
Shrink thinking: are countries really like people? - Thevet
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/nations-people-upheaval-niall-ferguson/
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Merrill
Ascribing personhood to countries is weirder than ascribing personhood to
corporations.

Particularly grating is the common parlance that countries X and Y are
"friends" or "enemies". This may have made sense in the world of monarchical
empires, but in modern nations it is at best a rough summary of the collective
attitude of an elite. The bulk of the population in each country is unlikely
to care at all about the other. And there is likely to be a significant
dissent about whether friend or enemy should characterize the relationship.

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blowski
It's a model used to simplify the world around us and, as with all models,
it's wrong but useful. When you over-apply the model, it stops being useful.

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everdev
How useful is it really? I think it only serves to conflate the will of the
people with the will of the elite. I certainly don't want to be associated
with everything the US has done in my lifetime.

Is it really that much harder to name the person who proposed the policy or
who ordered the action?

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kurthr
Yes, for most people it's much harder to name the person who proposed it, and
those who carried it out. Heck, we anthropomorphize cars, animals, and the
weather... on a regular basis. I'm not saying it's good much less accurate,
but it usually makes the story easier to tell and more memorable.

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cjfd
C.G. Jung once wrote that it was totally clear that the amount of conscience
of a group of people is inversely proportional to the size of the group. So,
if countries are like people they mostly are like psychopaths.

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dTal
If it's possible to mathematically characterize the relationship, and the
relationship is non-linear, then there exists an optimal hierarchical grouping
algorithm for maximizing empathy in nested groups (that balances the loss due
to group numbers vs the "generation loss" from traversing hierarchical levels.

I think the difference in sizes between the organizational groups of different
countries goes a long way towards explaining the vast differences in political
flavor. How many people are in the smallest political constituency you
identify with? Dozens? Hundreds? Millions? This is the range of scales we're
dealing with.

What would it look like if we layered government so that at no level was any
group larger than tribal size (~150)? In the US you'd only need 4 levels to
cover the entire population, roughly corresponding to: neighborhood (150
people), town (~20,000 people), city/state (3-4 million people), country (327
million people). At that scale, each representative can be on friendly
personal terms with a) everyone in the constituency they represent and b)
every other representative at their level. So the access to government ought
to be much better with this system. In the US, local and federal governments
are divided - there's not a lot of continuity between the town government and
your friendly local congressperson.

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crawfordcomeaux
My friends/partner and I are designing neighborhood models to go along with
these ideas with the goal of experimenting with them on land we give back to
native tribes. I'd love to talk to you more about this if you're interested.
My contact info is in my profile, if so.

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osullivj
Surprised to see Ferguson assert that the UK is more than 400 years old. The
UK came into being in 1801, as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Ireland. It's predecessor was the Kingdom of Great Britain, itself created in
1707 with the Act of Union between England and Scotland.

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JetSetWilly
He's probably equating the union of the crowns with the creation of the UK.
His political views are well known to be very passionately unionist and
critical of Scottish nationalism so he's motivated to overstate the historical
reach and influence of the UK as much as possible.

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Udik
I have very little doubt that countries are like their own people. If
anything, for the simple fact that democratic governments are the expression
of the people's predilections, fears, shortcomings and traditions.

When an emotional undercurrent or specific attitude is present in a
population- be it the result of current events or of a longstanding cultural
heritage, then it will reflect at state level. Thinking of interpreting
history as the result of external conditions and the choices of few people in
power is like trying to interpret the behaviour of a person as the combination
of external events and individual neurons firing.

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smitty1e
To oversimplify, think of a human population as an information system, and ask

\- where is the state kept, and

\- where is the state mutated?

There is some state kept in objects like books and buildings and databases.

But the individual human brains are the greatness/shame of the nation.

There is a cognitive crutch "The American People" that is frequently leaned
on, but the large the population symbolically aggregated for the assertion,
the less meaningful it seems.

Hence my disagreement when someone says:

> I have very little doubt that countries are like their own people.

It gets really hard to make any point stick at scale.

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Merrill
A common phrase of politicians and commentators objecting to some policy with
which they disagree is "That is not who we are as a people!"

Unless backed up with really good polling data, the phrase is total nonsense.

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smitty1e
I'm attacking "as a people".

It's a flag indicating: "hogwash".

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friendlybus
Personhood includes identity, character and personality. Ascribing most of a
countries' personhood to a personality and a therapeutic perspective does not
eliminate the character and identity the greater story of a nation instills in
it's populace and they grow to inhabit.

There are more lines you could draw against the title, but the content of the
article is so narrow I don't know which would be the most productive to add.

The culture and character of a nation is a useful guide stone for the
beginning of any expectations one could have interacting with said country.

