On Global Perspective

Humans are not good at thinking about the long term, and that's not good for our species. Responsible voters, responsible citizens, ought to train themselves to identify long-term problems that aren't immediately visible to themselves. It is the duty of every man and every woman to educate themselves on matters of their entire species, of their planet at large. Once upon a time, humans lived in isolated tribes, which with agriculture allowed cities and towns, countries, kingdoms, nations, entire peoples. They all had some neighbors, with whom they always traded with and went to war with. We didn't know what our entire planet looked like. Our history has always looked like this, with each group of humans hypothesizing divine creation in isolation in the cosmos. Ever model in history we have is based off of this.

However, limiting ourselves to short-term thinking is a luxury we no longer have. As our planet becomes increasingly unified, we understand with international travel that the emergence of a deadly disease (like Ebola, H1N1, MERS, SARS, etc) has the ability to spread much more rapidly. Things that could once wipe out only a community, can now pose a threat to entire species.

It is the same with economies. Greece falling might trigger Spain or Italy to fall, then Ireland, and Portugal, and then France, and finally Germany. Once all of Europe has fallen, the chain reaction can sustain itself across our ever so connected global economy. 

I get it. We're wired to respond to threats when you're at a cafe in a Shia neighborhood and a bunch of angry young Sunnis start screaming and go pop. You're wired to respond to threats like when an airplane gets flown into a tower a nuclear plant is leaking radioactive waste into the ocean. But we don't see the large, abstract threats. It's why we saw everything leading up to the 2008 crash, and many people recognized it for what it was, but everyone kept at it, business as usual, until the inevitable happened. Why? Because it wasn't an immediate, tangible threat. 

While many will look at Greece and dismiss is at as irrelevant, far away land, the fact is that no matter where you are in the world, the actions this country takes can and will effect you. And no matter how much you know this, or don't know this, you have to understand that on some level, you aren't wired to handle this. Our species has not had to face problems on such a scale before, at any time in their existence. The worst disease we ever knew of, the Black Death, only wiped out people on one continent, long before the age of automobiles and airplanes. 

We are not wired to think about, or even address problems such as this one:

The kind of problems we face now are truly unique, there is nothing in our histories, in our stories of Gods and Heroes, that can show us the way, because no civilization in our history has faced the problems we are coming upon. We are pioneers of our own right, treading into an unknown, where the decisions we make will reverberate throughout time. For all we know, several civilizations of ours have made it to this point before, and making the wrong decision as one society can mean consequences for our entire species.

I can't stand hippies any more. I hear so much bullshit and drivel from them about how we are "one species" and we need more of a "one consciousness", which largely comes out to being Marxist indoctrination wrapped up in new age feel good bullshit [I need to find a better synonym for bullshit here], yet they're incapable of actually being anything they espouse with such a passion. Change requires sacrifice. Change requires effort. For most of our species existence, change required a large body count.

Be wary of anyone who merely talks about global idealism, and stresses the importance of it, without being able to actually practice it. To really adopt the identity of a global species, we have to pay attention to events that happen across our entire planet. We ought to know what wars are going on, and why. We should know how the game of politics and geopolitics is played.

Part of our responsibility as citizens is identifying what we, as a species, do well and not well, and to face uncomfortable truths. From those truths, we take action. It's time for our species to take a critical look at itself, in a new light, and actually try to forge a way forward in a way that will preserve the species, to preserve life, in the long term. It's not how we're wired to think, but it's how we have to train ourselves to think to survive a globalized, connected world. We have to turn our attention to problems that are slow burns, rather than huge explosions.