy based on selfish private wealth-accumulation. And it's an economy based on a myth:

The story was that nobody likes capitalists, but if you have the market, and the market is competitive, and you have the butcher, the baker and the brewer - the three professions Adam Smith mentions in The Wealth of Nations - and each one looks after themselves, they will provide the community with the best bread, the best beer and the best meat at the lowest prices. Not because they care for the public, but it's the best way for them to look after themselves, and in looking after themselves, they look after the public interest in the best possible way. In other words, the public interest is best served when no one is trying to serve it.

That's how the below linked video starts. It goes on to draw out a possible alternative for this system, not by abolishing it completely, but by building into it mechanisms for redistribution of the wealth we collectively produce. Globalization is just natural. To maintain our current lifestyles we need resources from every part of the globe and we need workers from and in every part of the globe. Retreating back behind our own borders is not solving anything. The solution is to learn from our tribal past and rediscover our interdependence, just on a much larger scale...

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