Is Nationalism bad?

[tenta]

Nationalism is just an illusion created because people want to feel superior or have a sense of pride for something nobody can control

[Norbert Lennartz]

25 minutes ago, Shiva said:

Because when everybody has equal say, we won't accomplish anything.

With this sociological naivety you can make things even worse than they already are.

[jbram2002]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

If you think you're an American, that's something you fabricated to make yourself feel good. It's not true and it's an unconscious survival function.

Except... it is true. It simply doesn't mean anything. Someone who lives in America is an American. But they don't have to identify with it.

[Norbert Lennartz]

@Shiva
I'm sorry. But your remarks are so narrow-minded that not even your single argument can stand up in itself. If you believe in progress through decisiveness, then your democratic collectivism is the greatest economic obstacle to progress. I decide every day and every minute alone or with exchange partners freely about my affairs by exchange and interchange. One state by the other. Democracy is one of the anti-spiritual institutions we have talked about.

[Norbert Lennartz]

@Shiva
I don't know where to start with you. That would be a long journey. Please just follow my contributions and read this as an essence for now. Sections 1 and 2.
https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/Anatomy of the State_3.pdf

[AnTe]

no you're not wrong but it goes wrong when it becomes too personal, then it's no longer about the people but only your own insecurities and short comings.

[bejapuskas]

6 hours ago, mandyjw said:

BUT LEO! You told me I have to get involved in politics again instead of having my head stuck in the sand. I was a patriotic American, I let go if it, I hated my country, I embodied no identity, and then I had an awakening and I realized that America is a huge part of my (God's) creation. 

I mean it is pretty fucking great. The mountains, the variations in climate, the miles and miles of coastline. I could spend my entire life exploring and not even know a tiny fraction of it intimately. 

@mandyjw  You can let go of that attachment and rather care about which party can raise the consciousness of the people the most.

 

@Deadline We can learn from their dedication to take action, but why should we inest our energy into egotism and genocide?

[Norbert Lennartz]

Yeah, I don't like healing you from your prejudices one by one. I already know these fruitless discussions. You have to open yourself up to a whole different view. That can only be done with crystal clear basics. As in pdf.
Look also

 

[Norbert Lennartz]

20 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Nationalism isn't bad because good and bad do not exist.

But nationalism is problematic because it is divisive. It fails to recongize and honor the fundamental unity of all human beings by pitting one tribe of humans against another. It inevitably leads to hatred, violence, and war.

Nationalism is the prime example of collective ego in action. So nationalism suffers from all the same problems at excessive ego suffers from. And ultimately it ends up destroying itself.

Being passionate about ego, judgment, hatred, division, and violence is very problematic. Passion alone isn't enough, it must be channeled towards love rather than fear and hate.

All nationalist movements are fundamentally fear-based. They come from a position of scarcity and falsehood. They are anti-spiritual.

A high consciousness being will have a loving, inclusive, global perspective. Not a narrow, divisive, tribal one.

If you were totally conscious you would have absolutely nothing to defend or fear, and you would not judge or hate anyone or anything.

Some more thoughts:
1) Anyone who considers the difference between the biologically embodied knowledge and its consciousness can see that the totally conscious can not be found anywhere.
2) What biology also reveals is that all individuals can only exist in structural coupling and operational congruence with the components of their living and inanimate niche, and thus indeed the entire cosmos is a web of monstrously animated and inanimate subsystems without which there would be no cosmos again.
3) Indeed, splitting (injury, causing infirmity, untimely death) so is who disregards system boundaries - even if the system is a being of not so high consciousness (greater blindness, lesser ability to maintain its operational congruence in the course of evolutionary drift) and rather disintegrate ("destroys itself").
4) Something happens to us from which its potential can unfold. The central question is: are we this potential, through consciousness?

[Leo Gura]

11 hours ago, mandyjw said:

BUT LEO! You told me I have to get involved in politics again instead of having my head stuck in the sand. I was a patriotic American, I let go if it, I hated my country, I embodied no identity, and then I had an awakening and I realized that America is a huge part of my (God's) creation. 

Yes, you DO have to get involved in politics. But not from a position of ego.

I am not saying you should hate your country or deny whatever country you live in. Just don't confuse it with who/what you are. America is a very small part of God's creation, and really, it's a creation of your mind. God does not know or see any America.

