The world is a city?

There has been a conflict raging in human society since people first turned to farming and probably before that, between those who wish to expand and be open or close up and withdraw. Both of which share the motivation to protect what they love and hold sacred. The interplay between the two explains a lot of human history, and it continues to be played out today, and is further complicated by how it plays out in certain
situations and areas, such as expansion in commerce and trade might mean a withdrawal in military might. However for our modern purposes we can view it through the lenses of open societies versus restricted
societies, in terms of trade, freedoms of expression, politics and lifestyle.

Most countries in the world have a mix of areas where they may be free in one and restrictive in another, there is no single sliding bar between the two, like personality there are too many areas to consider to give it a single number. Some areas of the world value personal freedom, others focus on the good of the whole community and protect their way of life, some protect the weak and others empower wealth creation,
some look outwards, others inwards, some embraced the modern and others protect tradition. Though like individuals the fundamental difference could be seeing to be whether they are focused on external
or internal issues, you protect your borders and people as a whole or you promote the freedom of movement as an individual right.

As a stoic my bias is always towards the internal, what can I control, what is in the my area of control and the external world is firmly outside of my control. My reactions to, my thoughts, feelings and emotions about
the world are certainly my full responsibility, that is I decide how I respond, my inner game is under my control but what happens in the world is not. If I hold the expectation that the world will be the same today as it was yesterday, that is my responsibility and when it changes it, and it always does. I am responsible if it makes me
unhappy, fearful and angry, that is my fault for not holding reasonable expectation, which can only occur by failing to observe the world around us as it is not how we wish it to be, as the only thing you can say for a certain is that life and the world changes constantly. Winter follows summer, the sun follows the rain, and
death follows life, only change is constant.

The stoic Roman Emperor, Aurelius observed that, “The world is a city,” which was as controversial view at the time, as it is today. The Roman mindset of the era was of a militarily society that engaged in conquest and
command of the land, there is always ongoing argument about whether to expand their borders and areas of control, or to protect and strengthen the areas that they already held. The alternate view of Aurelius that you should see the world as a single city would have been strange to the average Roman citizen, the world was a resource to be plundered and farmed for the good of the city of Rome. Which was very much a living entity with a distinct personality and sense of being, in modern times we share that belief, we give companies a
legal personality, which means in a legal sense companies are people with the same responsibilities and rights. As the Romans thought of Rome being a real person with a character who had wants and needs, as
we do today when we think of nationality, which meant you gave it your loyalty and valued it above yourself, that it was special, distinct and separate.

And Aurelius observation is as astute as ever, he saw that the city did not end at a neat border on a map, that you hurt yourself when you hurt other parts of your city, that there was flow of people and goods, most
important of which was food, and that flow spread out to the entire world. There were spices, animals, slaves and gold that originated in places where the Romans did not even have a map to tell them where it
came from. He also recognised that the expansion of war led to the closing of borders, disruptions in that flow and that only trade and freedom of movement would allow these benefits to attract these
luxuries. It was his genius to reduce the world to a size that people can understand, the world is just too big, too full of alien and foreign places, we cannot make sense of their geography, our relative place in the world. Despite our modern knowledge that the world is a globe, how many of us have really internalised what that means, we still think in terms of up, down and across, the north of the city mean something in a local sense, but in reality whichever way we go we will end up in the same place eventually, we are all connected but
the world does not feel that way.

Our daily experience is that we have our house, on our street, in our city and country, we have an address that tells us where we are and defines the limits of our personal world, the one that matters to us. So when we say the world is as city, we make the world more understandable, whilst there are those who like to sneer at people who say they are world citizen, that they are the citizens of nowhere, what they are trying to
annunciate is that they are the citizens of everywhere. If the world is a city that would be its address and name, it enables people to see the actions of governments in terms of how it would effect their city.

In New York the idea that you would impose border control on Brooklyn, that there would be a tariff on trade between the two, that within the country of Brooklyn there would be no police, no laws, no restrictions on the
use of force between its citizen, that you allow extremists to terrorise the people, punish them if they refused to obey the laws according to a belief in anarchy. No one in New York would believe it was not their problem, that it did not matter what happened in Brooklyn, they would probably be angry that get to the other side of
Brooklyn that have to divert all the way around it, that they were not free to go and get coffee there, that there was a trendy new bar or restaurant that they were denied access to, that they could not work in the technology company that had set up there, or there was a girl they could not date because she was on the wrong side of the line, people would be furious and demand it's reintegration.

Yet, this is exactly how we treat the world as a whole, we are deluded by ocean, river, mountains that there are places that are far away, as if people were not like dominoes that knock into each other in waves and affect each other on opposite sides of the planet. We share the air, the sun, water and the earth, and what we do has consequences, pollution is everyone’s problem, but sadly no ones responsibility unless you force them to take it on, and that is only possible when people take on the responsibility of being part of the world city, and in honour of our classical friends, perhaps we should name it Elysium, a city that we share in our dreams and that we have to make in world. And to those who wish to live in such a city, Greetings, fellow citizen, it
was good to have met you, and good fortunes.