The Global Village

With all the great advances in the technology and engineering of global telecommunications systems, it is often claimed that the world has become integrated and is now a “global village.” Is it really?

What’s a village? One definition states that a village is “a group of houses and associated buildings, larger than a hamlet and smaller than a town, situated in a rural area.” Therefore a village has a few hundred people, and there is a high degree of dependence among them, they know and mind each other. Their knowledge of, and their interest in, the outside world is limited and their concerns are primarily parochial. A village, by its very nature, is not an agglomeration of millions of people. That would be a modern metropolitan area, or a mega-city.

With all its amazing instant interconnectivity, the global civilization does not live in a global village. People live in villages, in towns, cities and mega-regions. But to think of the world as one huge village is conceptually wrong and has practical negative consequences if taken seriously.

Many otherwise competent thinkers have advocated some sort of world government. It’s a stupid idea at best and exceedingly dangerous to even try to bring it about. It is just some harmless delusion as long as it remains in the fecund imaginations of the few. But when too many people start believing in it, and even attempt to implement it, that’s when the nightmare becomes a reality. The horrors that humanity imposes on its own kind is nothing compared to what would be if the world were to become a “global village” under one global government.

I believe that the best way forward for humanity is to live freely in voluntary communities of like-minded people. They would be self-organizing and therefore will need little by way of governance. The type, extent and the nature of the government needed will be determined by the community.

The communities will be politically independent, and will choose the level of economic interactions with the rest of the world.

This idea of voluntary, politically independent, economically free communities needs a name. Let me call it “Post modern cities” or PMC. Someone may suggest something better in due course.

Most of the problems of the world are from people getting in each other’s way. The solution common to those is to separate people into self-selected groups living in PMCs.

How these post modern cities will be implemented I will consider later. But first I will go into the why of PMCs. I am against the idea of the political union of hundreds of millions of people, or nation states. They lead to all sorts of problems. These nation states compete militarily and economically. With PMCs, we can do away with nation states, national governments, and all the stupidity that comes from them. Competition could then be channeled purely into the market place.

Nation states and nationalism is a bad idea in the modern world.