Back at client site work. I heard that while I was home in AZ I missed out on a flu that passed through the workplace. It makes me wonder how fast these diseases spread across the nation, and whether the east-coast flu is a different strain from the west-coast flu, and whether or not it is the same way in other large blocks of populated land in the world which experience less travel.

This week my end-client PM has seemed happy to see our progress (albeit stressed about the deadlines). Also, the end client PM has been taking an increasingly active role in understanding the details about our progress, which is not an easy task for such a complex design. That person is a good PM.

Early this week I was thinking about the nation state, and its value. I wanted to summarize my thoughts, but the summary has taken a few days to put together because I've been researching about these ideas as I go, and I keep having to rethink my conclusions. The observations and suggestions here, I realize, come from an approach to world politics which worldly people may think is naive... but I've read a few books on this subject, and I've taken time to empathize with a few different perspectives incompatible with my own or with each other (and I still disagree, though I less see the proprietors of those views as silly).

To be clear, I do not argue as some do that nation states are a new concept. Nor do I argue that they only serve to progress the motives of some malevolent party. I think that the modern world is technically capable of organizing itself in a way other than by nation states, maintaining the benefits of the nation state but overcoming its inherent disadvantages. This capability, I think, is a novelty afforded by modern technology and by the increasing wealth of historical insights we now have into the successes and failures of governments past. The change in perspective necessary to imagine such a world is so radical that I myself find it difficult not to revert to my normal way of thinking as I attempt to articulate my thoughts.

I. To start off, I'll give my estimation of the purpose which national distinctions serve.

A. They isolate economies, which enables large quantities of wealth to be generated with integrity in spite of widespread and not-immediately-curable poverty or corruption in other parts of the world, which would otherwise affect the value of a ubiquitous currency.
B. They serve to establish conventional boundaries so that a people group can expect to be taxed, penalized, and protected by a specific code of governmental law, as established by the local populace, and none other.
C. The conventional boundaries also allow for neighboring people groups to agree to defend one another, or to cease fire with one another, on readily identifiable terms, despite the fact that they are under separate legal systems.
D. They segregate and protect cultural practices

In short: They satisfy (and enable) the political self-consciousness of an ethnic or ideological community which exercises control over a physical territory.

II. Now, I attempt to identify a few issues with the modern conception of a nation state, with the U.S.A as my frame of reference. There are other issues, but these are the ones which interest me.

A. The persistence of the government is widely believed to be dependent on the support of the entire people group (and, in its current form in the U.S., this is so). However, the government is only capable of representing a subset of the people, and so the other subset is by necessity subjected to laws which it believes are unjust. The execution of unjust law on an unwilling people is tyranny. The out-of-power party is not always unwilling, but I think that it's safe to say that it complies either for fear of penalty (duress), or for hope that their party will come to power and resolve the issue. There's eventually a tipping point where the injustice is viewed as so egregious that the penalty no longer functions to incentivize compliance, or the ruling party established such perceiveably unjust laws in such a way that they cannot be overturned by any legal or reasonable means. (This is not the case with Obama care specifically, because the law can be easily repealed if only the right wing would agree on a strategy. However, the legislative process in the U.S. increasingly exemplifies the issue).
B. The nation state ultimately defines a people group by the land where they live, which (I submit) is not a relevant measurement of the cultural or ideological identity of a population. As a result, the ideals (especially political) of any specific ideological group are never truly tested in full, and so all parties are necessarily unsatisfied, and the merits of a party's proposed system can never be discovered in truth. (This is similar to my objection to the university's pretense in attempt to present neutral information, but it is an unrelated topic).
C. The nation state sees any loss of land as a national loss affecting all parties in the nation, but especially threatening the survival of the government thereof. Because of "A", this is often a valid fear. Thus national borders are inflexible, which, when innovative ideologies take hold of the population of some area of land causing them to desire independence (see also "A"), the resolution seems to commonly require a civil war. (For the record, I know I said that the U.S. was my frame of reference, and so I want to say that I do not agree with the ideals of the confederate south as I understand them, or the north necessarily for that matter.)

