When humanity is cut down to it's most basic concept I think we are all in essence slightly smarter chimps. The basic primal instict of our ancestors still shows through in our every day activies, our thought, feelings and actions at least, to some degree. I don't think this can really be argued about any more.
One of these insticts is to be part of a group or a "tribe". In earlier times people were part of literal tribes, then eventualy we formed village's, these turned to city states and eventualy small groups of towns and cities linked together we would call kingdoms. We grew and spred our reach in many different groups but all the while the groups were getting bigger as peoples united and realised a common history.
While once Ireland was diveded in to many tribal areas and people from different areas of the country would hold a grudge to one another. The Irish are much more willing to all be called "Irish" and see people from other larger tribes now as different.
This begs the question: "Do we need an enemy to unite?" I think that the basic instics all humans posses certainly make it much easier to unite people against a common enemy than support for a common good, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.
Eventualy humanity is going to get to the point where we need to unite as humanity, I don't think we will come in to conact with aliens any time soon just quietly so before we get to this stage it needs to be understood that we must unite for good.
Humanity is now slowly staring to up the size of our "tribes" again. The soviet union and NATO were what I believe to be an early attempt at this, wether we realised we were doing it or not.
But now with things like the European Union, NAFTA, the African Union and such trans-continental groups that co-oparate on such a scale I think it is only a matter of time before people start describing themselfs as "European, North American or African" rather than "French, Canadian or Liberian".
Part of this process involves persuading the public to embrace multi-culturalisim. But as has been proven in many countries, this is much easier said than done. Imigrants will naturally look for people of similar descent to them to live around. Who wouldn't? People who understand your slang and the food you eat would make you feel much more secure than trying to intergrate into a bunch of people who are a different colour and who would always ask things like "where are you from?"
Australia is at the point right now where there is a great deal of imigrants living in the country but still small enough that the local culture is reasonably well preserved. What do you think of the idea of Australia closing it's borders to imigrants until a majority of the worlds countries are also at a similar level of ethnic diversity.
I do however think the boarders should be kept open for New Zealanders, some Pacific Nations, PNG and refugees of the African decolanisation process. I feel that we share a reasonably similar culture and history with these people and embraceing our friends just helps us to ease into the process of reopening boarders in the future.
Obviously tourisim would work as it always has and the ban wouldn't affect people with a university degree and would infact be made easier for people like doctors, IT specialists and other high demand jobs. Nor would it affect students wishing to study University here, the country has many world class education facilities and the money made from international students plays a decent part in the economy.
People who finish with a degree in certain fields would be given the option to apply for citizenship.
I understand that these easiest political ideals to push on people are often the simplest ones that can be summed up into a few words so every idiot can understand it. This is a complicated issue but I hope that the people here have the patients to read and try to understand this idea that can't be so easily summed up. What do you think?
I wrote this while high and read it sober and now I am reading it high again and I think I am on to something.
Comments
How can you defeat such an enemy???
I don't disagree with you at all actualy. Humanity certainly seems to be heading that way for now. But I still think there are enough people out there who are just smart enough to go "Camping in Norway" should shit ever get seriously bad.
Western culture fails in many ways that give other cultures an advantage, things like childcare and eldercare are less expensive for other governments, because those cultures did not suffer the effects of the "me first" generations. Children and old people need taking care of, it is much less expensive if your culture encourages multi generation families to live in the same home. The old take care of the young, everyone else works. I would rather eat cold shit on toast than live like that, but it is very efficient. In other words, we need immigration, and a growth based economy because we are culturally inefficient.
Evolution, baby...
I'm on it.