I reminded you that people who want to live a normal life, work honestly, raise children and everything else, they need a nation state. The nation state, in turn, needs people who will be emotionally connected to it. This means that belonging to the nation and citizenship of the nation state will be part of their identity.
Actual belonging to the nation is experienced as an absolutely self-evident part of an individual’s identity. Personalities are shaped in such a way that being Czech, Hungarian, English, French or whatever is not an option. And everyone is constantly reinforced in this by their surroundings. This is the basis of the nation as a community of deep solidarity.
Actual belonging to the nation is experienced as an absolutely self-evident part of an individual’s identity.
Part of the population of European countries and the USA has already grown up in a new world where everything national is systematically destroyed. Against this, however, is the fact that man is a flexible being, able to adapt and adopt new cultural patterns quite easily – if those patterns are held by the majority and if the overall environment is favourable for him. And let’s not forget that the generation that grew up in an anti-national environment is the one that was socialized to constantly change its views, habits and values. So the way back is possible.
It is, of course, difficult for a national feeling to be deeply felt by someone who speaks English most of the time, goes to the theatre in Paris twice a month, is a member of a golf club on a Spanish island, travels constantly between London and Moscow for work (in addition to daily videoconferences with dozens of other countries), and when he wants to eat, he goes to his favourite restaurant in Provence. For such people, the country of origin is a dormitory or a territory from which they can squeeze money.
Some may feel that globalist attituce makes people more progressive and developed beings. But I fear that this is an illusion…
Some may feel that this makes people more progressive and developed beings. That their thinking is broader, that they can understand things from different sides. But I fear that this is an illusion, and that the result of such cosmopolitanism is an even stricter lock-in of their perceptions and their narrow culture. For one of the basic structures that has shaped the human mind for millennia is disappearing, namely the distinction between the ordinary and the exotic. The ability to wonder about things. The ability to notice that something fundamentally different exists (without labeling the other as pathological and tending to correct it). The ability to look at people with completely different ways of life and ask how they look at us. In a macdonalized global world, everything is flat. The pond behind the house, the Japanese mountains, Machu-Picchu and the guides on the African Safari. It’s all part of one space. Nothing is surprising. Thinking is flat, reduced to correctness, profitability and the presentation of obligatory experiences to colleagues (and rivals) of the same political class.
