What Is A Nation And Why Is It Important?

Organized Community

Human beings need an organized community to survive. Creating, raising, feeding, developing, maintaining, protecting, and satisfying the rest of the needs of a single person requires the effort of many people. This is all done through a cooperation that arises from the understanding that life becomes easier when people work together. Cooperation only becomes possible when each individual sacrifices some of their autonomy to meeting the needs of others. When the people work together to develop a collective structure and agree to participate in it, this is the basic functioning of social organization.

An example of this in our daily lives is the way we engage in formal labor. We were born into a society that provides us with several needs in the form of food, shelter, medicine, education, and others. In return, we are expected to generate some form of value for the society. It is because of a complex and developed community organization that this happens, often unconsciously, for millions of people. For most of our lives we do not have worry about building our homes, growing our food, and securing our water all at once. We are given or seek out a task that has collective value, with the calculated expectation that enough people socially participating in the same way will result in a stable community.

Nation

A nation in its most basic form, its origin, is a community of people who have come together for a reason that they share in common. As a nation develops, what differentiates it from other communities is that it becomes its own self-sustaining society. Individuals may actively seek out this community, but the community itself is tasked with the physical and mental creation of new members and with the reinforcement of its existing members. In its fullest development the nation provides the necessities of life to all its members and becomes an equal historical participant on the global stage of humanity.