A New World Order?

Back in the 1980s, I was taking a course from the Industrial College of the Armed Forces and there was a section dealing with the advancement of human development and government.  It offered a fairly good thesis on the evolution from family groups, to extended family groups, to tribes, then on to city-states, nation-states, and empires.  The final section dealt with the potential advancement from nations to the concept of a unifying world government, perhaps as envisioned by those visionaries who created first the League of Nations and then the United Nations as a means to end the global conflict and the devastation from the advancement of technology and man’s cruelty towards their fellow men.

Of course, this was not a psychology course, so any discussion of the psychological implications was nonexistent, and since my degrees dealt with the human psyche I tended to look at the evolution from that perspective.  The one question I kept asking myself was how would we overcome the human traits that were first outlined for me in Exodus 20:2-17.  These include greed, envy, disrespect for others and their property, sloth (or laziness), and pride.  To this list, you may add anger, hate, fear, and self-indulgence and unimaginable cruelty. 

This seems important, for our history is filled with examples of nations which have risen to greatness, some lasting for a thousand years or more, but ultimately fail due to our human weaknesses.  As we become “more advanced” in our knowledge has our thinking evolved to resolve those human issues?  If we are to evolve into a global sized government how will those human qualities affect the average citizen?

Since that time in the 1980s global communication has evolved significantly.  Our (the average American’s) view of the world used to be filtered through the printed word, or brief broadcast snippets.  Then came 24/7/365 broadcast news but as we come to discover those channels make a conscious effort to tailor their content to support an agenda they wish to push.  Finally, we have the world wide web of things and social applications, but they too filter and screen the information to fit their narrative.

It appears to me that with all the advances in communication we are moving not towards a unifying world view but are fracturing even further than we have in the past.  Now, instead of nations where the majority share a common view of their roles and responsibilities we are beginning to regress to city-states or even tribes where smaller and smaller groups are demanding their independence from the overarching government.

We see in the United Nations, and its subordinate organizations the political decisions based on those same human frailties’.  The promise of personal wealth corrupts those charged with guiding their organizations to advance the human condition, and seldom are they held responsible by those who have appointed them.

At this point in time that future utopia so often envisioned by science fiction writers seems a lot less likely than the darker future envisioned by Dante and the apostle John in his book of Revelation.