Astronauts on the International Space Station look down at night and see cities.
They look down during the day and see continents.
At no time do they see countries.
Countries are a fiction taught to us from a very early age, as part of a religion called 'Statism'.
At school we're taught about interesting people, outfits, cultural dishes and geography, all things which are fascinating and true; then we're taught to assign these cultural practices and languages to a coloured rectangle and the name of an imaginary area called 'Finland' or 'Venezuela' or 'Zaire'.
If it can be brought into existence or destroyed by simple agreement, then it doesn't exist; it's just a mental construct.
Now don't get me wrong, you love your country, and that's okay.
I love my marriage; but neither your country nor my marriage exists in any real sense.
Nobody's job ever caught fire. Nobody's marriage ever fell overboard in a storm. We might talk about them being stolen or lost, but this is just borrowing phrasing from the real world and applying it to our mental constructs.
If it stops existing when you stop believing in it; it's not real.
When I say I love Australia, I'm talking about a continent which was formed a long time ago by powerful geological processes. The thing astronauts see.
I'm not talking about a make-believe entity "formed" by a small group of old men in 1901. Nobody's ever seen that 'Australia', no matter how strongly they believe in it.
I'm open to being proven wrong. If you can demonstrate that there's actually a country on this beautiful continent, please do so.
There are buildings, people, vehicles, signs, uniforms and guns; but they're only evidence that people believe there's a country here.
Children's letters to Santa aren't evidence for Santa; they're evidence for widespread belief in Santa.
So when an Australian like myself notes that some others have hallucinated a country on his continent, and demanded he obey them or leave; it's only right and fitting to point out that there's nothing to leave, since their country doesn't actually exist in any real sense.
It's a religious construct, and I'm an apostate.
If the local Catholic church came looking for your tithe; claiming your house is in their parish/diocese or some other such fanciful geographic designation, you'd recognise their demand as baseless and tell them to pound sand.
Now, if they had the means and willingness to physically attack you, remove you from your house, auction it to the highest bidder and leave you homeless, you might choose to pay the tithe; but you'd recognise it for the robbery it is.
They'd blather on about the services the church offers, ironically including it's care for the homeless, and the 'free' schooling offered/required, and maybe your children would in this way be indoctrinated into sharing a belief in the diocese; they may even grow up to become tithe enforcers, but it would still be imaginary.
Politicians don't believe in countries.
If there's an invading army on the way and your house isn't strategically relevant in defense of the capital, there won't be a single soldier sent to your aid.
You know this to be true as you're reading it. While politicians and military brass present themselves as indispensable organisers of a strong 'National' defense, they're using their carefully cultivated belief in 'countries' to lure your sons away from their actual homes and families, to fight and die in defense of the chambers, robes and fancy chairs in the capital.
You get the downside of your belief in countries, they get the upside.
Even presupposing the existence of countries, the underlying threat has always been that you'd be worse off for actually leaving, as your licences and permits will offer limited to no benefit elsewhere, so you'll need to start over.
"You can always leave, but your earning capacity stays here" is a less than generous offer, and not by accident.
This is why they get so riled up about decentralisation. It makes a mockery of the concept of countries.
Your Uber driver reputation follows you from place to place, with no concern for borders, as does your crypto stash.
Every day they lose a little more ability to credibly claim that we need them to organise and authorise things.
- I'll hire an unlicensed plumber with a five star reputation over a guy with all the tickets and no online presence.
- My postal address is horribly cumbersome compared to my what3words address; because the latter has no interest in breaking the world down into countries.
- 3D printing means even physical goods ignore customs checkpoints.
- Home cooked, home delivered food will be next; and with a worldwide platform comes a worldwide reputation, and worldwide earning capacity.
Decentralisation forces them to either actively compete with each other for a finite number of taxpaying citizens, or to exert more onerous exit requirements, undermining that, 'You can always leave' mantra.
It's time to abandon the concept of countries. It's been hideously expensive, and they never existed anyway.
