indocrination "A system that had been ingrained for generations could not be easily undone." Yes I do turly understand you Babel fish.
The term 'world citizen' can be better understood with a negative definition than with a positive one. If a citizen of a state with political frontiers is expected to pay allegiance to the government of the state to which they belong and is expected to take arms against aliens who might invade the territory of the state, a world citizen recognizes the entire world as their state and in principle does not recognize any member of their own species as an alien to the world community to which you belong.
Yet here was born a tragic paradox, for the essence of democracy is universal participatory decision-making, whereas the essence of national sovereignty, a hangover from the feudalism and the absolute sovereignty of kings, is exclusivity and the non-participation of citizens outside the national boundary. Citizens "belonged" to the nation only while all humans outside that nation were "foreigners," or worse, "aliens."
Those who identified directly with the world of humans were considered starry-eyed idealists, utopians, sentimental humanitarians, impractical moralists, or simply crackpots. The only empirical world "citizens" were the pirates sailing freely on the open seas. Today, with virtually no distance and no time between humans, each person is the focus of a global input. Everything happening in the world affects us, sooner or later, each individual. With computers and satellites, the input to the individual has become fully supranational. So is it time to go back to the days of our forefathers and become pirates? ARRRRRRRRR! LOL
Last edited by Teacher; 09-18-2008 at 01:31 PM..
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