The U.S. government is like an ant colony that’s aggressively trying to expand its organization to encompass other regions and other colonies. (This does happen. Ants do make war.) Russia is another ant colony with its own designs.

Consider the drastically opposite policies of the U.S. toward Kosovo and Montenegro as opposed to the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics and Crimea. Kosovo is 4,212 square miles in size; Montenegro is 5,333 square miles. Crimea is 10,425 square miles. The Donetsk and Luhansk Republics comprise about 6,200 square miles of territory. The U.S. favors the independence of Kosovo and Montenegro. It opposes the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk. It opposed the breakaway of Crimea from Ukraine and its new political status with Russia. We could look at their population sizes and also see no reason to distinguish one “colony” or country from another on that basis anymore than on the basis of size.

One might invoke other distinctions based on old borders, history, religion, ethnicity, etc., but they do not explain what’s going on, that is, why the U.S. favors some breakaways and is against others. All these other factors disguise and obscure the brute reality. The key factor is obviously the competition of the U.S. anthill and colony with the large rival anthill and ant colony called Russia. The U.S. stood to gain by diminishing the scope of Serbia, an ally of Russia. Separating Kosovo was supported by the U.S. The U.S. wants Ukraine intact as a counter to Russia, so it’s against the separation of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk. The U.S. behaves like an expanding ant colony. Russia isn’t different. It wants to maintain Chechnya and other border regions. It wants to expand in the Middle East. China is no different. It has separatist regions it worries about.

The U.S. as run by the North did not favor the breakaway of the South. The same thing is going on in today’s cases as with the breakaway of the Confederate States of America from the United States of America. The key criterion for understanding the support or the condemnation of a given breakaway by the U.S. is how it affects the colony that we call the U.S.A. The U.S.A. would have been greatly diminished by a separate C.S.A., so it opposed it and fought to prevent it.

We’re all currently organized as a bunch of competing ant colonies, and we have the capacity to obliterate one another and the entire planet. We could learn to compete more or less peacefully through business, although whole colonies are conducting business. That’s about the only alternative to warfare. That’s a way of working with one another. Another way is to overcome our hatreds. We cannot count on that process. There’s continual evidence right up to this instant that people in general hate one another in all sorts of ways and on all sorts of grounds.

At present, we have to understand ourselves as very much like rival ant colonies, but who can think, communicate, set goals, change, make new arrangements, invent, and discover ways to create positive sum games in which rivals both benefit. If we adhere too much to the aggressive ants among us who stupidly want to dominate every ant heap in the world, we run the risk of stagnation, warfare, destruction and world destruction. If we adhere too much to the passive ants among us, which has been and is very unlikely, we run the risk of being dominated by some rival aggressive colonies. We have so many weapons and so much willingness to use them that the latter risk is very small. Our own colony is not exactly thriving under the policy of controlling every other anthill in the world. Our political, legal and social system is not producing a really healthy colony. This is where we separate ourselves from the ants. We have ideas. We’re operating under some bad ideas, and that’s why we’re experiencing some bad results.

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