I’m serious. I don’t understand why humans draw imaginary bidders. I don’t understand why humans fight and lose their lives defending those borders. It’s not “cultural identity”. For example, people in either side of Punjab are more similar to each other than say people in the South of India. And further, i don’t understand how countries can be bought and sold like the “Louisiana purchase”. I mean who’s paying for what? It would be great if someone could recommend some books about the idea of nationhood.
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It’s the end result of an incremental process. As nomadic hunter gatherers, we learned which areas were more productive and better hunting grounds, and being an inherently selfish and short sighted species, we drove off any family groups or tribes we viewed as competitors. When we moved on to early agrarian societies the same thoughts applied. This is our land and our crops and our cattle, and you can fuck right off if you think you’re going to take it. These societies formed borders, evolved into feudalistic type cultures, some merged and amalgamated others, and the idea of “fuck off, this is ours” was really only internalised by the ruling class. A peasant doesn’t really give a fuck who his overlord is, providing he gets treated the same, but the tribalism remained ingrained in the common people. Foreigners were seen as inferior, barbaric, stupid, rude etc, and this is still obvious even within homogeneous societies today. Nearly any country in the world will have some level of “the next town over is full of criminals and crackheads” or some level of “country folk vs city folk” and the attitude just gets turned up to eleven when it’s people from another country.
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