herzmeister:
I don't think individualism and collectivism are mutually exclusive. You can have a collectivist society that strongly supports individualism and is very individualist, even if it doesn't look like that. Especially when work is voluntary. Maybe think about Wikipedia and have a look at various user sites. They are extremely different, have completely different opinions. There are no strongly enforced rules and still everything appears to work pretty well. I am saying this as someone who isn't really a Wikipedian and also criticized it a lot, even though (or actually because) I like it.
About land/resource struggle. I think that is actually more a cultural thing. One can't really explain borders and stuff with territories. No sane person considers the borders of his country his territory. That's just something that comes from nationalistic thinking cause by rulers that hungered for power and considered the size of their country something important.
As a matter of fact a bigger movement could solve most of the problems, be it energy (see a random fair for new technologies waiting to be implemented. There are so many different ways, that just haven't been tried yet. A few countries, like Japan work on space based solar systems, there is technology ready to use bare land to produce oil from algae and these are not the things I meant when I talked about fairs) or food (currently (that's a fact. Check the WHO I think it was) we could feed the world population thrice if we'd organize it optimally, so even if we don't do it perfectly we could easily prevent people from starving). If we do some of these things, together there would be no more need for resource wars. There is just too much unused potential. A lot of it possibly isn't really in use cause it doesn't really allow you to make a lot of money, but instead solve a problem in a way that prevents you from making money. No, I am not talking about conspiracies here. There is no need for one. People just don't use it commercially yet. I give you a completely different example. Memristors are a new way to store data. They only have benefits and are pretty much completely researched (in the sense of production ready, not like "we are done with research in that area" of course). The reason we don't have them yet is that companies (HP I think) are yet trying to figure out the marketing, doing lots of marketing research. So they'll (if not overtrumped by some other technology) come in this decade (HP plans 2014 IIRC). Something similar is the case for many, many technologies to solve big problems. However, no country is willing to take the risk of trying it first unless they really need to (space based solar systems in Japan).
So we are are really stuck by the lack of will and by the risk of investing capital. Big projects just cost a shit ton of money. Cold war made countries invest that money, but it sucks if money only gets invested for military in first place. It's maybe the reason the US does so well, despite sucking in so many ways. They invest so into military like no other country. Even China that has a way bigger money, actual reason to invest, etc. doesn't invest that much. That's btw. even true for percentage of the income. Besides that the US society is trained to be anti-socialist, so they kinda use military investment to secretly still have a form socialism (investing in companies, and people (veterans, etc), make jobs, ...). But hey, that's a secret.
