WARS ARE US?

Kanak Sharma

Wartime 1945, drove many hard decisions. Made entirely by hand, the Nagasaki bomb, Little Guy, was fully loaded as it was installed into the airplane that carried it onto its path to the destruction of the Japanese city. The highly explosive plutonium, would go on to destroy the entire city killing thousands. Ever since this World War II massacre, the entire globe has been walking on eggshells when it comes to deploying nuclear power. So when North Korea’s Kim Jong-un refused to dismantle it’s the nuclear weaponry, there was a dead shock silence among the leaders with only the sound of their heavy beating hearts. 

Flash forward to 2016, Trump is now the President of the United States of America and the leader of the free world. Times have changed, and the threat of nuclear power has started to be recognized as only that – a threat. It is safe to say that we are living in the ‘best times’ in human history. More and more people die from eating more than eating less; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; more people die from suicides than war, crime or terrorism combined - effectively, you are your own worst enemy. You are most likely to kill yourself than anyone else killing you. And ironically, in some ways, the path to achieving this has ripped open an entire system in which we lived 30 years ago.

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What now seems more threatening is the sweeping nationalist tide over the world guided by the hypocritical activities of the “power nations”. The political spectrum of left or right is highly irrelevant and what is becoming more and more pertinent to the problem is the understanding that the mood of the public is swaying between globalization and nationalization. The political spectrum no longer has conservatives or liberals. The humans of the Earth want to live in a system of globalized economies and nationalized politics. The problem with that is that such kind of a disparate system just does not exist. People are losing a sense of their stories. For generations the human race has had a very pretty picture to paint for themselves (to what the Americans relate to as the ‘white picket fence’) - the economies should be globalized and the politics should be liberalized – and as we keep doing this, we keep moving closer and closer to the goal that everyone is racing towards. However, whether for good reasons or bad, people simply no longer believe in this story. Growing inequality in the world has led people to establish that this just isn’t effective anymore. 

Then, the natural human response to such a problem is this - For anything that doesn't work, let’s go back in time and do what we used to do. And so, you witness a series of retrograde perspectives on how the world should function – whether it’s the Trump slogan of Make America Great “Again”, Putin’s attempt to reestablish the “Tsarist Regime” or the construction of temples in Israel – that we did better back in the days, is simply the gut instinct of people. Albeit, this approach is fundamentally flawed. 

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Case in point: About 100 years ago, the Yellow river provided a home to Chinese settlers throughout its bank. These tribes would often get destroyed by the floods or droughts the river would throw at them. Through a long drawn out process, the settlers finally learned to get together and built a system to work with the river. Through canals and dams, they together controlled the river and thus functioned well. For a long, long time, the world functioned much like these river establishments in the form of nations. The issue now is that this river is no longer composed of water but technology. Across the globe, we are all living on the banks of the same internationalized cyber river, controlled, in parts, by individual nations. There is absolutely no global authority over this river. 

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All major problems of the world today, in essence, cannot be solved unless controlled at the global level. Take climate change for example. Unless there is no control over the global control of carbon particles, there is no way to stop the emissions. Take high risk, high gain technologies like bioengineering - controlling research activities in a single nation wouldn't work, simply, because any nation possessing the technology to develop such a technology WILL develop it at the risk of not falling behind the competition. The intrinsic feeling that arises is that the political system is broken and doesn't empower the ordinary person anymore – and sadly, this diagnosis of the political disease is astonishingly accurate. What is becoming more and more important today is to synthesize history with the underlying ideas. Technological development in areas of military, economic and political power have destroyed human belief in their own governments and those of other nations. And so, the question really here is, are we starting to hit reverse pedals and work our way to the era of highly centralized national governments or are we looking at a central global political power that will guide the human race out this self-created chaos?