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vision of communism and our perception of it but chickened out. In more general terms, wasn't our own propaganda machine also compounding some of the post revolutionary rhetoric into something considerably more sinister than it actually was?
The end result was the same though - a race to try to get the biggest stick to keep everyone else in line.
I think it really goes back to this post industrial paroxysm we as a planet are experiencing, where our old geographical and cultural boundaries are being blurred, but not the ownership of resources, or the management of trade of those resources. In primarily agrarian cultures and heavily superstitious cultures it is much more difficult to evolve stable democracies from entrenched monarchies. The church and the monarchy (and cronies) own all the land in the former, but in an exuberantly capitalistic society, corporations end up owning all the land too.
When the industrial age developed, worker rights became an issue. When the press was used for more than printing bibles, communication of political ideas was done more readily. When anyone could own property or (theoretically) make choices about their lives that didn't involve subsistence farming for another generation, we began to have the groundwork for taking a drastic step away from social institutions like the Russian monarchy. In contrast, the Russian monarchy sought to tighten its grip and became even more disconnected from the very real people of Russia, with disasterous consequences for the monarchy, and created an opening for a political philosophy that was an opportunistic perversion of a social ideal.
All power seeks to remain in power, so churches don't like it when their members are gay and don't reproduce, and don't like it when sex is done for anything but procreation, and don't like birth control, and don't like their members marrying outside the faith.
Countries, sovereign monarchies, petty dictatorships, and grand democracies alike, don't like their "members" marrying outside their nationality. Don't like their members failing to make babies. Don't like their members not pledging blind allegiance to its symbols.
And all political philosophies, if they believe themselves to be superior, eventually seek to change competing philosophies to their own, so "co-existence" is always seen as undesirable, whether that is accomplished in short order by physical war, or over the longer term by economic war, or by controlling information.
The most obvious shortcut is to have weapons that can threaten large populations of civilians to give a nation the leverage it thinks it needs to enforce its own goals. I think the most obvious thing that would unite this itty bitty little planet to work cooperatively rather than competitively would be a global problem that doesn't impact resources (fuel, drinking water) but rather is an external problem that we have to work together at 100% capacity to overcome. A comet heading our direction, a verifiable signal from an alien civilization, a global catastrophe, a precipitous freefall decline in the human birthrate. It's not going to happen for free, and it's not going to happen without a reason to look at the planet and our species as a whole through different eyes, and that means we do indeed have ages of interregional conflict ahead of us.
We're now building our own bio-weapons and chemical weapons programs again. We are once again talking about nuking a civilian population. We are allowing mind boggling trade warfare to trounce us in the form of China so that a few American corporations and individuals will profit at the expense of the many, and so that we can hide our war debt in new borrowing and trade offs.
One thing is certain, we cannot achieve peace in an arms race. We cannot force political, cultural evolution and economic change by having the most weapons. Texas doesn't have nuclear weapons ready to lob at Oklahoma because we're essentially a loose federation of open border interdependent states. That basic model HAS to grow to be universally global or we will be chasing nuclear weapons programs and decrying egregious human rights violations until the end of time.
It would be nice if someone gave us a realistic roadmap though, wouldn't it.
/insane ramble
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