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I remember after the Roe ruling many people were saying things like ‘fuck America’ and some were burning American flags. And I also remember speaking to someone who was maybe 23 (before the roe ruling) and she said something to the effect of ‘I know in my generation (gen z) it’s not really socially acceptable to say you like the US’ (and for context she was an American). And this jives with my observation that the impact of identity politics has been people focusing more on what makes us different than what makes us similar. But something that has kind of thrown me off is if you meet someone from a developing country where terrible shit is happening they will say ‘fuck the government’ but they still love their country and will say so. But in the US, the connection of those on the far left to their country is so tenuous that if a single policy is passed that they do not like, they completely disavow the US in a way that I’ve only seen Iranians do. And what makes it even crazier is that progressives tend to come from wealthier families, so, unlike those I mentioned in developing countries, they have actually had a pretty privileged life that has presumably treated them pretty well - but the second some law is passed that they don’t like they will disavow it. It strikes me as a unique form of privilege that is so great and imbedded in the person that they fail to actually assess the nature of their own privilege; they are so oblivious that they would oppose with every fiber of their being the very system that has given them so many advantages.
The alternate explanation is something like the civilization of the hedonic treadmill: as societies become richer and more stable, the people living there start to have higher standards regarding what they expect their governments to provide for them. The bar that a government has to clear in order for its citizens to feel “patriotic” about it continues to be raised, and in fact might rise at a higher rate than it would in a relatively less developed country.
Is this actually something I should admire and want to emulate? If some person from, say, Senegal is a proud Senegalese patriot and loves being from Senegal, then there’s a couple possible ways I can react to that. One is to be happy for him in the sense that he found an effective cope that allows him to derive some degree of satisfaction and meaning from a scenario that, while objectively sub-optimal compared to many other countries, he has no power to change, and therefore needs to make the best of. But the other possible reaction is to say: what the fuck are you so proud of? Shouldn’t your standards be a little higher? What has the government or even the polity of Senegal done to deserve your love? Sure, abused wives often genuinely love their spouses, but that doesn’t mean we on the outside shouldn’t want those women to set their standards a bit higher.
A lack of patriotism is not a condition exclusive to the “far-left”, although certainly the average self-identifying progressive is far less likely to self-report patriotic sentiments than the average self-identifying conservative is. On what you might call the “far-right”, though, it is common to think bserve a seething hatred of not only the current American governing regime - the phrase “the Potomac regime” is commonly used to rhetorically distinguish the government from “the American people” - but also, increasingly, the basic assumptions and civic mythology that used to bind Americans together.
If we do, indeed, live in a “clown world” - a failed country built on false assumptions which have rotted away the foundation of what, if anything, made it initially worth living in - then why should I feel “patriotic” towards it? Because I could have it worse? Because at least America is a better place to live than Senegal? Isn’t it okay for me to set my sights a bit higher than “not maximally terrible”?
Obviously I think the people who were ready to emigrate because the Supreme Court overturned a poorly-reasoned decision from activist justices fifty years ago are dumb, but that’s because I think they’re wrong on the object level, about that particular issue. However, I have also strongly considered emigrating, and am limited not by any sense of “patriotism” - I pretty much never experience that subjective sensation that others report feeling often - but because I’m not confident enough in the long-term prospects of the particular alternatives on offer. If I strongly believed that, say, Australia was prepared to change course on its cancerous self-decolonization and focus on being a proud white-and-Asian outpost of the once-great Anglosphere, I would be doing everything in my power to emigrate there.
That I’m not currently doing so should not be interpreted as a result of any “patriotic” sentiment toward the country of my birth; I am resolutely not “proud to be an American”, and even if I could credibly say that “at least I know I’m free”, there are other, more meaningful, goals that a society can and should strive for than merely being more “free” than a maximally-despotic hell-hole. Singapore is less “free” than the United States, at least if you’re using Enlightenment metrics of “individual rights”, but along pretty much every measure of quality-of-life that I care about, it seems like a substantially better place to live than where I live now. Does “loving my country” require me not to notice that? I’m not faced with a binary choice - “either America or North Korea”. Rather, I can rationally assess the entire range of possible civilizations, and if my home country is lagging significantly behind on a number of metrics on which numerous other countries seem to succeed, then maybe “patriotism” is in fact a maladaptive sentiment.
Have you ever been confronted with seeing true poverty in your life? This paragraph reads like pure horror to me. I have seen people who live in tents at the edge of the sea, people with massive tumors on their legs, people with horrible facial skin discolorations living in cardboard under bridges, people living more terrible lives than I can imagine and it would absolutely break my heart if I had to live near them or have them in my family. If people from poor countries find solace in patriotism, and your response is "maybe you should want more for your life," your response is gut wrenchingly immature and morally repulsive, in my opinion. I'm not trying to attack you but your comment makes me feel dread.
My heart absolutely breaks every time I see someone struggling with poverty, I feel so guilty that I have so much and they have so little. Your comment reads like someone who has so much privilege and has no perspective on how much they have to lose that their only response is to beg for more. It is the epitome of entitlement and immaturity and really reveals a lack of self respect. You believe that asking for more makes you look like you're deserving of more, but it really makes you look like you aren't happy with what you've been given and people will be hesitant to help you out when you're so ungrateful for what you have.
You can set your sights higher but you will have such little sympathy from people who have less than you have if you show such little acknowledgment of what you do have. It is really to your detriment at the end of the day.
Sorry if this post is harsh, your posts rub me the wrong way to such a degree because I used to share so many of your rather haughty views ten years ago but have realized how maladaptive they are in the past few years and it kind of hurts my brain to see them repeated like this.
