Why Acting in National Interest Impedes on the Greater Good
An Excerpt from Ron Garan’s The Orbital Perspective
In The Orbital Perspective (Barrett-Koehler Publishers, 2015), author and astronaut Ron Garan describes how he and others are working to apply the orbital perspective here at home, embracing new partnerships and processes to promote peace and combat hunger, thirst, poverty, and environmental destruction. This book is a call to action for each of us to care for the most important space station of all: planet Earth. The following excerpt about national interest has been excerpted from Chapter 8: “Arrested Development.”
Destructive competition can affect how nations interact within the global community. Looking at our planet from the orbital perspective reveals a collection of contiguous landmasses separated by water. But as we know, these landmasses are made up of a series of sovereign nations, and these nations all tend to act in their own individual best interest — or at least what the national leadership believes is the nation’s best national interest. Cooperation occurs when the national interest of two or more nations align. I believe that most nations are open to acting in a way that furthers the common good of the planet, but when nations are faced with a decision between acting in the best interest of the world or the best interest of the nation, national interest will win out every time. This is one of the challenges to be faced in doing something international.
The International Space Station provides enormous benefit to the entire world, and the fifteen nations of the ISS partnership rightfully take pride in their contribution to the greater good of the global community. But what enabled each of these nations to join the effort in the first place was a conscious decision that the effort was in their best national interest.
Likewise, numerous decisions every day guide a nation’s path and progress. Some of these decisions put a nation on a good path and some do not. Some decisions are made by individuals who have acted honestly, responsibly, and with integrity, and some are made by individuals with hidden agendas, seeking personal gain or political power. National decisions are influenced by myriad factors, including politics, personal agendas, pride, ego, altruism, and compassion, but I believe that the decisions that nations make are affected by the same factors that affect individual decision making, with one apparent key difference: individuals are considerably more likely to act selflessly.
When an individual is faced with a decision between what is good for him or her personally and what is for the greater good, it is conceivable that a person could sacrifice for the greater good. This happens all the time. Nations, on the other hand, seldom if ever act exclusively in the best interest of the global society, if it comes at the expense of their own national interests. After all, politicians are generally expected to further the national interest. In cases where a nation acts in a manner that benefits other countries or the world, to its own apparent detriment, I would be willing to bet that this is really a sacrifice of immediate best interest in favor of that nation’s long-term, big picture best interest. In other words, if we pull back and consider the implications from a global scale and over a long time frame — which, by this point in the book, we should all recognize as the orbital perspective — we can see that the chosen course actually was in the best interest of the nation.
If we remove the undesirable personal motives of individual politicians and assume that decision makers are acting responsibly, honestly, and with integrity, then a decision about whether to support something that furthers the greater good of the global society should ask the following questions:
1. Is the decision in our best national interest?
2. If we project the predicted outcome out further in time, is it now in our best national interest?
3. Are we as a nation willing to sacrifice our national interest for the greater good?
If the answer to question 1 is yes, then the nation will likely decide to follow that course. If the answer is no, then the second question should be considered. An answer of yes to question 2 should again prompt the nation to follow that course, but an answer of no should lead to question 3, and I believe that nations that get to question 3 will say no nearly every time.
What this means is the decision makers either didn’t pull back far enough to see the benefit when considering question 2, or there really is no benefit and the nation is not equipped to make that type of sacrifice. On the other hand, I believe individuals are equipped to make that type of sacrifice, and this is why I believe that a collection of individuals is more likely than a collection of nations to make real progress toward solving our biggest challenges.
In the early U.S.– Russia space collaboration and the ISS program, it was the personal trust among individuals that carried the programs through a doctrine of exclusively national interest. The tendency of nations to act in their own best national interest is a barrier to international collaboration, but in some cases this can be overcome through the trust that develops within an international program, which is founded on personal relationships.
Patriotism and loving one’s home country is a wonderful aspect of humanity, but love of country needs to occur in the context of the rest of the world — that is, with an orbital perspective. Truly loving something means seeing it clearly and loving it in spite of its faults and imperfections. No country is perfect, and when national interests don’t coincide and countries take the pursuit of national interest to the extreme, war breaks out. War is humanity’s greatest failure.
However, if we remove the stressors caused by the requirement to pursue national interest and instead interact on a person-to-person, organization-to-organization level, then a cause itself can gain greater influence, enabling remarkable collaboration that does not require the establishment of deep personal relationships.
In the next excerpt we’ll look at several movements and initiatives that are synthesizing the orbital perspective and the worm’s eye view, making vast amounts of information accessible and bringing large groups of people together to work toward common causes. In some cases, collaboration is not facilitated by long-term personal relationships. Instead, the bond is the common cause, the shared experience, and in some cases simply being given the permission and the means to help. In all cases, however, groups of individuals working together toward a goal have been accomplishing far more than any individual — and perhaps any organization — can alone.
This excerpt about national interest was published with permission from The Orbital Perspective (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2015).
Read the next excerpt in this series: Global Collaboration and Bridging the Data Gap
Check out the full series from The Orbital Perspective: How Having an Orbital Perspective Can Create a Better World
Image courtesy of E. Krall.
B the Change gathers and shares the voices from within the movement of people using business as a force for good and the community of certified B Corporations. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the nonprofit B Lab.
