Political Implications of Planetization
Because we're so enmeshed within the Nation State framework, we're unable to view it with any measure of distance in order to more fully understand its limitations and its increasingly maladaptive influence on us. We're largely unaware of the danger it now poses to our survival. The irony is, we're aware of the possibility of a nuclear Armageddon being either accidentally or deliberately provoked. But like adults passively watching toddlers play with a book of matches, we've become so de-sensitized to the dangers of our military adventurism and avoidable wars that these reckless policies fail to any longer even arouse our instinct of self-preservation. The thought experiment below is intended to illustrate just how the Nation State conceptual framework might be viewed by an outside casual observer. It also makes clear just how its oppressively insular focus keeps us separated on inner levels of consciousness every bit as much as it does in the outer world through its external hodge-podge of borders.
A Thought Experiment From Earth Orbit
Imagine you're an astronaut out on a space walk. Your life support line securely anchors you to your spaceship as you float just above the atmosphere in a near Earth orbit. You serenely gaze down at Earth as sunlight spreads a new dawn over the islands of Japan, while the inky waters of the South China Sea still glimmer in moonlight. As your spaceship moves you further toward the horizon line and into the new day on the sunlit side of Earth, you see bright sunshine glinting off the curved contour of our home planet outlined against the total blackness of deep space. You watch as the coastal outlines of Australia and New Zealand come into view beneath a giant swirl of clouds.
As your spaceship continues to circle high above Earth, not only can you easily identify the landmasses you gaze down upon, but you suddenly discover that you're able to telepathically read the minds of the people far below! Their thoughts don't come to you as a loud chaotic jumble. Just as someone driving cross-country would pick up on their car radio only the signal coming from the major radio stations of each area as they passed through, likewise, you pick up telepathically only the pre-dominating thoughts and feelings of each landmass that your spaceship flies over. And just as only the radio stations with the strongest signal will play on someone's car radio as they drive from New York to California - you telepathically pick up only the major harmonies, those thoughts and emotional emanations that the majority of people are thinking and feeling in any one area. It is this resonant harmonic of collective thought which reaches you telepathically as you float in space high above the rest of humankind.
What would you hear?
Mental Radio
From your vantage point high above Earth, there are no boundaries, no open spaces that clearly set apart any one group of humans from the adjoining humans sprinkled over mountain ridges and concentrated along coastlines. In spite of this, you repeatedly find that as you fly high above Earth, one telepathic 'signal' of a distinct tone and temper, content and coloration, drops off completely and a totally different telepathic 'signal' takes its place as you move over the continents just like someone driving from New York to California would experience a similar signal 'drop off' on their car radio. They'd inevitably pick up more country western stations the further west they traveled, and in general, their car radio would play the musical tastes, drawls, twangs and other regional accents specific to each area they drove through. Out on your space walk, you soon realize that these distinctly different telepathic 'signals' from the people far below you correspond exactly to the national borders and ethnic enclaves you're flying over - even though there are no visible borders or boundaries separating the concentrations of human settlements scattered over the landmasses below you.
You'd soon discover that the thoughts of the people within each national border and ethnic enclave all have the same inward focus and largely reflect that sub-group's particular zeitgeist (sense of the world). They would bear the imprint of whatever their leaders emphasized about the world (good and bad), and the most significant events, situations and circumstances (good and bad) that were happening within their particular group. Their own national pop culture happenings, celebrity gossip and major sporting events would be a collective sub-harmonic in all these telepathic 'signals', weaker in strength, yet still binding all together in consciousness within that particular group.
You'd soon come to realize that these collective thoughts are rather like group thought 'bubbles' that the whole mass of humanity is mentally encapsulated within. They largely determine who the people contained within each 'thought bubble' regard as friends, and who are considered enemies. Only the people on Earth far below you have no idea that so much of their thinking is influenced by their respective sub-group thought 'bubble', or how it keeps their attention focused inwardly within their own sub-group - rather than having a more outward planetary focus. From your perspective high above Earth, you can see more clearly how as a species; we've ghettoized so much of our thinking this way, separating ourselves out on inner levels of consciousness every bit as much as external borders separate us in the outer world.