Tuesday 18 October 2016

The Nation State

This post follows on from the earlier one on patriotism.

There are those who say that the days of the nation state are over and that henceforth we should live under the banner of one humanity by which they mean a humanity which adheres to egalitarian doctrines in which the only differences allowed are ones that submit themselves to the prevailing dogma. Spirituality of a sort would be permitted but it would preferably be non-theistic and certainly have to fall into line with the official political orthodoxy which would be unquestionable. There are others, of whom I am one, who think that this is a tactic to separate human beings from their roots so that they are more easily malleable and better able to be shaped to the requirements of a One World system of government which would present itself as benign but which would really be about total control. To this end all traditional loyalties are to be destroyed in the name of unity, and people are presented with a shiny new and sophisticated ideology to which everyone must subscribe. As always, the real powers deceive the well-meaning but naive by hiding their true agenda behind noble sounding words with which it seems no decent person could possibly disagree.

The idea of the nation state needs to be broken because it resists this orthodoxy by giving a focus for identity to something that conflicts with it. Thus it must be presented as divisive, out of date and probably racist too, and obligingly, because when you suppress the natural expression of something it reappears in a deformed and exaggerated state, groups spring up that do indeed tick all these boxes. However that does not mean that the principle in question is as described. The distortion of a truth is the distortion not the truth. Do we define a thing only by its negative aspects? Is Christianity only the Inquisition? Is marriage only divorce?

This is why mass immigration is now so much encouraged. New arrivals are naturally not going to have much feeling for the past of a country but it is the past that gives that country its identity. When that connection is weakened so is the sense of identity and a new one based on the universalist, humanity is one, modern ethos can be built up. People without a past are more easily controlled by the powers that be, whether they be political, economic or whatever, and they can be more readily herded into the direction desired by those powers. A new direction is not always a bad thing, of course. It all depends on what the direction is. The introduction of Christianity to the West was clearly a very good thing but now the situation is precisely the reverse. The agenda is the destruction of Christianity or any form of religion that points human beings away from the preoccupations of this world and towards the sense that life here is part of much larger field of existence, and promotes the idea that one's values should be based on the reality of that larger field not the small segment of it in which we currently live.

A nation state is probably the largest unit with which a person can feel a real sense of belonging. This is not just an imagined ideal, as in the airy dreams of the ivory towered intellectual, but a truly felt sense of participation which has depth and roots, blood and soul. One based in the earth as well as the mind. A real home unlike in the globalised world where, as they say, no one is a foreigner but no one is at home either. One humanity may seem a pleasant idea but it has no substance for it has no real distinguishing characteristics and nothing concrete to define it. It is just an abstraction. There is no individuality and what we love is individuality. The Frenchness of France, the Indianness of India and so on. This is not to say that humanity is not one. It very definitely is and in today's world should be seen as such. But, at the same time, it is made up of different constituent parts and its multiplicity is just as important as its unity and should not be destroyed in the name of the latter any more than the reverse should be the case. Are we so blind that we cannot see the virtue of the two existing together? I like to think of the Trinity as a pattern for everything and, for me, it certainly gives us a clue as to how things should be in the context of one world and many nation states. The one and the many are two sides of the same coin and neither should be neglected for the sake of the other.

Although often described as such, the nation state, or better put, the country, is not really a political entity. It is a cultural thing, certainly, but at a deeper level it is a spiritual thing. It can, indeed it should, change and grow but this growth should be faithful to the inner reality of which the country is the outer expression. If it is not there will be a rupture between inner and outer as is the case with virtually all countries now. This can only lead to disharmony within the nation and instability among the people. In this context it has to be said that England is increasingly losing its connection to Albion. One can only presume this is deliberately engineered so that we accept the brave new world being prepared for us and do so gladly, thinking it an improvement on the ignorant past. Let us hope there are enough inhabitants of England who can keep that connection alive in their hearts until the times be more propitious for its expression.

