[boffinAudio]

All culture is a lie that only persists in the re-telling. There is no such thing as America or Russia - these things exist merely as a facsimile created in the minds of humans, who must perpetuate the concept by re-telling the lie, lest it fade out of human consciousness into the oblivion of history.

Computers merely allow us to lie - and forget the lies - at light speed. This will eventually replace all other cultures - neoliberalism especially ...

[svara]

We do speak of dynamic phenomena as "existing" all the time.

A river is made up of different water molecules every day, yet it's the same river over millennia.

In the same way, countries (and other abstract entities such as companies) exist in the dynamics of human interactions.

So yes, humans must perpetuate the concept by re-telling it, but somewhat paradoxically it's not a lie as long as they do so.

[drewcoo]

> A river is made up of different water molecules every day, yet it's the same river over millennia.

Heraclitus would like a word with you.

[didericis]

And Parmenides would like a word with you.

It’s amazing to me people agree on definitions for anything, given people have been having the same basic abstract arguments for what makes thing A thing A and distinct from thing B for thousands of years.

[svara]

My argument was in some sense more shallow, I just made a point about how we talk about things.

You can open a map and find that a river has a name, that's true no matter your stance on what it "really is".

[tomjen3]

I don't get why OP is downvoted. We have a (nearly) perfectly round globe and the first thing we did with it was to carve it into pieces.

Rerun the human race 1000 times. Do you think Russia will show up more than a handful of times?

[boffinAudio]

People don't like to be confronted with the reality of their own lives' utter fallacy. We all participate in these fallacies, it is very hard to extract our own personal identity from them once we have spent decades supporting the fallacy.

It only takes a few days in the bush, out back, to realize just how futile it is to consider any one culture superior to another...