Background boundaries

We can start to see the Global Civilization when we stop focusing on the boundaries and start focusing on the interconnections across borders.

While boundaries—and I’m including political boundaries like national borders and societal boundaries like those surrounding in-groups—are an important property of living systems, the interconnectedness, diversity of centers, ambiguity, and other properties are also important to have and to develop. We have such a preoccupation with our divisions that we cannot see the connections. We need to let the boundaries fade to the background, and focus on the other properties.

It feels like there’s almost a parallel world, operating within and alongside the world that we see presented in the media. It’s the world of cooperation, and while there’s a lot of talk about how all the news is bad news, there is actually a cost to that: we lose sight of the global civilization and don’t even know it exists or that we can nurture and develop it.