The Map Of The World

I wondered what we could tell about human nature simply by looking at a map of the world. The first and most obvious is that humans prefer warm climates to cold climates. The geographical size of countries is much smaller nearer the equator than near the poles. The obvious conclusion is that real estate is more valuable in warmer areas, not because there is less real estate but because this is where humans want to be.

If we have specialty maps of the world such as for distribution of resources and wealth, a glaringly illogical fact emerges. The poorest people in the world tend to live in those countries that are very blessed with abundant natural resources. In contrast, most of the world's wealthiest countries are those with comparitively little in the way of natural resources such as Europe and Japan.

The inescapable conclusion is that wealth breeds corruption. In nations rich in resources, an elite few manage to set up the system to get the wealth for themselves. The result is that the average person in such a country is poorer than if the country had no natural resources. In resource-poor nations, in contrast, there is no resources to be corrupt with. Thus, corruption is limited and citizens are better off than those in nations with abundant resources.

Another obvious illogical world fact is that the poorer people are, the more children they have while the richer people are, the fewer children they tend to have. This results in extremes of poverty and wealth and clearly shows that human thinking tends to be self-centered and short-term at the expense of big picture and long-term. People in poor countries are not thinking about world problems, they are thinking about having enough children to survive to adulthood and take care of them in their old age.

I notice by looking at a map of the world that there are only six nations, out of about two hundred, that are named after individuals. America, after Italian map-maker Amerigo Vespucci; Colombia, after another Italian, explorer Christopher Columbus. Bolivia, after South American liberator Simon Bolivar; Israel, after Jacob renamed Israel; Saudi Arabia, after Ibn Saud and; the Phillippines, after Spain's King Phillip. Only Ibn Saud and King Phillip actually led their namesake countries in anything like modern history.

What this tells me is that our history books are very top-heavy. We tend to focus on a few individuals in each time and place in history at the expense of everyone else. An example is Ferdinand Magellan, most people know that he led the first expedition around the world that resulted in the Phillippines being so-named. But who can name even one other person who was on the journey?

This makes these few individuals seem more important and all-powerful than they probably were. Even if they were, their hold on their position was certainly much more tenuous than our history books seem to portray. If this were not so and our history books were more realistic, more great individuals of the past would have managed to leave their names on a country.

Some really exceptional individuals have gotten cities named after them. Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, Kitchener in Ontario, Washington D.C. (District of Columbia, after Columbus) However, these are rarely capital cities and such names are very prone to change. Lenin had his namesake city but now it has reverted to one of his predecessors, St. Petersburg. Likewise Stalingrad has been renamed Volgograd, after the Volga River. There used to be a city in the eastern part of Germany called Karl-Marx-Stadt, but no longer.

This makes it clear that out view of history is somewhat over-simplistic in that it tends to be top-heavy, that is focusing on a few prominent individuals at the expense of those in lesser roles and who were either never as powerful as we perceive or their hold on that power was tenuous and limited. Many of those who left their names on the geography actually had no temporal power at all.

Yet it is also obvious by a map of the world that there are many people whose goal is to be in power. Consider the many Spanish-speaking countries of the western hemisphere. These are people who were of the same ethnicity and religion and who spoke the same language. There could have been one country but a multitude of countries from Mexico to Argentina was the result.

This points to the fact that there are many who would like to be in power and the forming of a multitude of countries was the result. The same can be said of the Arab countries from Saudi Arabia to Morrocco. They are united by ethnicity, language and, particularly by Sunni Islam. But formation of one country is almost unimaginable.