States Are the Problem: What Is the Solution?

States Are the Problem: What Is the Solution?

I’m beginning to believe that essentially all of the world’s problems result from the fact that we humans have organized ourselves into nations, into so-called sovereign states. With a few exceptions, human beings are not violent. With a few exceptions, we are not physically aggressive. With a few exceptions, we humans, left to our own devices, are not filled with hate. At least, human children are not born hating anyone. Nations are all of those negative things that most individual humans by far are not. Few, very few, of us will  voluntarily kill another human being. But when a government trains us to kill and sends us to kill, we kill any number of other human beings, against whom we have nothing personal, quite willingly. Why? I sure as hell don’t know. Governments portray doing it as an honorable duty. It’s a duty only because the government says it is, and it isn’t the least bit honorable. It is, in effect, murder sanctioned by one’s country. 

States pass laws that put unchecked power in their own hands and favor some people over other people. States pass laws that tell some people to kill other people and call it justice when all it amounts to is state-sanctioned murder. States have human societies spending obscene amounts of fiscal and human resources developing ever more effective ways of killing people, and they call it defense. It’s not defense, it’s investing in the means of killing large numbers of other human beings most effectively and efficiently. Nations compete with each other for political, military, and economic power whether the state having those things actually benefits people or not–and mostly it doesn't. Even, or maybe mostly, democratic governments pander to the people whose money puts and keeps them in power. In the US, the Republicans are shameless about doing it, though they lie and say their policies that benefit only the rich actually benefit everyone. The Democrats are more subtle about it, but they too need massive amounts of money to win elections, a truth that gives people with money tremendous power even over the Democrats. 

Is there anything to do about it? Probably not. Even if I could propose a better way of organizing human societies, there’s no chance that states are going to disappear soon. We can work to reform our state. In the US, we can try not only to defeat the MAGA fascists but to crush them and eliminate them as a political factor in our country. Those are worthy and necessary things to do. They will not, however, change the underlying social, economic, and political systems within which we must operate. So we’re pretty much stuck with what we’ve got.

Christianity warns us against nations, against sovereign states. That’s what the New Testament book of Revelation is about. It’s about the evil of the Roman Empire specifically. More generally, it is about the evil of every nation that operates in any way like an empire, which the US certainly does. No nation has ever existed that has come anywhere close to embodying the realm of God on earth. None has ever been truly nonviolent. None has ever adequately cared for “the least of these.” None has ever put the welfare of the world above what it perceives to be its own welfare. In other words, none has ever truly embodied true values, true morality. 

Christians cannot make any nation their ultimate concern. Neither, for that matter, can people of any other faith tradition. The world would be so different if people truly made God their ultimate concern. Not some nation. Not some theology, though I do think theology is really important. Not some institution be it secular or ecclesiastical. Not any person be that person a pope or a real or would-be dictator.Not their family. Certainly not themselves. Not to anything other than the utterly transcendent, perfectly moral God, Who is nothing but absolute love beyond human understanding. 

The world would be so much different if everyone really got it that love is all that matters. Love is all that makes life worth living. Love leads to nonviolence. Love leads to true justice. Love leads to true peace. God is love, and no ultimate concern other than love can lead us humans to overcome all of the evil to which we are so prone. 

And no nation, no state, has ever truly been organized and operated according to the ultimate concern of love. Some nations, some states, the United States more than most, claim to be good. Claim to be virtuous. Claim to stand for what is right and good. All of those claims are nothing but propaganda. They are nothing but lies designed to attract people’s commitment, people’s devotion, people’s willingness to perpetuate the myth of a country being something it is not and to commit evil acts of numerous kinds when the nation tells them to. 

Sure. Some states are worse than others. The United States is not Nazi Germany, though Donald Trump seems to want to make a sort of thin copy of Nazi Germany.. The United States is not the Soviet Union. The United States is not Idi Amin’s Uganda. It is not communist 

China. It is not North Korea or Vladimir Putin’s Russia. There are many countries with histories and/or present realities arguably worse than those of the United States.

None of which means that the United States is good. We have a history of genocide against Native peoples so bad that Hitler thought it meant we could not object to what he was going to do to the Jews. We have a history of centuries of slavery and more centuries of racism that we still have not overcome. Sinful white supremacy remains present and active among us fanned by Donald Trump and his fascist MAGA movement. We Americans, or most of us,buy the myth that we are the greatest country on earth. We aren’t, and we never have been.

My point is only this. The organization of human beings into nations, into states, may well be the cause of many if not most of the world’s problems today. If I could, I would not defend national borders, I would eliminate them or at least make them stop being the obstacles to human wellbeing that they so often are today.I don’t believe that there will ever be a world government nor am I convinced that a world government would solve our problems. After all, peoples and nations the world around have very different histories and cultures. World-wide human homogenization probably isn’t desirable or effective in eliminating humanity’s problems. 

So I don’t know what the solution is. Is there some way to get humans to see all other humans as their equals? As beloved children of God worthy of respect and care? Is there a way to get humans to live and work according to the principle of love rather than the principle of self? Is there a way to get people to understand that nonviolence is the way and that all violence is sinful? Is there some way to get Americans to stop idolizing Ronald Reagan and realize that the greed he claimed was good is actually evil? I wish I knew. 

My faith says I am supposed to have hope, but, frankly, I find hope a very difficult thing to find in this world. So I fight a feeling of despair that threatens to overwhelm me. I said in a sermon not long ago that God is our only source of hope, and I suppose that’s true. Still, that notion sometimes seems to be quite a thin reed to which to cling. Belief in some transcendent reality has been a factor in human civilization for as long as there have been humans, and the world is still the God-awful mess that it is. Yet it remains true that God is all we’ve got. So I cling to God, or try to. Doing so is enough, or so I try to convince myself. So be it.