Our brains need to create a shared sense of self, an “imagined community,” as the political scientist Benedict Anderson put it, on whose behalf collective decisions are made. This community is a “person” that has a past and a future that transcend us as individuals.
国家（nations and states）也是如此。我们的大脑需要创造一种共同的自我意识，一个政治学家本尼迪克特·安德森（Benedict Anderson）所谓的 “想象的共同体”，集体决策的代表对象。这一共同体是一个“人”，它具有超越作为个体的我们的过去和未来。它拥有一个历史和一个telos。