Nationalism is garbage. Your country/government sucks like everyone else’s country/government. You shouldn’t be willing to kill other people because of where they were born.
If you are comfortable with the idea of national myth as a sort of acceptable lie to build a society around then, sure, do a nationalism. It’s a great way to unite people in resistance to empire and colonialism and you get to really, really enjoy when your country does good sports. But I think there must come a time when the connective comfort of the imaginative story holding a bunch of geographically contiguous people together must be discarded. The story of a nation gets built up and up until it breeds a broad intellectual shallowness expressed in jingoism or worse. It’s like a bedtime story to help you sleep. But you’re a big boy or girl now and you can just choose to sleep all by yourself. Or not.
Nationalism is garbage. Your country/government sucks like everyone else’s country/government. You shouldn’t be willing to kill other people because of where they were born.
Ryan Chapman has such a good channel. Definitely worth checking out.
If you are comfortable with the idea of national myth as a sort of acceptable lie to build a society around then, sure, do a nationalism. It’s a great way to unite people in resistance to empire and colonialism and you get to really, really enjoy when your country does good sports. But I think there must come a time when the connective comfort of the imaginative story holding a bunch of geographically contiguous people together must be discarded. The story of a nation gets built up and up until it breeds a broad intellectual shallowness expressed in jingoism or worse. It’s like a bedtime story to help you sleep. But you’re a big boy or girl now and you can just choose to sleep all by yourself. Or not.