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Comment by Merrill | Hacker News Reader

Ascribing personhood to countries is weirder than ascribing personhood to corporations.

Particularly grating is the common parlance that countries X and Y are "friends" or "enemies". This may have made sense in the world of monarchical empires, but in modern nations it is at best a rough summary of the collective attitude of an elite. The bulk of the population in each country is unlikely to care at all about the other. And there is likely to be a significant dissent about whether friend or enemy should characterize the relationship.

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It's a model used to simplify the world around us and, as with all models, it's wrong but useful. When you over-apply the model, it stops being useful.

How useful is it really? I think it only serves to conflate the will of the people with the will of the elite. I certainly don't want to be associated with everything the US has done in my lifetime.

Is it really that much harder to name the person who proposed the policy or who ordered the action?

Yes, for most people it's much harder to name the person who proposed it, and those who carried it out. Heck, we anthropomorphize cars, animals, and the weather... on a regular basis. I'm not saying it's good much less accurate, but it usually makes the story easier to tell and more memorable.

>How useful is it really? I think it only serves to conflate the will of the people with the will of the elite.

When people think at that level of abstraction they don't care about the "will of the people" of the other country, they care about what the other country can do (does) to theirs, and that's mostly based on the will of its elite.

So it makes sense to ignore the "will of the people" when considering a country friendly or not.

>Is it really that much harder to name the person who proposed the policy or who ordered the action?

Well, the persons are often replaceable or insignificant the elite has people doing its work in politics etc, but it's not like some specific person is the embodiment of being the "enemy" of another country the elite wants to attack.

But the problem is the equivalisation of the state, the country and the nation. These are three different things. Australia and the United States are friendly: the states are friendly.

Not so long ago, the United States went to war: the state went to war. Iraq went to war: the country went to war.

Thank you! This is a serious issue I come across often. I'm often the token outsider when traveling which leads people to being open about their prejudices, most often to their neighbouring countries, how the is mutual dislike. Almost always this is an idea evolved some some hundreds of years ago, and no longer holds any truth. Even when conflict is more recent its remarkable how easily a civilian of one county will blame the civilians of another, not taking geo-politics into account in any way.

Same here! I thought nobody was understanding this.

>Particularly grating is the common parlance that countries X and Y are "friends" or "enemies". This may have made sense in the world of monarchical empires, but in modern nations it is at best a rough summary of the collective attitude of an elite. The bulk of the population in each country is unlikely to care at all about the other.

Perhaps the bulk of the population in each country doesn't matter then, as far as the country's relation with other countries and friendly or enemy actions are concerned?

You say this made sense in the world of "monarchical empires" -- but then "the bulk of the population in each country" was even more unlikely to care at all about the other.

If anything, the bulk of the population in modern countries votes, and so, whatever their country's behaviour is to other countries, is more of their responsibility than it ever was in "monarchical empires".

Similarly, a single neuron in your brain has no particular feelings toward neurons in your friend's brain.

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