Right, let's Make Greece Great Again. I'm wondering if countries are even where it's at anymore. We're living in a globalized world - in some ways the UN is now a super-power - or at least a vessel to be inhabited by historical power. Even when empires decline, the power doesn't evaporate - it goes somewhere.

Interesting insight.

a vessel to be inhabited by historical power

I had a vision last night while I couldn't sleep, and I normally wouldn't describe something like this on a public forum, but it's relevant to your comment and Terence McKenna once said, I can't remember the clip I heard it in but maybe this is it, that he'll never keep a secret. He'll tell everything, and so I'll spill the beans in his memory.

But now that I've over sold it --

I was basically experiencing humanity, all of us, on the earth, going about our days, feeling the hardship and heartbreak and misery. I couldn't sleep and felt weird and uncomfortable so maybe my misery wanted company. Who knows.

And so I felt us, all of us, times 7 billion or whatever we are, going about our day. Desert, jungle, city, countryside, even went to the north pole. I sort of wandered the earth experiencing life as others, many others. Not individually, but individually. It's very hard to describe. I've done this before. It's a not quite asleep and not quite awake state, and the sense of reality and, call it hallucination if you wish, are as strong as any drug I've ingested can produce. When this happens, it is quite literally a trip.

And then something really weird happened.

The earth on which we exist, on its skin, the skin flipped inward. It's like if you had a tennis ball or any sphere and could flip the skin inside out. That's what happened. So we were all living on the inside of this sphere.

And that had a profound effect on my perception of our situation. It is, I think, a more accurate visualization of what we are and what our world is. It is an enclosed system to a large degree, particularly in a sociological sense.

Maybe if we thought of oursevles as coexising on the inside of a sphere, in an enclosed space, rather than on the outside, we would more easily find ways to get along.