People see themselves as completely alienated from their bloodline, heritage, culture, and history. They believe that they are mass-produced and interchangeable widgets. No wonder they have all these mental health issues. This is an approach that guarantees great psychological discomfort.
Widget Mentality
Clarissa's Blog 
I really don’t get the idea that I should love America simply because I was born here. I’m neither pro-America nor Anti-America. There are things I like about America and things I don’t. I don’t see myself as an “interchangeable widget”; I’m a unique person with my own character and interests. If I got to choose my own country, though, it would probably be one of the Western European, social democratic countries that places an emphasis on taking care of their own people. Unfortunately, the United States is becoming way too expensive, and I’m seriously considering retiring in a Latin American country like Ecuador, Panama, or Paraguay.
LikeLike
Do you love your mom?
LikeLike
Yes, but if she were abusive, I would not.
LikeLike
My friends, I present to you our very first AI reader.
Drum roll.
LikeLike
my take on it is that it is not cool to pick and choose. If there is (not individually deserved) national pride then there is also (not individually deserved) national responsibility. I.e. if one is to be proud for all the good things one’s ancestors have done, then one is also responsible for whatever bad things their ancestors have committed.
That’s one of the reasons why I can’t get on board with nationalism of even my own countrie(s) (the second is havoing experience of being on the receiving end of somebody else’s nationalism) – to me it looks like just unprincipled picking and choosing of what strokes the nationalist’s ego. Nationalists are not just proud of X Y and Z, but they take it as a reflection upon them even though they did not personally contribute to X Y or Z. But personal responsibility for the crimes of the ancestors is “leftwing BS”… Yeah, right…
LikeLike
You are positioning responsibility as the opposite of pride. But it’s not. The antonym of pride is shame. Which is not related to responsibility.
Example. I’m extremely proud of my father. I’m happy and proud that I am his daughter. He was human and made many mistakes. I’m sad over them. I feel shame over them. There’s no place for responsibility in this equation because responsibility requires action. There’s no action I could possibly take. What’s done is done.
Successful nation-states have zero problems recognizing their past mistakes. And recognizing. And recognizing. And recognizing some more. There’s a shortage of national pride, not of the realization that mistakes were made.
LikeLike
Fair enough, let’s compare apples to apples. According to the nationalists, shame about the wrongdoings of the ancestors is also leftwing BS.
And, just like in personal relationships, “spherical shame in vacuum” is not worth much. Usually feeling genuing shame about one’s actions (or actions of those one associates oneself with) implies some corrective action. This is what I meant by “responsibility”
LikeLike
“According to the nationalists”
Which nationalists? There are a lot of different schools of nationalism, some fine some kind of bad and some terrible….
And shame has more than one definition… I usually use it in the same way as some social scientists as a means of discouraging bad behavior (especially contrasted with guilt)
guilt – individual, knowledge that one has done wrong (whether or not it has been discovered), not shared by family
shame – collective, bad feeling because others know of one’s wrong-doing and family members also feel shame
Any reasonably well-adjusted person is motivated at least partly to avoid behavior that can cause guilt or shame and all societies use both to some degree though there’s usually a strong bias toward one or the other, the US is a guilt culture and Poland is a shame culture (for example).
I feel regret that the US has done certain things and not done other things but I can’t change that and I feel neither guilt nor shame about it (which I reserve for my own wrongdoings).
LikeLiked by 1 person
If we take Spain as an example, both nationalists and anti-nationalists feel a lot of shame around the Spanish Empire. Anti-nationalists feel shame that it existed. Nationalists feel shame that it stopped existing.
Ukrainian nationalists are tying themselves in knots with shame over pissing away 30 years of independence and actively licking Russians’ butts for centuries. I can’t imagine anybody looking at the history of their country and having uniformly positive feelings.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Nationalists have plenty of shame but it’s about different things than the anti-nationalist left. I can give examples from several countries but let’s take American nationalism. There are many pain points but among the most salient ones are Cleveland and Detroit. I saw a whole segment the other day, I think on Matt Walsh, about what Detroit used to be and what it became. Cleveland and its devastation is the starting point of Curtis Yarvin’s entire philosophy. Do you think American nationalists get together and celebrate these cities? They are a wreck. Nobody celebrates them. Every time I drive through St Louis, which is weekly, what do you think I feel? Joy? I see children playing among the ruins similar to those of Lugansk.
The difference is that our corrective action is inwardly oriented. We don’t want to improve life in the Congo. We have no idea how to improve the Congo. We want to improve St Louis and Cleveland. That’s what nationalism is about. Recognizing the boundaries of the nation-state and wanting to work within them.
LikeLiked by 1 person