The End of Nationalism

This piece came about as the result of a thread I found myself embroiled in during a visit to an Occupy Melbourne Facebook page.
A video was posted which displayed an ugly tirade of racist abuse on the Melbourne Metro.
This led to diverse opinions which eventually brought some apologists out claiming that they saw nothing wrong in being proud of their Country, something I have always associated with a measure of short-sightedness and as traditionally the preserve of all good racists world wide.

Because of the controversial  nature of this topic and my hot/cool participation within it, I will no doubt unavoidably repeat myself as the vast bulk of this is lifted straight from the thread in question :


...Eamon described it simply as bigotry...which stems from inherent ignorance and lack of education
The rage is irrelevant, it's the attitude that counts, if we want to change this world for the better it becomes incumbent upon us to educate ourselves and those around us as education is a tool for empowerment.

Now lets see where this thing called Pride for one's Nation leads us...

As I see it when we climbed out of the primordial ooze we banded together for protection and formed primitive gangs which became localized tribes around watering holes and sources of food.

Thus our population expanded as we mastered the art of the collective kill and agriculture.

Eventually our ideological conception of ourselves as a collective group was expanded by the formation of Cities.

We became proud of our Cities, then City states emerged expanding our ideological conception even further.

Eventually we spread across entire continents forming our conception of Nationhood and pride in a Country.

This remained a reasonable balance for thousands of years...that is, at least, until one day someone tried burning coal.

As a result of this discovery, now fueled by a phenomenal energy resource, we have witnessed the exponential growth of the Human population with it's accompanying bad habits being replicated across the world.

We crawl across the face of the Earth like ant hordes due to our use of ancient sunlight...Oil...which is reaching 'peak' capacity and is approaching it's use-by date as a successful energy source for global purposes.
 
Our so-called Civil-isation has been an explosion across the Earth, transforming the face of Gaea in a wave of concrete and Ecological destruction not witnessed in the previous 65 million years of evolution.

This destruction of our life-giving air and water, our habitat and the habitat of all species on Earth has occurred in just 300 years!

We are merely infants in the broad scale of history.

We are an organic species...made up of individual yet interdependent cells.

And our technology is uniting us...the web is our collective brain...we now see that our ideological conception of our provincial world must be expanded further to encompass the globe.

With peak-oil a reality and our continuing exponential growth, numerous disaster scenarios are about to hit us and it therefore is additionally incumbent upon all of us to raise our awareness and recognise that with dwindling Resources and the Rise of India & China occurring at breakneck speed, the accompanying drain on resources which such an enormous population of switched-on Consumers demand will make this scenario impossible to sustain.

We hit a brick wall with the natural physical order, and with the resource demands of our fellow man i.e Nationalism no longer remains viable.

This is already in evidence in the New World, in Cities such as Mumbai and Beijing.

This direction can no longer be maintained.

Nationalism is defined as Pride in one's Country above all others.

It promotes competitiveness, not co-operation.

Nationalism is just as primitive as tribalism...we are all now citizens of the post-crash Earth.

Maintaining tribalism and Nationalism is the best way you can destroy the planet...

Our sphere of consciousness has already expanded...our Monkeysphere has expanded...there is no way back...!

And there is no other way out, but to share our resources as ONE tribe i.e the Human Tribe...either we learn to work together and share or we wipe our Civilisation out, it's that simple i.e Paradise or Oblivion...

Remember, otherwise we are doomed to repeat History in an endless cycle of destruction...

Pride goeth before the fall.

It must be acknowledged that as a subgroup; people who were proud of their countries have killed more of their fellow man than any other ideological group, and the Church is always conscripted to add additional nationalist fervor.

Pride in King and Country...or God and Country.

Pride is Hubris pure and simple.

Analyse something you are proud of and you will see how pathological it is to cling to pride.

Oh? you have pride in your drawings?

Well tell me could you have done these drawing without a good education and without the support of innumerable people over many years?

So, you are proud then of this great land of ours...what part did you play that made you so proud?

Did you form the Government ? make the roads across OZ? Establish our coastlines?

Proud of our Economic standing in the World? then you should really thank slaves in sweatshops in Asia and the Chinese.

Proud of our mineral wealth?

So, you are proud of a geological accident?

Proud to be an Aussie? well then you are proud of an accident of birth...and so on and so on, ad nauseum.

You are proud of mum and dad...a noble attribute!

So, you shaped them into adulthood? No?

What part did you play then that made them such noble creatures as Adults?