None of this means that present day nation states will not be fundamentally altered in the future. That is all part of the natural way life unfolds. But the motives of the forces which are ultimately behind the attempts to deconstruct them today are to do with power and control despite the humanitarian tone of the way their case is presented to the public. For the sort of oneness that is being promoted now is not a spiritual oneness but a distortion of that for non-spiritual ends. The devil is able to corrupt anything and, as Shakespeare tells us, 'can cite scripture for his purpose'.

7 comments:

Bruce Charlton said...

@William - The key argument was, perhaps, that the world wars were supposedly caused by The Nation State and the 'nationalism' that was supposedly the inevitable result; neither of which is true.

And I think this relates to mass immigration as well, in the sense that the intention is to 'divide and rule' the population - by creating inter-cultural strife to the extent that there can be no spontaneous solution (given that the only effective way of having multi-cultural cohesion is a shared religion) - and eventually people will want or at least accept a tyrannical central state to impose order and 'peace'.

Mass immigration is therefore a win-win for the global conspiracy, which is why they will do nothing to stop it, lie and lie about the subject in every way, and try to thwart all attempts to control it.

Bruce Charlton said...

Comment from Brett Stevens (sorry I accidentally deleted the original while trying to post it - a lethal combination of small touch screen and stubby fingers... Bruce)

People support what flatters them. This is the opposite of searching for transcendental or metaphysical meaning in life, because in that context, the heavens replace our egos. It amazes me, but the tendency is in all of us to make ourselves into the world and to see the world as only the substrate on which our egos act. Our canvas. A stage. Etc: the human, especially the intelligent human, is eternal drama.

What flatters them is a long list, but near the top is "We are all one." To the human ego, that means: You are all part of Me, and therefore I control you, such as by making a rule that we are all equal which really means "no one can deny me inclusion in this society." We hide this behind layers of shifted-perspective nonsense so that no one can see that humans, instead of thinking "objectively," think from the individual unless they have the dreamlike condition Bruce identifies with creative genius, or otherwise apply discipline to see a wider world than their Simian self-consciousness.

The Nation -- I prefer these to Nation-States, but your use of the term is different -- thwarts this idea of "I am the World, and you are part of it" (I always feel a comparison here to Captain Ahab's "you are my arms and legs" and the One Ring of course). Instead, the individual is part of an organic whole, linked to culture, soil, heritage and God. That offends the monkey ego and makes people rage within because it brings up mortality and our relative impotence as tiny meaty individuals in a vast world made of rock and earth.

This is the psychology behind the quasi-globalist sentiment you mention. It is a desire to psychologically unify the world into the self. We might even call it a consumptive impulse, a desire to take the world within and thus to digest it and convert it into human form. Not surprisingly, the results of this mentality are universally excremental.

William Wildblood said...

An illuminating comment. Thanks for adding it to the post. I don't like the technical sounding phrase nation state either. I just used it in the context of them being abolished.

TIMOTHI said...

I think Bruce has written strongly against any dreamlike condition, and sees genius as purposeful, active, and highly self aware.

William, you made a surprising comment that the nation state helps liberate us from earthly preoccupations, and I have trouble seeing how this can be. I would have guessed the opposite.

Can you elaborate?

William Wildblood said...

Did I say that? I'm not sure I did! All that liberates us from earthly preoccupations is faith in God or belief in the hereafter. This is just about how a world of individual countries is preferable to a global soup and more natural for human beings. At the same time love of country can surely inspire one to selfless acts even if that feeling can be corrupted as it presumably was in Nazi Germany.

William Wildblood said...

I think I see what you mean now. I wrote that the agenda today, as in the one behind the scenes, is the destruction of Christianity or any form of religion that takes us away from worldly preoccupation. But that's a different point, nothing to do with nation states as such.

TIMOTHI said...

Yes, that was it.

Thanks for clarifying William!