This is something I've thought about for some time now. I'm not saying
that any of this is new; other people have probably said what I am
about to say before. But these are my own thoughts and I'm noding them
as food for your thoughts. Okay, here goes.
Organizations do not exist. No, they don't really exist in the
physical sense. The people who make up an organization exist, assets
owned/used by the people in the name of the organization exist, but
the organization itself is just an abstraction, a social
convention. Since the concept of organizations often is a useful one
we accept it as reality but tend to forget that it doesn't really
exist outside our own heads.
This way of thinking can be extended to countries as well, for what
exactly is a country if not a large organization? If we accept that
thought it becomes clear that countries do not really exist either,
they too are just social conventions. The 'United States of America'
does not really exist, 'Europe' does not really exist, 'Japan'
does not really exist. Not in the same way as the chair I'm sitting in while
typing this exists. The chair is real in a physical sense, but 'Europe'
is a notion shared by billions of people because it is a
convenient abstraction.
From this follows that war is impossible, for how can there be wars
if there are no countries to wage them? Uniforms exist (it would be
futile to deny that), people (mostly men) who wear these uniforms
exist, and people wearing uniforms tend to do terrible things to
other people. Why? Because they accept the concept of 'countries' as
real, instead of seeing it as merely a convention one can abandon
when it outlives its usefulness. They do not have to take personal
responsibility for their actions, because those actions are
committed in the name of a 'higher cause', and responsibility is
transferred to the shared social convention behind that cause.
Sometimes, abstraction is your enemy.