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Why people think the world is small

If you ask a person to sort the regions in per mind in the descending order, the person would probably say something like this:

  • Home
  • Town
  • State
  • Country
  • World

This is coming from a video in youtube in which the person argues that the “Ethical Software Movement” (ESM from now on) is not legit, because people believing in it want to change the fundamental being of other people. Per mentions that this is because a typical person active in this movement is incompetaent to change themselves, so they would go to change their family, then their town, then their state, then their country, and at the end, the whole world.

I’m not familiar with ECM yet and I’m not supporting them, but I think this critice of the movement does not understand how the world actually is. Or better to say, per thinks that per knows exactly how the world is. Person ~> Home ~> Town ~> State ~> Country ~> World.

This way of looking at the world is not real. It disregards the diversity of the world, and the complexity of the human environment in which they live, socialize, and act.

The other problem with the statement is when we say that the person A tries to change per town, and then per country, we are secretly admitting that all towns are similar to one another, meaning we assume that when a person changed a town1, per is automatically succeeded in changing the neighbouring town, and the next step would be to change the country.

The other notion about the video is the person assumption is if you can’t change everyone, then don’t act. This seems very wrong. Nobody should try to change every body, this leads to totalitarianism and dictatorship, but at the other hand, you must act against bad, harmful, discriminative policies individuals, companies, and governments try to apply. You must speak up and raise awareness. I’m going to certainly look into ESM and see what they’re up to, but if they’re acting, I’m with them, even though people say they’re trying to “change” everyone.

The world is not small. It may seem so now with all our digital connections. But the world is not Twitter, or Facebook. Social networks are big factories that accept diversity as the input and give shaped, trimmed, and biased view. Don’t believe it for a second. It’s bad for ya!

  1. The definition of “changing” a town is completely vague and absurd, and as mentioned in the post, it should not prevent someone from acting against certain things. ↩