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Let me ask you a question—tomorrow you have to go to war with New Zealand. I know, Kiwis are lovely people, but still, there's no getting out of it. But you have a choice-you get to have one ally. You can have a) Bulgaria or b) Microsoft. Country or corporation-take your pick.
Let me put it to you this way. Bulgaria has a gross domestic product worth 36 billion in US dollars, while Mircosoft is valued at 90 billion and has-according to 2006 numbers-an annual revenue of 44 billion. So yeah, trick question.
We live in a time when corporations are much more powerful than nations. We also live in a time when nations are not what they used to be. Right now, Ted Turner owns about two million acres of US land. One man, a private landholder, essentially owns Montana. Doug Tompkins, the one-time founder of Esprit turned environmentalist, now owns over two million acres in Chile (which he has turned into a national park).
Over the past few years, spurred by global food crisis, countries in both the Middle east and Asia have begun purchasing agricultural lands abroad to make up for shortages at home. Currently, over two-and-a-half million acres of the Congo; half a million hectares in Tanzania; a quarter-of-a-million hectares in Libya are owned by foreign countries. Not too long ago, the President of Madagascar was ousted because (among other things) he tried to sell off 1.3 million hectares to South Korea.
The internet has taken down communication borders, we're very close to an age of simultaneous translators (bringing down remaining language barriers), the current plight of the world economy speaks volumes as to how commingled our financial systems have become, and, thanks to immigration and intermarriage, we are moving towards all sorts of rainbow colors and racial mixes and, arguably and eventually, a world where everyone is about the same shade of light brown.
Here in the United States, for example and unless trends radically reverse, by 2042 we will cease to be a Christian nation. So religious barriers are falling as well.
In fact, all of the obvious categorical separations that once defined a nation-state are starting to fade. Unfortunately, our psychology-shaped by eons of evolution-is taking a while to catch up.
Social identity theory is our current model for explaining the psychology of "us versus them," which in many ways is the psychology of the nation state. Social identity theory teaches us that human beings, with very little prompting, split themselves into groups. The late Henri Tajfel and John Turner, the duo behind the theory, say that people naturally divide into an "in-group" and an "out-group. Sometimes these divisions are along lines like nation, race, color, language and religion, but they can just as easily be height or hair-color or some other triviality.
Evolutionary psychologists explain this by pointing out that for most of recorded history we lived in bands of about 150 people (which is why the human brain is built to recognize 150 people as friends/family and why most surveys of social networking sites like Facebook find that on average people have 150 friends they actually network with). These bands were most likely related.
Moreover, scientists have also found that people who share cultural similarities are more likely to be related than people who don't. In other words, forming and in-group and an out-group based on seemingly arbitrary distinctions might not be so arbitrary after all and could actually be a strategy for passing along one's genes.
Since cooperation is also fundamental to passing along one's genes, humans have developed a neat way to get past such inborn biases. University of Delaware psychologist Samuel Gaertner and Colgate University psychologist John Dovidio have done experiments showing that racial biases fade when mixed-race groups work together towards common goals.
Along these lines, Concordia University evolutionary behavioral scientist Gad Saad, writing in his PT blog Homo Consumericus not too long ago, pointed out that what it's going to take to unite our planet is a common enemy-essentially when the Martians attack-we'll band together to defeat the little green men.
The problem with all of this is that the Martians are attacking. We now face a variety of global threats. If South Korea had been successful in buying up Madagascar what happens when famine hits both places at once?
What happens when it spreads?
By 2025, according to well-verified UN figures, two-thirds of the world's population will face water shortages. And scientists are pretty much united in their opinion about the fate of the world if temperatures rise more than 4 degrees—united in believing that if that happens 90 percent of all people on the planet will perish.
James Lovelock, the man who found the ozone hole and helped solve that crisis, believes all we need is a two degree warming to accomplish this kind of mass die-off.
Which is to say, we are currently being attacked by little green men. We have a common enemy. We also have a tremendous amount of proof that the thing that's holding up the kind of global cooperation needed to battle back—what we roughly call "nationalism"—is a term that is almost entirely useless in defining anything beyond an arbitrary set of lines drawn on a map.
Scientists have also found that these artificial barriers between tribes are easily dissolvable with a little work—meaning we can take down the mental barriers separating us with a little will and a little practice.
And the time to start practicing is now. Bumper sticker or not, there's really no way around the fact that we really are currently one planet, one people, please.
And if we want to survive, it seems like we better figure out how to start acting like it.