All that's being said here is to be conscious of the socially constructed nature of all these social constructs like money, political parties, nation states, races, genders, etc. Do not confuse any of that stuff with Truth or with yourself. Do not take any of it personally. Use it and enjoy it, but don't attach to it.

Quote

I mean it is pretty fucking great. The mountains, the variations in climate, the miles and miles of coastline. I could spend my entire life exploring and not even know a tiny fraction of it intimately. 

The Earth is a cool place, I'm not disputing that. But to divide up the Earth into parts and call one part yours and other part not yours is an egoic fantasy.

9 hours ago, jbram2002 said:

Except... it is true. It simply doesn't mean anything. Someone who lives in America is an American. But they don't have to identify with it.

It's only true in your mind. "America" is something you invented. If you think you're "an American" you invented that. It's very important to be conscious of that.

Just because a bunch of people get together and say that "this is America" doesn't make it so. It's a collective hallucination.

Besides which, no two people in the world agree on what "America" even means. Everyone has their own ideas about what America is and ought to be. Some people believe America is "The Great Satan". And they're not entirely wrong. If Americans are not devils, who is?

[mandyjw]

We could go back to something like what America was when the Native Americans lived here with no concepts of land ownership. The fictions of wealth, expensive properties and buildings are what make that impossible. An enlightened society would resemble what America was before Columbus, but without the disconnection and warfare caused by tribalism.

[Leo Gura]

12 minutes ago, mandyjw said:

We could go back to something like what America was when the Native Americans lived here with no concepts of land ownership. The fictions of wealth, expensive properties and buildings are what make that impossible. An enlightened society would resemble what America was before Columbus, but without the disconnection and warfare caused by tribalism.

I am not saying that we need to eliminate all social constructions. Social constructions are necessary and useful. We just need to be conscious and honest that they are social constructions, not objective things. And we need to not get out identities attached to them.

300 million people can never go back to living in a pre-Columbus society. This is not possible due to problems of scale and technological and cultural evolution. You cannot put the genie back in the bottle. 300 million people requires SERIOUS bureaucracy to manage. Bureaucracy itself is not the problem. The problem is corruption in the bureaucracy, which can and must be eliminated.

The invention of modern bureaucracy is a miracle greater than electricity. Without it your life would be so awful it would hardly be worth living. People take all this for granted.

[mandyjw]

@Leo Gura But you could put the genie back in the bottle in a small area couldn't you? Assuming that you had the right amount of land for the population, you could create a community that lived like a tribe off the land with help from technology. 

I look at the Indian (Native American) reservations here, and how we shoved all the people together on small amounts of land. There is no possible way that they could have kept their traditions of seasonal migration and continue to hunt and gather over the wide areas that were cleared. They became dependent on our agriculture and they didn't even have time to adjust genetically to that diet. Wheat was never a great idea as a food staple anyway. We've nearly hopelessly fucked things up, the earth and people are sick as a result. As we combat climate change we need to learn to unobtrusively farm the land, and a lot of that means going back to gathering and farming efficiently. 

I see the world very differently because I live where people are a rarity. I see food growing wild going to waste and running wild in the woods while I burn fossil fuels to drive to the grocery store and buy food that was shipped hundreds of miles to me, grown on depleted soils with chemicals. 

It's insane. Reconnecting with nature is a necessity. The wisdom we need to get out of this mess is there. 

 

Edited May 24, 2019 by mandyjw

[Leo Gura]

16 minutes ago, mandyjw said:

But you could put the genie back in the bottle in a small area couldn't you? Assuming that you had the right amount of land for the population, you could create a community that lived like a tribe off the land with help from technology.

In practice, no you can't, because we live in a globalized world. You cannot just build a wall between your community and the outside world. Because fundamentally everything is interconnected. Eventually your commune would die out or become a cancer.

The issue of running a good society is very complex. You cannot it do it in isolation, or by sticking your head in the sand, or by ignoring issues of mass scale. Whatever solutions you imagine must work at the scale of 100s of millions of people AT LEAST, and even at the scale of 7 billion. Otherwise you're not actually addressing the deepest issues, you're just offloading them on someone else to solve.

Yes, you can create a small commune of millionaires who live on a golf course in a gated community with security guards. But this is all made possible by the larger society which maintains the police, military, legal system, monetary system, education system, fire department, important regulations, food inspections, vaccinations, environmental protections, trade treaties, taxation, nuclear weapons, telecommunications, immigration, airports, etc, etc. Your little commune could not exist without all that as supporting infrastructure.

