Can individual beliefs be abstracted to a communal level?

I was in a bookstore this evening, and as usual I quickly browsed through the 'current affairs' section before continuing my shopping. There wasn't really anything new there, but something about the collection of books - the zeitgeist of the times, if I can steal a term - something struck me. I suddenly was convinced down to my bones that there was something fundamentally wrong with the world. I had a moment where I felt like a complete stranger, looking at the world as if anew, and thought to myself, 'Wow. This place is messed up in a really sad way.'

Okay, okay, 99% of my readers are not surprised by this (or, rather, since I doubt I have 100 readers, one might say that one reader is completely unsurprised, and the other is only 2% surprised). Nor am I, really - I've known this for years, but was overwhelmed by the ringing truth of this thought in my head.

Why, do you ask? Well, permit me an excursion into the past, and I will presently explain it. Oh, and apologies if I write a bit oddly today; I've been reading too much Paarfi lately.

Since a fairly young age, I've kept abreast of news, at least on the barest levels. My parents always encouraged us to read the newspapers, and I took an active interest in increasing numbers of world news topics as I grew older. It always seemed a good idea to have a firm grasp of current events, but by the time I was 14 or 15, I began to be intrigued not by the news itself, but by the underlying subtext.

I began to first ask the hows of the world - how are decisions made and carried out, how do events occur as they do, etc... and these answers inevitably led me to ask the more ultimate whys. For the last 5 or 6 years, then, I've developed a hobby of trying to understand why the world works the way it does. I've spent quite a bit of time reading histories, political science texts, essays, news analyses, economics, dabbling in sociological theory, etc, in an attempt to answers these questions. Obviously, I have only attained a cursory understanding of each topic (scholars in any of these fields could undoubtedly leave me in the dust), but I've aimed for a global understanding of the driving forces of world events.

There are plenty of ideologies out there to explain things, from popular to scholarly, and from emotionally based to the most rigorous of logics. I feel that most of these fail in that they base their understandings on a few basic theses of human interaction and behavior, whereas true motivations are much more complex. Some of the more interesting bits I've seen have tried to model events and interactions by chaos theory or by evolutionary pressures, but even that fails as it tries to quantify too many variables that are unquantifiable (is that a word? now it is).

Whatever the root causes, though, this leads to the world as it is today. And the topics covered in this section of the bookstore were revealing. There was a large emphasis on empire building, clashes of culture, humanitarian failures, failures in systems of government, increasingly limited resources (in a presumably closed system), struggles for cultural and political supremacy, and the personalities driving all of these events. You can fill in the blanks for specifics regarding your country's current events (or global politics), but that's a function of the specific snapshot in time, not of the underlying state of the world.

What is bothersome about this all is that most individuals would not say that our world should be in that form. Oh, for a specific decision or state, they may side one way or another, but fundamentally people do not work on the same principles that the world does. This curious contrast between the motivations of individuals and the events of the world is probably why there exist the aforementioned scholarly (and not-so-scholarly) disciplines.

How does the sums of billions (well, trillions) of human interactions, actions, and reactions create the world as we see it today? Ignoring any partisan influence, I think that everyone would agree that starvation is a bad thing. Or that the deaths of millions annually in human-organized slaughters (ie, war) is similarly unwanted. Or that people should be given as much choice in their destinies as possible, so long as they do not impinge on the choices of others (yes, the interpretations of this can be quite varying, but the fundamental idea is one that most people could agree on, no?). No one can seriously say they do not care about equity of one sort or another, from resources to 'rights' to 'choice' or any other concept that they find overridingly important. So then, why does the world have such obvious discrepancies?

I will bring up some specific points from current events just to drive the point home. In the Arab-Israeli conflict, it seems that stripped of all of the ideologies, there should be no fundamental disagreement between the two sides. Oh, yes, there are people who would like to wipe Israel off the map - along with a few Israelis who wouldn't mind wiping most of the Arabs out. But when you get down to their actual values - completely bypassing concepts of 'nationality' and 'religion' and such that drive them - they would probably have very little reason to fight, as it would be much more productive to work in tandem.

In the United States, we've recently been outraged by (or firmly supportive of) our government's invasion of our privacy and reductions in personal liberties. For some reason, we have come to a situation where many feel that our two desires for personal security and personal liberty are at odds. With such seemingly disparate concepts, how has this occurred? Theoretically, everyone would love to have the maximum of both.

I could go on, but you get the point. Individual choices and ideals, when abstracted to communal or global ones, fail to be realized. Now, some people would argue that this is merely because we have imperfect systems - and that is true, we do have extremely flawed systems. But I wonder if somehow, in this leap from the one to the many, the sum of our interactions somehow makes a utopia impossible. Something causes a fundamental clash of our individually held beliefs (the barest of which are nearly universal) when they come to the fore.

And this causes a world that most of us shudder to contemplate. So, then - should we even bother measuring the state of the world by our individual beliefs, or by some other rubric?

Hmm.

I know this isn't really that clear or organized, I was just rambling in a stream-of-consciousness after my odd feeling at the bookstore. But it is quite fascinating to consider how this all works.