there’s this passage that infected me like a little germ and now im gonna sneeze it all over you too
[Nationalism] plays a crucial role in nation-building by instilling a sense of togetherness among its adherents, incessantly telling them where their collective future lies with reference to their real or supposed common past, and thus inducing them to transfer their loyalties from their local communities or supra-national church to the nation-state. Its aim is the creation of territorially defined polities in which all individuals are directly affiliated to the state as identical legal units…and, not the least, in which all are prepared to defend this state of affairs
to me this is one of the most sublime examples of an infohazard. simply by being exposed to a historicization and deconstruction of the nation state—a novel understanding of it as a malleable constructed ideology, not a fact of nature—i feel that i have permanently disqualified myself from ever participating in those actions to preserve my nation that would otherwise come naturally due to my having been raised here. if i were elected the president of ukraine in 2019 and russia came a-knockin’ three years later, i would no longer be able to “rally the troops” and make an impassioned and emotionally salient case for self-sacrifice in the name of preserving the nation. not without coming off as incredibly fake. i could try some other tack, maybe i could talk about the undesirability of living under russian rule, but i think my words would motivate more people to flee as refugees rather than bleeding and dying for the homeland.
what’s the big deal (i can hear you saying as you read this) nobody was going to elect you president of anything. of course youre right, but it still feels a bit disturbing to know that mere words on a page can foreclose an entire future to me by rearranging the atoms in my head to an irrevocable configuration. could i do something like this to someone, if i tried really hard?