I get patriotism. That’s recognizing and appreciating the abstract principles a state is founded on, and occasionally making courageous choices to defend them. Nationalism though is a weird symbols-and-history emotional apohenia. Personalizing impersonal meta-institutions...
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It is easier for you to imagine yourself into fake stories built on manufactured emotional resonances than to see living people as human and actually form real connections and author and inhabit real stories. Easier for the same reason video games are easier than real life.
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Actually creating a real human role for yourself in a real human story evolving live is ugly, messy, dissonant work. No strident Wagnerian music accompanies it. Reality is not color-coordinated. It’s just you, tough decisions, and hard ethics principles in a room together.
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Patriotism is hard, lonely, uncomfortable, THINKING work seeking commonality and connection with people who are not like you. Nationalism is a matter of blending into a pleasant concert crowd and chanting slogans, pretending your basest psychopathy is your highest human self,
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You look at a photo of a crowd of hungry, desperate, dirty people on a journey towards your borders. None of them look like you. Do you do the patriotic hard thing and apply hard-won and history-tested principles to what you see, and attempt to connect to the present reality?
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Or do you do the easy, “nationalist” thing of contrasting the real picture to staged visual and musical theatrical backdrops, finding dissonance, and concluding they are monsters to be slayed? The choice is yours. Patriotism or nationalism? Individual courage or mass psychopathy?
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End of conversation
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