Just as an example of how everything is interconnected: let's say you build your perfect little commune on a tropical island. Everything is going great until some large corporation decides to use your island chain as nuclear dump site. A giant oil tanker full of nuclear waste material come and dumps 100 tons of radioactive material on a neighboring island. This material leeches into the water and gives 70% of the people on your island cancer which you cannot cure without flying back to the mainland. But to cure your cancer requires you pay $100,000 in medical bills which you cannot afford because you lived on a remote island with no major economy. You have no way to stop this from happening because your island is without any political power. So your commune very soon dies.

[mandyjw]

But what about a community without walls or it's own rules, within an existing country like the US? For example if you got a bunch of enlightened people together to live in one area. They would transform that area by changing the local politics, building and running conscious businesses together and the influence would spread. 

I've seen this work on a small scale. For example there is one very stage green artsy community in among a wide area of stage blue territory here. It's law of attraction at work even if they aren't aware of it themselves. 

I'm just imagining how powerful it could be with stage yellow and turquoise people. 

Edited May 24, 2019 by mandyjw

[jbram2002]

@Leo Gura the definition of America was created before I was around. And although it's true that we are all one, and that definitions change, having these definitions is immensely useful when dealing with dualistic people. Putting aside all dualistic definitions makes it impossible for me to communicate with anyone who doesn't know the nondual lexicon. 

Thus, to 99.9999% of the world, I am an American. That's not by my personal definition. But it still applies. The difference between myself and, say, Trump in this regard is that being an American does not define me. It's just one of a million words that describes the conditions I live in.

[Leo Gura]

2 minutes ago, mandyjw said:

But what about a community without walls or it's own rules, within an existing country like the US? For example if you got a bunch of enlightened people together to live in one area. They would transform that area by changing the local politics, building and running conscious businesses together and the influence would spread. 

I've seen this work on a small scale. For example there is one very stage green artsy community in among a wide area of stage blue territory here. It's law of attraction at work even if they aren't aware of it themselves. 

I'm just imagining how powerful it could be with stage yellow and turquoise people. 

Of course that already happens. But its too small to really address any serious world problems.

What you're describing is called: American society. Here it is. You're in it already. The question is, how do make this society better for 300 million people?

1 minute ago, jbram2002 said:

@Leo Gura the definition of America was created before I was around. And although it's true that we are all one, and that definitions change, having these definitions is immensely useful when dealing with dualistic people. Putting aside all dualistic definitions makes it impossible for me to communicate with anyone who doesn't know the nondual lexicon. 

Thus, to 99.9999% of the world, I am an American. That's not by my personal definition. But it still applies. The difference between myself and, say, Trump in this regard is that being an American does not define me. It's just one of a million words that describes the conditions I live in.

You are underestimating how much these kinds of constructions contribute to your sense of self and how much they shape the behaviors of hundreds of millions of people. This is not merely about you. This is about entire societies and cultures.

[mandyjw]

I'm one of 7.53 billion but I'm also God. So anything that I do is too small to address serious world problems, but God wanted to be small, God wanted to experience herself through me. So it starts with my community. It's a small enough of a community that I can make a HUGE impact on it. 

It think my time is better spent on my local community than spending my time working for a deluded political party, even if it is slightly less deluded than its rival. 

 

Edited May 24, 2019 by mandyjw

[Leo Gura]

@mandyjw Firstly, you can do both.

Secondly, if everyone took your attitude we'd be living in Nazi Germany or worse.

If you care about human life, your worldview must be GLOBAL! Mankind's greatest challenges are GLOBAL. This cannot be resolved by just focusing on your local community. That's what got us into so much trouble that we're in today.

This planet will be destroyed if we don't adopt a global perspective immediately.

[jbram2002]

50 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

You are underestimating how much these kinds of constructions contribute to your sense of self and how much they shape the behaviors of hundreds of millions of people. This is not merely about you. This is about entire societies and cultures.

Specifically because of this is why it's important to not throw away all of the dualistic definitions when dealing with those societies and cultures. Speaking in nondual terms to dualistic minds is like speaking Latin to a Korean. It's a completely different language that sounds like hokey to those who don't understand it. 

The trick is to be able to see both the nondual and the dualistic points of view. If you only accept nonduality, then you can't communicate with nondual people. If you only accept duality, you never see beyond your ego.

It's like Inception, just with nonduality!  

Edited May 24, 2019 by jbram2002