My acquaintance was despairing about how few people think globally. “We have all these massive problems and need solutions which work for everyone, globally, or we’ll disappear as a dominant species.”
My response to him:
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It’s not natural for people to think globally. What’s natural is to think about yourself, your immediate connections, and beyond that the tribes you belong to. Thinking globally requires levels of abstraction which completely ignore local variations. Genuine flesh-and-blood people are messy and don’t fit neatly into models and spreadsheets well.
One of the telling characteristics about Star Trek plots is that in Gene Rodenberry’s future there is always a planetary government. There might be a resistance group or a few minorities. One could argue that this is just simplicity for the sake of story-telling. But I suspect Roddenberry really did believe that the desirable future state is a planet-wide government system (peaceful, of course). Ruling the whole world has been a dream of multiple empires and rulers.
This is a warm and fuzzy fantasy, but highly unrealistic. No human leader, no leadership team, no central planning committee can successfully work at even a regional scale for long. After hundreds of economics books and multiple Nobel Prizes for economics, no one understands macroeconomics in a predictable way. Every experiment we’ve done in history shows us that global and central requires optimizing on a few variables – which creates the cracks in the foundation and sows the seeds of collapse. The lag between changing conditions and top-level decision-making creates an implementation gap that cannot be overcome.
It will take a divine intelligence and a pure heart to rule globally in a way that everyone and creation itself thrives. I believe that Jesus will return as the true king. The prophecy is clear: Every knee will bow. It does not say that everyone will like it.
Also, there is probably a clue to how best to rule large numbers of people in Exodus 18:13-26.
Given these constraints, rather than insisting on perfect global solutions, we’ll probably get further along doing the best we can (using moral principles, and putting the good of others ahead of our own), where we are, right now, with what we have, knowing than loving and omniscient, omnipresent God is caring for all of us.
That’s about solutions. Ideas and core principles, which can be global, must be fought for at every level.
