Small States and the World

One place Religion and the Enlightenment worked together was in turning upside down the gradation of values in human nature. The world was placed at the top of human valuation and the small group, the small state, at the bottom, by both idealism and rationalization.

Human nature places the small group, the small state, above the world, genetically or instinctively. This does not mean that the world is not important to survival but that human nature is far less bonded to the world than to the small group.

This transvaluation may have been done out of ignorance in some cases but it was also exploited by those who gained hierarchical power from insisting on non-hierarchical world values. For example, both Lenin's communism and global capitalism insisted on an globalist value system, which needed a dictatorship to make it happen, until the world could think globally, a time that never came.

Kin-centric, ethnocentric and region-centric human nature can be denied, even forcefully, but that will not make human nature go away. Repressing or suppressing it will bring all kinds of problems and exploitations. Better to have a sociopolitical system which declares that the world may be important to ultimate human survival, but if it excludes the small group, the small state, the world will fall apart, back to small states and small groups.  History shows this to be true.

Competition is not evil, but cooperative competition is needed. Those who insist on a noncompetitive, non-hierarchical world end up forcing the world to be unequal, ruled by an unequal hierarchy. Better to have many hierarchies, many small groups, many small states, guarded by a light federalism. This does not go against real human nature. Then we can all get on with evolution.