![An Important Distinction [Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal]](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1476886340-20161019.png){kind=link}
An old comic that feels oh so relevant in this tumultuous election year.
Source: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/an-important-distinction
An old comic that feels oh so relevant in this tumultuous election year.
Source: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/an-important-distinction
Nah.
Patriots would be there waving a giant flag saying we’re the best house ever, despite not actually being involved in building the house or having anything to do with the state of it outside of living in it.
Patriotism and nationalism has zero place in society.
We need to build a shared culture so that we can work together.
My house will become the best house should be a message we all can get around. Otherwise, why should I work with you to build society?
If you don’t like shared work or shared culture to begin with, it’s a bit problematic in that your own political ideologies are destined to die. At the very minimum, your ideology must be self sustaining.
Why this house should be the best? Why make it a competition? Who cares about the house?
We care about the people living in the house. And about the people living in other houses too.
The house in this case is a metaphor for the politicians, laws, community, etc.
You want people to take pride and improve all that. You want friendly competition there. And part of it would be, “We are the best house because we help other houses improve”
It’s a stepping stone to, “We are a commune” ie “We all share this world and should take pride and improve it for everybody” - It’s easier to take pride in and improve your own home first so you get to the point of, “Others should get to share in this and we have so much, let’s help others make their homes as great as ours”
I may be dumb, but for me the metaphor is for the nation. Or the mention of patriotism against nationalism makes no sense.
And I don’t care about nations. They’re a tool used to divide people.
Yes it’s easier to improve my country than others’. But I don’t need pride for that.
Good luck building up a coalition of people who will cooperate with you.
And worse: good luck politically defeating those who are smart enough to use basic psychology to coordinate the masses. Its not evil to do so, its just practicality. We know how people act and how they think. Its not so hard to then use psychology and sociology to build up our own coalitions.
As Terry Pratchett wrote in The Hogfather : We tell little likes like Santa Clause because we’re training children to believe in the big lies like Truth and Justice. And only when we all believe in that stuff can it possibly work. “We’re the best country in the world” is part of that, its a little lie that helps smooth over problems and helps us work together. And in my experience, its effective at it.
You know, I’m not particularly intelligent. If I (and you apparently) understood that nations are a manipulation of the masses, everyone can. Thus we could create a coalition against nationalism and patriotism quite easily, but schools and medias are spreading their propaganda.
That’s not true, Bernie Sanders campaign had a wonderfully wholesome and inclusive version of patriotism which they used to great effect:.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nwRiuh1Cug
…and he also talks about his nationalism when deriding the Koch brothers:.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0
So like most things it depends on when AND HOW they’re used.
Not true. Patriotism is wanting and seeking the best for your country. Because our society relies on those physical divides, patriotism would actually improve society. Nationalism is deciding that whatever your country is doing already is the best simply by virtue of self-identification. There is no desire for improvement outside of an individual perception so it, functionally, can never offer any improvement for society.
One is potentially beneficial. The other is cancerous.
Strange, nationalists in Europe have a lot of ideas about how to change their various countries.
Only in that they want to move it to a more extreme version of what they already perceive it to be. They are not looking to change it based on any meaningful measure. Nationalists are almost always conservatives.
That’s true.
I was reading a nutter manifesto from the Heritage Party in the UK earlier… It is a hodgepodge of animal rights laws that are a mix of actual animal rights and outlawing Halal and Kosher slaughter, encouraging free markets and nationalising railways and utilities, being free speech and personal freedom but LGBTQ people can’t have families or be spoken about, want to invest in the military and especially navy but also apparently are anti-war and want to cease support for Ukraine.
One is cancerous, the other is a benign tumor (for now).
How? That statement means nothing unless you explain it.
Patriotism, as long as it stays just that, is probably not going to do much damage. It’s just kind of there and annoying, but not directly dangerous. But it is still a ridiculous concept to be proud of the arbitrarily drawn lines within which you were born, and being loyal to them simply because you were born there. That doesn’t mean you can’t like your country and want it to prosper. But emotional attachment to and positive attitudes towards a nation by default is cringe at best. Praise a country if it does something good and critisize it if it fucks up. But why would you give one country special treatment there? And patriotism is never far from being exploited and turned into nationalism at the slightest inconvenience. Sometimes, it doesn’t even take an inconvenience, as evidenced by football right now.
What in the fuck are you on about?
It’s not pride in the lines drawn, it’s pride in the positive things that your community does on a national scale. That’s the point. You take the good things that you see elsewhere and you decide that you want to emulate that.
Ok so let’s entertain the opposite of patriotism and talk about self distane what is going to drive you to fix the crumbling rotting foundation or leaky roof because who cares if this crummy house rots and collapses on me if you don’t care about your county then you won’t have the drive to maintain it sure some might but those people who don’t need motivation to do things are rare and far between if the world is hopeless then what hope is there of fixing it
Is pride the only reason you take care of your health?
Because the motivation to not live in a shit place should be that you wouldn’t want to be living in a shit place, not because you think it’s great.
People with no or low self-worth are way more likely to neglect their health than those with high self-worth. Pride is a huge motivator for taking care of your health.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC194072/
People often don’t take care of things they aren’t proud of. It doesn’t matter if it’s clearly in their best interest to.
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