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this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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Leopards Ate My Face
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For me loving a country is a natural love of home. It's a sentimental attachment. I want my country to be a nice place the way I want my home to be a nice place. I want to feel the pride of both. If my kitchen stinks because of spoiled food and piles of dirty dishes I don't feel right. Same when my country stinks of poverty, homelessness, sick people who can't afford cures, etc. I want my home to be better than that. Recognizing faults doesn't mean someone doesn't love their country. it means they're honest.
Well said
But why would the boundaries of your "home" be as big as a country?
Sure, being proud of yourself makes sense, and of your family and close friends and of the things were you or they have a strong influence over like their homes and what they do which in some cases means their jobs.
However being proud of something were you and those you hold dearest are but a tiny, tiny fraction with pretty much zero influence is not at all the same thing, especially if most of the great things about it are the product of the works of people long dead.
My point being that pride in one's country is an artificial thing which you've been pushed into having from the outside and as such is a prime vector to manipulate you (and all it takes is to listen to politicians harp about the greatness of one's country to see that it is indeed being used for that by some), not something natural like pride for you and those close to you and their deeds.
I wouldn't be surprised if my words above feel wrong, but under a cold logical analysis, do they come out as wrong?
I understand what they mean. I think this comes down to an exercise in semantics, and you are pushing the “country = home” analogy too literally.
Feelings of love and pride don’t need a pure rational root cause. They can exist in a more abstract sense, like in the case of “loving your home”. You can take pride/love in the work you do to clean your home, especially when realizing others will be living in it as well. I can “love” the earth, and want to take care of and respect it.
Love can be expressed in many different forms. I can both love my significant other and also love my parents. I think you can then extend this argument to loving something abstract, like earth, or your country, with a sort of rational basis being that I love my fellow humans and want to reduce suffering.
I don’t quite follow you here. To me, there is a difference between having love or pride in one’s country versus being nationalist. To me, the latter involves critical analysis and honesty about flaws, and working to fix those flaws. Nationalism on the other hand would be amount to uncritically supporting everything the country (or politician/government) does, which is I think what you are describing?
Also, how do you define what is “natural” vs “unnatural” pride?
I think the first part of your post kinda starts to answer what you quoted from me below it.
Love for your country is an emotion, so it's not rational or logic.
It is however something one gets from society because nobody is born with love for one's country nor naturally grow it by themselves without outside contact, whilst most people naturally grow love for their parents, brothers and sisters (or are born with it?) as well as love (in the broader sense) for some of the people you know well (i.e. good friends and in a different sense romantic partners).
Mind you, love (again in the broader sense) for a group one belongs to (for example one's sports team) is natural for most people, often to the point of being tribalism.
Anyways, the point being that countries are artificial, societal constructs, so that's the first part of "love for your country" being artificial and whilst the general cognitive mechanisms to learn to "love" a group is natural, for it to be for the very specific group which is a country, requires that you're somehow influenced from the outside towards it, if only by constant exposure to talk about "our country", so that too can be artificially pushed (maybe it might happen naturally from mere exposure and without a "push", though from what I've observed having lived in a couple of countries, the levels of Nationalism and Patriotism in a country seem to be positively correlated to how much the media and politicians talk about "the country" which for me indicates that for most people such love it's pushed on them).
"What does X mean to you?" isn't a cold logical question, so a cold logical critique or analysis is pointless, but you do you.