As great as free press and democracies are, they also come with huge weaknesses. Those make it easy for foreign propaganda to influence the public and hence run the countries from outside. Thanks to The Great Firewall and the CCP rule, China is mostly immune to foreign propaganda. At the same time, China is using a lot of effort to affect countries with democracy and free speech, like India and the U.S. China is obvi…
Seeing free speech as an impediment to nationalist competition is rich. Nationalist competition appears to corrode every civil liberty and thing that makes life worth living that we have. What if we had international cooperation instead of a death match? I guess certain business people would not make as much money.
What do you mean by nationalist competition? Nations competing against each other?
>What if we had international cooperation instead of a death match?
Cooperation for what? Different people value different things. Different cultures even more so. You cannot have cooperation unless everyone is on the same side of every issue in the same degree.
If we had that level of agreement, we would not survive, not for long anyway. Let me explain:
Almost all of politics (or religious sects for that matter) is about how we use the resources we have. If there are multiple ways of using the resources, there have to be people who disagree and want different ways of using the resource. That slows us down, which helps us understand the cost/benefits of different ways of doing things. That also keeps options open... so if we find problems with the prevalent way, we won't have to start over. Other groups will already have understood the alternative ways and made some progress that others can join... once they sacrifice the leader who led them the "wrong way", of course.
Nations are just another level of doing this thing on a global scale. Nations should do things differently, so that the world as a whole is more robust.
>I guess certain business people would not make as much money.
Ironically, it's certain business interests which have tried to make the world homogenous. That helps them scale their business in the most efficient way. They value efficiency more than robustness. George Soros, founder of the Open Society Foundations, is an example of a person who religiously believes in removing all inefficiencies due to nation states... and has been using his billions of dollars for that cause. I think that is dangerous. It's not different from finding "superior people", inbreeding them and killing everyone else for being inferior. That wouldn't make them superior. That would make them fragile. It's the same for nations.