... their poverty's material cause is, to a great extent, that their government sucks, though. Systematic corruption (that both infect the government, and private corruption the government is failing to prevent), lack of economic freedom, poor laws that aren't enforced, etc. What Hoff is suggesting is that patriotism crowds out a valid and correct desire to improve your government, and ... prevent that poverty. In the analogy, there literally are tribalist/nationalist senegalese people who excuse their government's cruelty and corruption as a result. And their doing so is part of a large system that continues to harm the senegalese.
So you object to something that appears to insult poor africans because it's cruel, but in doing so endorse the exact patriotism that perpetuates their oppression?
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pity is the deepest pit one can fall into and it makes suffering as contagious as any disease
it saps strength and injures the healthy; the most common responses to it seem to make that disease spread and produce even more sufferers
you are a vector of its spread
why? what do you think is gained by causing others to suffer the way you do with the albatross of runaway pity around your neck
that is maladaptive to healthy civilization
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No need to apologize. If this is how you genuinely feel - and I use the word “feel” because your post is very loaded with emotive language and invective - then you have every right to tell me so. Obviously, you and I have very different moral foundations, and when faced with such a massive gulf in moral instincts, it is natural to feel revulsion. It’s useful for me to hear from people who are genuinely appalled by my views. Of course, I believe that your worldview is probably very adaptive on an individual, personal level - mawkish as it may be - but maladaptive at the level of “seeing like a state” and trying to actually build a great civilization. I don’t begrudge you the empathy that you feel for “the wretched of the earth”, but I personally have made peace with the practiced hard-heartedness which I believe is going to be extremely necessary in the years to come.
Your haughty affectation is a defense mechanism to protect yourself from having to see the ugliness in your heart and the uncharitableness you approach the world with. I don't know if you are rich or poor but regardless you display no sense of noblesse oblige and have no class. You can delude yourself into thinking you've made peace with your hard-heartedness but at some point you will face a very human obstacle and the flimsy affectations you are relying on will crumble and you'll be left with a cold heart that offers no warmth for yourself or the situations you face.
Are you engaging with my views on an emotional level or are you protecting yourself by holding them at an analytical distance to try to perfect your artificially constructed worldview?
Can you tell me your secret to being so above the rest of the wretched of the earth that you can operate on some theoretical transhumanist plane of great civilization in spite of your own humanity?
Yea, first an american comes to your country to kill your family and then 10 years later to film a movie about how killing it made him all depressed.
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That's quite a philippic, but it's still just a bunch of personal attacks. Don't do this.
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I think it’s a bit rich to be accused of “affectation” by someone who writes like a character in some didactic nineteenth-century novel or religious tract.
I’m neither; I’m just your standard-issue lower-middle-class American, with a job that allows me to live comfortably in a shitty apartment in a run-down neighborhood of a big city. While I’m not exposed to Third World poverty, I do live in a city with a massive and an ever-expanding homeless population. You hit me earlier with the old “I used to be like you” canard, and two can play at that game. When I was in my teens and twenties I would agonize over the homelessness I saw all around me; I’ve never owned a car and commute primarily via public transit, so I see the homeless up-close every day and interact with them frequently. My scrupulosity cascades would make me miserable every day, and I got very into socialism partially as a result of what I perceived as the unacceptable levels of injustice and deprivation and inequality I was observing.
At a certain point, though, I realized that I have no idea how to help these people, and apparently neither does anybody else. It also became acutely clear to me, slowly at first and then all at once, the extent to which, when it comes to homelessness and poverty in 21st-century industrialized nations, it’s actually not that hard not to be homeless/impoverished, as long as you’re not profoundly mentally ill. And if you are profoundly mentally ill, then I really really don’t know how to help you! And so if there’s a huge, complex, and intractable problem that surrounds me every day and is causing me to agonize impotently and blame myself - unfairly - for not fixing it, then isn’t the adaptive strategy to stop caring about it? What good does guilt do me if I can’t do anything about it?
Again, it is perfectly normal and natural to develop psychological strategies to defuse and sublimate negative and maladaptive emotions. You presumably do it every day, and so does everybody else. We find ways to suppress anger and frustration and jealousy on a daily basis, because we live in a society and those emotions would do more harm than good if translated into action. You believe that extreme empathy is a positive emotion - apparently in all cases, even when it comes to problems that you yourself seem to acknowledge that you have no power to fix - but I believe that it’s maladaptive in just as many - if not more - situations than it’s adaptive. Especially, as I said, if you’re trying to think like a government, or a social engineer - which is the hat I’m wearing when I’m writing in this forum - rather than as an individual in an interpersonal context.
Look, I’m a fuck-up in all sorts of ways. I’m acutely aware of my own fallibility and poor judgment when it comes to many different areas of life. I’m certainly not living up to my own potential, let alone achieving what I wish I could if I were smarter, more ambitious, more high-agency, came from a wealthier background, etc. I don’t think that I’m personally cut out to build the glorious future, and I have no illusions that I’ll occupy a position of any significant power or prestige if the glorious future arrives in my lifetime. I’m probably cut out to be, at best, a minor scribbler and scholar.
But since my society has no way to help the wretched of the earth, and because the quality of life of its own citizens would be substantially decreased were that society to start seriously trying to help them, the primary approach I want my elected officials to take toward the Third World is keeping it as far away from me as possible. Whether or not I’m “better” than an impoverished person in Africa is irrelevant; I’m not an impoverished African, I don’t want to be an impoverished African, I don’t want to live near an impoverished African, and I want my society to look less like the Third World, rather than more like the Third World. Since I can’t fix Africa, that’s where I’m at in regards to the problems you’re talking about. I hope I never have to confront the problem on any level that is more personal and up-close than that.
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