21 - NATIONS
Nations are the largest and most powerful institutions of our automatic reality. They were not planned by intellect as sensible institutions necessary to the humane functioning of world society. They originated in that animal necessity which seeks to establish and defend a territory large enough to support the family, group or tribe. Nations were enlarged by competitive aggressive conflict between leaders for dominance. They were given organised form by the worst instinctive features of humanity; a pecking order in which the majority were subjugated and suppressed by a self-interested and often tyrannical minority.
The borders of nations, or groups of similar nations, were originally determined by natural barriers such as mountains, rivers and seas. Within their national borders, cut off from contact with other nations, people acquired physical and cultural differences which made them strangers, easily persuaded that they were enemies of each other, like different species. At the same time the major automatic influence on the whole civilisation process gave virtually all peoples the same advancing Machine. Whilst the competitive money economy largely rules the relationships of nations, and of people within nations, the long moral struggle between humanity and the Machine has brought a kind of human unity to some degree within nations, and even a small degree of unity between certain nations (e.g. the European Community.) The need for unity is urgent, but this process has been too slow and limited. We do not have further centuries to wait, and in any case there is evidence that even this slow progress will not continue. Civil disturbances in many countries suffering economic recession have indicated a breakdown of national unity, revealing that it was falsely based and fragile.
When the natural barriers between nations were overcome by technological advances in means of transport by land, sea and then air, the result was commerce, interchange by way of trade; an economic struggle of nation against nation, according to the rules of the competitive money economy. But this advance of civilisation did not break down human cultural barriers. In keeping with the worldwide competitive concept, peoples nurtured, inflated and defended their differences of language, habit and appearance. The majority of individuals had lost much of their sense of personal identity because of subjugation, but they could partially regain it through a sense of national identity, under their national flag. This explains the phenomenon of men willingly fighting for a governing authority which cruelly oppresses them. It represents human development in an opposite direction to that which is truly proper to an intellectual race.
Human individuals may be beginning to see that they, morally and intellectually, must take responsibility for humanity, regardless of nation. But the preference for the national interest works against this, and is a habit hard to overcome. This habit consists of not only patriotic loyalty but also fear of the consequences of disloyalty, summed up by the maxim 'if you are not with us, you are against us' - fear of ostracism, loss of privilege, or painful reprisals. For instance the German people, despite private misgivings, fought for Hitler's cause because he made it Germany's cause, a cause which the great majority of other peoples, once the nature and threat of it was realised, everywhere abhorred. Patriotism is fortified by the human wish to identify the self with something stronger than self, in the name of which one can willingly and voluntarily act without regard to the still small voice of conscience.
The fundamental reason why separate nations still persist is that they fill the roles of chief opponents in the general worldwide competition. The money economy needs them just as it needs supply and demand, profit and loss, rich and poor, and the Machine needs them as major protagonists in this conflict. Autonomous, sovereign nations subject to this automatic system make acceptable the unacceptable - the existence side-by-side of very prosperous and very poor nations. Both are isolated, with no protective higher authority to appeal to, so that the poorest have no recognised claim on the richest but appear to have only themselves to blame, and the richest have no obligation to share their good fortune. Should it come to war between them the whole world, subject to the same system, may press for peace on humanitarian grounds, but, until more recently through the United Nations Organisation, has had little or no moral authority or power to insist on it.
Just as in personal terms intellation is a matter of supraconsciously following true reason, often against instinctive and economic self-interest, so in collective terms it is a matter of caring for the well-being of all humanity, against the preferment of national interests. The fact of the existence of separate nations is of significance and service only to the competitive Machine. National divisions are a prime cause of man's inhumanity to man. The existence of nations is of no value or assistance to the cause of humanity as a whole.
Pt.IV REVELATION
AUTOMATIC CONTROLS
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