Orion Digest №5 — A Need for United Nations

The nations of Earth that exist today are built on thousands of years of human civilization, layer after layer showing ambition and theory put to the test of time. Looking back through history, we see a database of strategies and answers to many fundamental questions about how a society runs. Save for new technologies and discoveries, in most avenues of politics, you can find an example of something that has in some way, shape, or form, been tried before.

Thus, you’d expect us to be a wise set of nations, who can govern Earth in harmonious peace and wisdom. But we don’t appear to be there quite yet. With all those lessons from history, we also draw back a very layered social consciousness, consisting of fears, tensions, and anxieties that hold us back and divide us more often than they unite us. If one were to take an outsider’s view of the Earth, they would see a planet initially abundant with resources and space for life, whose species split into factions over perceived barriers, and preceded to fashion a system that kept them divided and working against each other. As far as we know, we are alone in the universe, which means that the only enemies we have are those we create.

This becomes dangerous when issues arise that, regardless of your nation or identity, threaten your well-being and ability to to live in a comfortable status quo. The year 2020 introduced us to a single disease, COVID-19, which spread like wildfire across the world and resulted in panic and shutdown in nearly every nation it touched. While we survived, we are still feeling and reeling from the effects, and its clear that there was a disconnect in policy. Where some countries were able to contain and properly protect their citizens from the virus, others saw millions die due to mismanagement.

COVID-19 is a great example of how international crises can arrive out of the blue, and threaten even our modern international society. Natural disasters and pandemics are rather common, and our industrial ambitions have led to irreversible climate change that, as time goes on, will change the very world we live in into one we might not be able to survive. Going further, cosmic events could easily threaten the Earth — should a unforeseen asteroid come hurtling out of the abyss and into our planet, a devastating solar flare fry much of our circuitry, or the shield of debris above our planet turn into a death trap for any who try to leave our orbit.

Some of these we can help, some we can’t. But if the Earth and its people face issues that concern all of us, it is only logical that we should all have input and come together to focus on those decisions. Working them out separately divides our time and resources, and leaves our fellow humans to deal with a problem we could help them solve. It could also cause efforts to come into conflict with each other — if one nation was preventing movement into the country but another nation allowed it, the disease could be transmitted more frequently from the former to the latter, because they didn’t coordinate their policy.

Multiple nations working on one issue can also allow for the use of specialization — instead of each nation working on the same components of an issue over and over again, each nation is assigned to a part of the entire task at hand, with all members collaborating at completion. I could imagine this function being used possibly less for emergencies and more often for more positive projects like space travel and technological development, with the ISS being a prime example. Piece by piece, different nations contributed their own components to the station, building a landmark of human engineering that still operates today as a global laboratory.

The more we cooperate and collaborate between nations, the more influence this can have on relations. Any relation, from the smallest set of humans to the largest conflict between nations can be improved with trust and understanding. Much conflict in the world today comes largely from an inability to grasp the motives and logic of the other party, with each side believing that they are right, and not that they both approach the side carrying a specific reasoning tailored to their own situation. The better you understand how your opponent thinks, and why they think that way, the more you can relate to them, and use less offensive actions when your agendas are in conflict.

World peace may be an idealistic goal, but that should never mean it is one we should not strive for. If we look at the way the world is and conclude that coexisting with each other is not truly possible, it will be true only because that is what we have convinced ourselves of. As we stand in the present, we know more than all who came before us by virtue of them coming before us, and those who live tomorrow will know even more than us. With that knowledge, it is not merely a fantasy to say that one day, we will use what we know to foster cooperation and goodwill among the nations of the Earth.

To start, however, we have to have a strong system between all the nations of Earth, consisting of nations that coordinate and cooperate with each other to deal with disasters that threaten people across the Earth, from war and terrorism to climate change and natural disaster. We need nations that can realize mutual prosperity is more important than petty differences in ideology and identity, and that can subordinate their egos and work together on issues that truly matter. We need to have a baseline for rights and freedoms for the people of the world, to ensure that no one government robs our fellow humans of that which is fundamentally necessarily to live in the global society we have created.

- DKTC FL