As promised in the introduction, I am following each few of the workshops by a look at how well the tools used in them served their purpose.
One of my purposes in looking at human social systems is that I think that many of them do not serve us as well as they could. By us, I mean the large majority who are not controlling those systems.
In the case of countries, there are several obvious concerns.
The land on the Earth is currently divided into a set of patches of land together with a margin of sea around the land, except for Antarctica and a few small disputed patches. The United Nations recognizes each of these, together with an institution for each patch which it recognizes as the sovereign government of that patch, including everything in it, including all its people.
As I start this workshop, this appears to be a bad idea from the point of view of most humans. The primary evidence is the enormous amount of spending on the military which is driven and enabled by the size of the larger economies. In 2020, the total world military expenditure was about US$2 trillion. Even worse is that they are used against people other , causing death and misery on a huge scale.
This in itself is reason enough to rethink the system. There are alternatives. Think of federal states, like the Canada or the UK. Scotland does not need to arm itself against England or Wales. For that matter, there is little fear in the near future that one EU country will invade another, in spite of their bloody history of doing just that. Indeed, this was one of the primary reasons for forming its predecessor organizations shortly after World War II.
Another large concern is that many of them are under the control of colonialists and imperialists. Obvious examples are Canada and the US, offshoots of imperial Britain, who are still performing genocide against the Indigenous peoples whose land they occupy in violation of even those treaties which were not the result of coercion or bad faith on the part of the colonial power.
So far, the workshops on clarifying the concepts and on a very high-level application of the diagrams for understanding the external and internal aspects of systems haven’t revealed a lot, but I didn’t yet feel I had to go back and change the generic diagrams.
The thoughts in the beginning paragraphs of these reflections fit into the idea of analysing the interests of the interested parties and many more of my thoughts fit into the history topic, though I think that may be too general but may be as far as it can go in the abstract.
I also have this idea that there is something to learn from comparing countries to protection rackets. I think this fits in with the language tools around reasoning by analogy, but that also needs further development.
However, before exploring those further, I think it would be useful to do some work on the internals of countries, starting with democracy.
Previous: Clarifying the Concepts | Next: First Workshops On Democracy: What is Democracy? | Return to Table of Contents