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You ever think about how borders and countries are just some extreme rich guy shit that we've all been trained to believe are real? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by DJDarren@beehaw.org to c/chat@beehaw.org

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Like, the only reason countries exist is because some rich guys decided that they ruled this chunk of land, and everyone else just kinda said "Yeah, whatever, I don't really give a shit, just let me farm and leave me the fuck alone".

Then the rich guy on the next bit of land said "I want a bit of what he's got going on", and before we knew it, all the bits of land were ruled by people who's only claim to them was that they were the first to have the idea.

Fast forward a few thousand years, and some of the bits of land are ruled by people who wear gold hats and spout a load of bollocks about divine right, while some of the bits of land are ruled by people who convinced the rest of the people to let them do it, and really, there's no difference between, like, France and Spain, but some old dudes drew a line and said "Nah, that bit speaks this version of a language, and that bit speaks another version of it".

You ever think about that?

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[–] LiesSlander@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah I have thought about it, how messed up the whole concept of borders are. They inevitably end up as dividing lines that cut people off from their territory or each other. Then the nation-states that enforce the borders work to create a reality that the borders make sense. Wars are fought, media is created, entire histories are erased!

The results are cataclysmic, as we are seeing now, with endlessly compounding crises. The politicians in this are complicit in everything, as are all the other members of the ruling class, but the real twist of the knife is that the rest of us are too. If we want any chance of survival we must give up our modern conveniences, living instead in a way that regenerates the Earth.

This is unthinkable to a great many people. So much infrastructure is built around a destructive way of life, it is hard to imagine how we could possibly live differently. Paradoxically, it is even harder to imagine how the current state of things can continue in the face of climate disater after climate disaster. We must learn to abandon existing structures of power, to think and act on smaller scales. Learning to live as part of our local environments will be the beginning of the lengthy process to restoring our planet, but it will take a great deal of work, from so very many of us.