By David Decoteau

"Preppers" are interested in being self sufficient.   And in that process of learning and preparing, "Preppers" being to understand how much better life is with division of labor and free markets working for us. People concerned with self sufficiency know better than anyone else, how hard it is to be a self contained unit. And not only is it hard...it kind of sucks. Your choices in goods and services are SEVERELY limited, and that is in the BEST case scenario. In worst case: you get a disease, injury or other unforseen problem...and everyone dies.

I mention the "Prepper life", as it's the ultimate example of isolationism. The exact opposite of globalism.

So if we know that isolationist life is hard, we also know that working together with other people makes things easier. We are diversified. We can weather the storm better as a group. All of history shows us that humans without community at best teeter on the verge of extinction from year to year.

So then I guess the only question is: how much "community" is the right amount? If it's not the individual: is it a village? A town? A city? A state? A nation? A continent? A planet? Multiple planets? A galaxy?

In my opinion, this ultimately comes down to education. Frankly, everything does.

When you live in a world of scarce resourses, you need a certain mindset. Each person can be looked at as either another mouth to feed (using scarce resources) or another person to help feed you (processing exponentially more resources and creating new ones). The difference in those two thoughts, will be education. Fearful folks will only see a threat. Educated folks, will see a history of advancement via human partnerships. Sadly, in a SHTF situation, I believe fear will trump education and logic.

So then there is culture (which in my book is also a function of education - but we can't get into all that here). Culture is why most folks believe in borders. "Those people treat their community members in ways we find immoral/unethical/offensive. Therefore, we don't want to associate with those folks." And that is totally legitimate. But I'd argue that an educated people would realize that there are more gains to be had by good treatment of citizens, than poor treatment, and this is why it's a function of education. But it's easier to build a wall than educate... so that's what we do.

Then there is religion - the other reason for walls, armies, govenments. "Those people believe in a false god. Only our god is real, so we don't want to associate with those folks." Again, perfectly legitimate. If you want to treat your people better, than you should be allowed to do so. But again, this comes down to education.

So say we could get the whole world educated and thinking logically and peacefully (those things actually go together), and we could evolve a bit further away from our "monkey brains" and toward some next level thinking: would we need borders at that point? I'm not sure. And if you didn't need borders, then globalism would be the maximum amount of cooperation humanity could achieve while limited to this planet. In other word, the village, would now be the size of a planet.

I realze we aren't there yet, but if we survive, I do think this could be a destination for mankind. But we have a good bit of work to do on ourselves first.