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Territory is a concept that transcends the human species; it's not all that weird. We simply don't do it by rubbing our scent glands on stumps and rocks.

To say that there's no difference between France and Spain is a bit disingenuous. Outside of colonialism, the lines are less arbitrarily drawn and moreso organically evolved along with language and culture in a context where wide communication is rare. That and fighting for control, of course.

It sucks that we don't have universal peace such that borders are unnecessary, but that's life down to the simplest organism. Governments need borders, and shitty as they are it's our only path toward societies that are more fair than pure natural competition.

I think you over oversimplifying somewhat. Most countries have a very deep history and a long chain of events that leeds to what is now their countries and borders. There has been plenty of kings and rulers of different lands, and wars fought over said land, but again this have evolved a lot over the ages.

One idea you're touching, that borders aren't real can be a good one. When astronauts take their first trip to space some of them are almost overwhelmed by whats called the 'overview effect'. Seeing earth as a blue marble, with no borders and realizing we all share this small island of life we call earth circling around the sun. In this regard it would be nice in a distant future that what country you were born into has no limits to you possibilities in life. and no one will judge you because you live on the "wrong" side of a border.

So yeah, I think about it from time to time.

I think about things like this all the time. Take the Louisiana purchase, the Americas "bought" a swath of land from the french. The French barely "controlled" any of it, and the concept of them "owning" it was completely theoretical. The Native Americans were the only people living in the majority of it. Rich people doing rich people things. Crazy

I've been very slowly reading a book called "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow. It has mostly covered agriculture so far, and has challenged the idea that caveman is less than hunter gatherer which is less than farming. But it has also noted how evidence shows just how fluid people were with where they lived for so long.

For so much of humanity people have just decided that they weren't happy with where they were living and would just up and leave or travel or visit distant people who recognized them as relatives. For some reason in the time since we have culturally decided that money and property are paramount and that dedication to accumulation of things makes us less able to move around. Hard governmental borders and property existed then too, it just wasn't the nearly universally agreed upon method of existing.

I've enjoyed the book so far and I would recommend it if you are open to reading non-fiction, I think it gets pretty close to this topic and might even cover it too

Well, there was a time when people lived moving around foraging and hunting, mostly avoiding bad weather and other predators, during the change of seasons. A time where human populations were so small that it was impossible to view every single patch of land as someone's ownership. Both land ownership and people like those you probably call rich, started to appear after humans started settling down on certain areas and farming instead of foraging. I think borders are an evolution of that land ownership as populations and communities living permanently on certain (probably fertile) patches of land started to scale.

What I found most crazy is the hubris of saying "This piece of land that existed for billions of years and will exist for a couple of billions more is MY property".

I always wonder what it's like to live in a country that's only separated from other countries by a line. Here in Aotearoa we're the only islands here so it feels slightly more natural even though it's not. But it's also been colonized and forcibly turned into a single nation when before it was several.

Yes. I believe strongly that people have the right to move, work, and live where they wish without needless bureaucratic overhead.

I think the founding of civilizations was a big step for humanity and made us progress impressively. The whole thing works because we organize, delegate and collaborate. I guess it sort of follows that organized groups will share the territory among each other and agree on frontiers. Of course there's been a lot of evil done over territorial conflicts, but I don't think it's intrinsic that frontiers are evil. It's just where the shit plays out.

Yup.

If you bop enough people over the head and take the land they are on, you can soon afford to exert a lot of control, and through that continue to expand your wealth.

And if you fear being bopped over the head by someone who wants the land you are on, you'll do what you can do defend the boundaries.

So yeah, almost all of it comes down to control of resources, with plenty of use of mass psychology to get populations to assist.

It is disturbing that what amounts to a very small proportion of humanity somehow manage to conduct societies to their ends so very effectively.

Here's a little animation you might find interesting. Doubt it is super-accurate but it conveys the basic idea just fine https://yewtu.be/watch?v=UY9P0QSxlnI

On the more local scale, but by the same mechanism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure Today it is often less about land, but you'll see it with stuff like the sale of water rights to multinational corporations and the emphasis which many jurisdictions place on property rights compared to human rights.

Yeah 100%. Mohawk Interruptus by Native scholar Audra Simpson is a must-read piece of scholarship on this topic. If you've never thought about this before, it will literally blow your entire mind. Highly recommend.

As long as people protect their house or land, or any posessions, as long we will have borders of countries. It's just the extension of what most people want for their own property. We create a system that protects our property within the borders, and then we need to protect those borders in order to protect that system.

On a podcast called Motherfoclóir (it's about language) someone said something like "the only difference between a dialect and a language is an army."

Yeah I have thought about it, how messed up the whole concept of borders are. They inevitably end up as dividing lines that cut people off from their territory or each other. Then the nation-states that enforce the borders work to create a reality that the borders make sense. Wars are fought, media is created, entire histories are erased!

The results are cataclysmic, as we are seeing now, with endlessly compounding crises. The politicians in this are complicit in everything, as are all the other members of the ruling class, but the real twist of the knife is that the rest of us are too. If we want any chance of survival we must give up our modern conveniences, living instead in a way that regenerates the Earth.

This is unthinkable to a great many people. So much infrastructure is built around a destructive way of life, it is hard to imagine how we could possibly live differently. Paradoxically, it is even harder to imagine how the current state of things can continue in the face of climate disater after climate disaster. We must learn to abandon existing structures of power, to think and act on smaller scales. Learning to live as part of our local environments will be the beginning of the lengthy process to restoring our planet, but it will take a great deal of work, from so very many of us.

Sometimes borders represent the differences between groups of people and what they find important on a range of issues including trade, security, and how they choose to govern themselves. (When those people aren't being forsably ruled.)