I’ve read most of his books and missed this, or it never stuck with me.
Thanks for posting it. Dude was smart.
I’d like the source, please.
3rd edit:
Asimov, The Sun Shines Bright, Ch. 17 Nice Guys Finish First!, pp 124.
It’s actually a footnote and not part of the text, so here’s some context:
Within these units co-operation has been brought about, despite the natural tendency to destructive competition, by the application of governmental authority, internal police and, most of all, the strictures of custom, social pressure and religion. The general advance in the size of the units within which co-operation is maintained has, at the present day, produced governmental control over a population of 950 million people in China; 22 million square kilometres of area in the Soviet Union; and one third of the real wealth of the world in the United States. The advance has not been smooth and steady. The stresses of internal decay and external pressure have led to the fall of empires and the periodic destruction of central authority and its replacement by smaller units. Such periods of regression usually result in a ‘dark age’. (4)
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(4) There are people who, disturbed by ‘big government’ today and its tendency to curb the advantages they might gain if their competitiveness were allowed free flow, demand ‘less government’. Alas, there is no such thing as less government, merely changes in government. If the libertarians had their way, the distant bureaucracy would vanish and the local bully would be in charge. Personally, I prefer the distant bureaucracy, which may not find me, over the local bully, who certainly will. And all historical precedent shows a change to localism to be for the worse.
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Today, the world undergoes centrifugal decomposition politically, as the old European empires break up and as cultural minorities demand nations all their own; but economic units continue to grow larger and the only economic unit that makes sense today is the whole planet. In one way, it’s the political units that count, for it is they who wage war. Though peace is maintained within the units (if we ignore endemic crime and violence, and occasional terrorism, rebellion and civil war) there is war between them. City-states warred against each other interminably in ancient Greece and in Renaissance Italy; feudal estates did so in medieval Europe and early modern Japan; nations did so in early medieval China and modern Europe, and in all cases until modern times there were conflicts with barbarians on the fringes. The intensity and destructiveness of the conflicts shows a general rise with advancing technology, so that despite the growing size of the units within which co- operation can be counted on, competitiveness may still win out. Destruction still threatens to outpace the capacity for recovery. We now live at a time when the outcome clearly hangs in the balance. One more all- out general war and civilization will probably be destroyed - possibly for good. Indeed, even if the realization of this keeps the war from happening, the existence of potential conflict keeps the minds and energy of all the competing nations on each other as the enemy and not on those true enemies which threaten us all - overpopulation, resource depletion and technology inadequacy. Nasty guys will finish last.
Hes not wrong, just didn’t have the zeitgeist to add climate change to the list.