In short: After the establishment of the nation state by a people group, the people group may move or change, and the land controlled by that ideological community may change, but the nation remains associated with the physical location rather than the people or representative ideological community which established it.

III. Now, I'll present an alternative system.

........I wrote and rewrote this section several (5+) times over the past few days. Some of my ideas were very long, some short. A few times I ended up just describing the world map, or the United States, because I was trying to establish a system where any group could identify as a state and govern themselves according to their own preferences. The issue with that is that it's basically establishing nations again. And, no matter what system I describe, it is likely that the whole world will not agree to it at once, and so its people will be identified by the land they occupy, and its neighbors will regard its physical boundaries with respect to their own borders.

So I finally resolved that the truest expression of my idea is a state where any part of it may choose to leave without consequence, and any part of a foreign nation, bordering or not, may choose to join and abide by the nature of the new state without question. Now, considering this carefully, I realized that what I had just described was a religion. In the first millennia, Christians around the world claimed Christ as king and were executed in large numbers for following Biblical law in priority over local law. Even today, the Christian conscience is penalized in places which do not allow public reading of scripture, and "hate speech" legislation, wherein "hate" is defined by people with self identity issues so deep that they reject the physical reality of their own bodies and sue others who openly disagree with them about their arbitrary self identification, poses a similar threat in America.

In the end, what I present is ultimately what I believe. Furthermore, borders are inescapable because property ownership is natural and Biblical. Physical property (including land, clothing, our bodies, and the food in your mouth) has physical borders around it; it takes a fixed space in the cosmos. What I propose is that we, Christians, preach the gospel of repentance and belief in Jesus, that we live according to our Christian convictions, and that we do not incorporate nationality, race, or culture into our identity in any way which would segregate us.

Here's my understanding of the Biblical judicial system prior to Israel's rejection of God as king by the establishment of the monarchy:

In any given community of at most 10 adult individuals, let a judge be established according to whoever they respect, and let the community resolve their disputes in accordance with the determinations made by that judge. Let the judges only resolve disputes when they are called upon to do so, and if the victim drops charges then let the judge honor the victim by foregoing penalty on the perpetrator. Let the judges be limited in their penal determinations by a *short* (as in, fits on your bookshelf) written code given by a higher authority (and since all men are equal, no man or group of men can be regarded as a higher authority above the judges. So, the code must be issued by God Himself, that is, the Bible). In any community with at most 10 judges, let a higher judge be elected according to who the judges themselves respect. For each tier of judges, if there is at most 10, then let a higher judge be elected for the ten. So, in a community with 10,000 people, there will be 1000 tier 1 judges, 100 tier 2 judges, 10 tier 3 judges, and perhaps 1 tier 4 judge. The function of the higher judges is to resolve disputes among judges, to receive appeals from individuals in lower court at their own discretion, and to take on cases which a lower judge feels that he cannot determine because it is too difficult. When a judge is called upon and makes a determination, and the determination is not appealed, and the determination contravenes no clear teaching in the written law, the community must accept and respect it. If the nation is threatened by some external army, let the defending army be composed only of volunteers who join in that moment to love their neighbor by defending his or her property, and let them trust God to do what is right in the battle, so they must only enter battle for causes which are righteous and worthy of God's favor.

So, to conclude, basically I'm advocating the Biblical government prior to the instantiation of the Israeli monarchy, and even if I'm wrong about the details, I will advocate the correct details when I am corrected. The issue with this proposition is that such a government can only prosper with God's blessing, because it's easy to take advantage of it by ignoring the moral indictments in scripture, for which there are no civil penalties, and so the whole populace must trust God to protect their freedoms. So prior to any truly free and good system being established, all people must repent of their idols and believe the Gospel.

"Good night"