Q. Won't people naturally gravitate to old and local nationalistic sympathies?
A. This is a great danger but it describes already the world we are living in -- rather than a possible danger of tomorrow. What we realize is that older nationalities are largely the result of education and cultural experiences -- a fluid a shifting process that is constantly building and dissolving national boundaries. The danger posed by local nationalities IS and WILL BE massively dangerously and virtually un-policable unless it is countermanded by an equally strong set of commonly shared images, ideas, experiences and communications.
Q. Aren't there more pressing problems that establishing a Terran Nationalism?
A. No. Our pressing concerns are biospheric mismanagement, toxic and irresponsible diet, nationalistic militarism between and within countries, global economic mismanagement, human rights horrors, violent disagreements about the custodianship of bioregions and cultural traditions, mass displacement, slum cities, collateral damage from mass-scale habits of industry, the threat of 'redneckery' and fantacism in all nations, etc. All the most pressing problems must postulate solutions at the level of global social organization, holistic ecology and specifically human ethical dilemmas. The vision and motivation with which to solve our most urgent difficulties all depend upon the intensity of widespread feeling for the total 'terrestrial' frame.
Q. But don't people hate each other?
A. The natural and learned patterns of antagonism between disparate and similar human beings must be subsumed in the image of the global commons. Those you cannot stand are still tolerable as long as they are working on the same 'project' as you. The worth of participatory membership is extended and exerts a cooling effect on the normal dislike which arises between strong stylistic and capability discrepancies.
Q. How important is this?
A. In order that we do not perpetually face a destructive divide between those with progressive global/human sympathies and those with nationalistic emotional sympathies we MUST do everything in our power to produce an epidemic of planetary nationalistic sympathy which will align both all levels of political and intellectual complexity in human individuals.
Q. Doesn't this kind of viewpoint come from personal efforts at self-cultivation?
A. No. Individuals who get high inner refinment are lucky enough to have been born with the circumstances that helped them undertake the necessary self-efforts. Cultural and ecological support is necessary to produce even the most autonomous morally elevated individual. It is the duty of higher levels of insight to produce the conditions in which more people will gravitate to such insight.
Personal growth and political action can both promote a vision of the dynamic social well-being of the entire world. And, frankly, the mass-scale dangers are so enormous that we cannot wait for the general population to grow individually into an enlightened disposition. We now need to supplement this an active persuading of their nationalistic instincts.
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