Thursday, November 29, 2018

Nationalism Is a Weird Ideology

By Robert Higgs

Nationalism is a weird ideology. It would be easy to imagine that it was cooked up by rulers looking for a means of keeping their victims submissive and cooperative.


A nationalist gives moral priority to others within the boundaries of his nation-state, or at least to his fellow citizens there, and he acts accordingly in political affairs. Yet even in a small nation-state, practically all these people are complete strangers. One has never met them, never will meet them, has only the foggiest idea of the sort of people they are. Maybe they speak his language, but many do not. Maybe they are of the same race, but many are not; and even if they are, so what? Maybe they share his cultural affinities, but maybe they don’t. Maybe they are not even decent people; in fact, many are complete creeps or criminals. Why should anyone give any kind of priority to them merely because they happen to be located within the boundaries of the same tax farm?

Nationalism is, among other things, a gigantic aggregation error. It takes a huge, enormously diverse collection of people and imagines that each and every individual in the collection is somehow better than each and every individual in other nation-states. The more you think about it, the more idiotic it becomes.

Robert Higgs is a Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Independent Institute.

The above originally appeared at the Independent Institute.

6 comments:

  1. Nationalism is offered today as the alternative to globalism. Globalism suffering from the same problems as nationalism but factors of ten worse. Certainly individualism is best but globalism is parsecs further away from it than nationalism.

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    1. To paraphrase Higgs, globalism is, among other things, a gigantic aggregation error. It takes a huge, enormously diverse collection of people and imagines that each and every individual in the collection is somehow better than each and every individual on other planets.

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    2. I see nationalists often (deliberately?) labeling universal humanism as "globalism." You want international free trade/migration? "Globalist." You think non-citizens should be entitled to due process? "Globalist."

      What must be opposed is not so much globalism, but global STATISM. But this is redundant, as all forms of statism must be opposed.

      From where I stand, nationalism is counterproductive to liberty, because it so often furnishes national leaders with an excuse to exercise power. "We need to rule you in order to protect you from THOSE PEOPLE over there." It's entirely possible that global government could be more benign, as it would prevent leaders from finger-pointing at out-groups to justify their own tyranny.

      Maybe The NAPster has a point that globalism is anthropocentric, but it's almost certainly the case that the differences among various groups of humans is absurdly trivial when compared to the differences between humans and any other animal/alien.

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  2. Globalism as Jimmy indicates is magnitude of orders worse than the common Nationalism. Globalism supports negative political constructs and contingencies that affirm the oligarchy and exploits the common man far worse than nationalism because their wishes are even further removed from the effective ideal of self governing decentralization.

    Nationalism is a drastically imperfect and quite destructive pursuit at times but it is not the total clusterfuck that Globalism is. Ask the member countries of the little EU experiment and see what they tell you.

    The lesser evil (even in the case of the Idiocrat in Chief) is an evil that those that cant grasp Bildegerger and Deep State concepts can wrap their head around even though its the equivalent of the Dutch boy with his finger in a dike.

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  3. Isn’t nationalism derivative of tribalism? Most of us still have some tribalism in us. This is a real social construct that is part of human social evolution. There is an us and them part of humanity that was probably more useful in the past.

    Appearance and language are huge factors. Before I know a person I feel more affinity toward those that look like me. If you don’t speak like I do it is going to be harder to get to know you.

    With today’s technology tribes can be less proximal and more ideological or based on interests. This blog is somewhat of a tribe. Our nation is the NAP.

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  4. Nationalism is tribal pagan self-idolization.

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