Our main man in England Keith has just published his latest in a series of great “what if” articles. This time he tackles the idea of why we have countries and what would happen if they were all gone.

“What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can’t all be worth dying for.”

Catch-22, Joseph Heller, 1961

Can you feel the heat of competition growing, coming in from all sides and pressing on the borders of the country you live in? Are you feeling helpless as your government makes political decisions that damage the global environment; repress your ability to speak out and act as you feel compelled to do; compete in the white-hot global economy whilst the basic needs of its own people are driven by profit-based consumption which just keeps turning up the temperature?

Welcome to the world we live in.

Read this article here

Check out more of Keith’s stuff here.