None. So what exactly is it that swells you with Pride?

Mark came up with a good example...Team Pride in Your Football team.

Your team wins..Yay...you clap each other on the back and celebrate...but hang on?

You didn't play did you...no, you just sat in front of the big screen guzzling beers...
Is that what you are proud of?

And as for being proud of our language...well I like our language a lot...although it needs vast improvement, but neither you nor i Moose had any part in creating it.

That kind of pride seems vacuous to me...

You might as well say you are proud of the rain...

It wasn't one of the seven deadly sins for nothing...

I guess I am becoming tired of seeing this useless notion..this human foible...this ego driven attitude continuing to be promulgated as if it were a virtue!

It's not.


Definition of Pride :

"Pride is an inwardly directed emotion that carries two common meanings.

With a negative connotation, pride refers to an inflated sense of one's personal status or accomplishments, often used synonymously with hubris".

The second form is considered a more healthy form, is socially acceptable and probably more in line with what you guys are on about.

However, this is where I differ.

We are an emergent i.e changing species who are gregarious in nature and interdependent.

We live within a temporal stream, where the only constant is change...because of this there is hardly an instance unless purely philosophical where one could satisfactorily claim pride in something in the physical dimension without having to acknowledge that it really had very little to do with you...but was seemingly pure random luck...atoms crashing into atoms, jostling for position in the slipstream of Time...an interconnected series of galactic causality, a tapestry of events weaving our collective reality.

The beating of a single butterfly's wings in Brazil can lead to extraordinary ramifications around the World, and there are 6 degrees of separation between each and everyone of us on the Planet.

It is an interconnected World.

It is our consciousness which shapes meaning, patterns and order out of an unpredictable Universe.
However you cannot look at an event in isolation and if you try, you will be forced to recognise eventually, that at some deep sub-atomic level we are all connected and in essence 'One' with the Universe...

Like one of Zeno's paradoxes, the more you can examine an event, the more you begin to break it down into it's component parts, the more you tumble down the rabbit-hole into infinite regression until finally you are forced to see that you are just a part of a greater whole ...an Intelligence manifest through out the Cosmos.

You are part of a whole host of interconnected  events, and 'one' with that slip-stream of Intelligence, of Consciousness.

But I digress, and find myself traveling down my own linguistic Rabbit-hole...

A question : What if we all lived in a similar world, an equal world where Money was no longer part of the equation, simply no longer existed?
Would you still have so much Pride in your little patch then?

How would you substantiate or validate your pride in a world of true equality, one where possessions had no Monetary value?

Can you see what I'm saying?

How is it that you assess or validate your level or degree of Pride in some possession or attribute?

We are gregarious creature and we establish our values and norms through feedback, by comparing with those around us, those less fortunate perhaps, it's how we establish our views about our own personal space...

Our blessed space...our special space...our better space.

In other words Pride is dependent on a comparison and on inequality, and to achieve pride you need to be in a superior position to the object of your comparison.

Otherwise, it's a different emotion entirely.

We are the fortunate ones. We must be Chosen!

Yes, we are the chosen ones obviously....look at our bountiful harvest compared with my neighbour over the hill.

I said before...don't have so much pride in accidents of birth and geology.

Have empathy and compassion instead.


There are allegorical tales through out Eastern, Western & Persian literature stretching back to the dawn of writing...parables warning of the Dangers of Hubris.



Societal conditioning occurred initially on a Grand scale in the West due to our technology, our ability to spread messages simultaneously over an entire continent thanks to our Western Media.

Radio, Television, Billboards, Placards, Magazines and Posters.

Social memes have always been with us, but with the advent of our communication technology this became an enormous tool for wielding hearts and minds.

Nationalism, Patriotism...Jingoism...all were artificially manufactured by Governments usually with just one agenda...War!

Uncle Sam needs You! Are you not Proud of your Country?

Do you not wish to lay down your life in some distant land for the Glory of God and Country?...etc., etc., more and more BS.

These social memes festered in the minds of our parents and their parents before them under Government propaganda and now run as tape-loops through our minds...constantly.

F*** Pride in Nationhood or Race...rather have gratitude and humility instead.

A last note on "Pride"...For Christs sake people, study your Buddhism and learn what an ancient, wise people already knew, 1000's of years ago...Ancient Wisdom.'

Addendum :Please note that the vast bulk of this text was taken straight from a thread in Occupy Melbourne (FB) and therefore when I refer to 'people', present company is naturally excluded.