The Dangers of Patriotism

First off, this article is titled “The Dangers of Patriotism” because we are currently in the context of an upcoming election, but it could just as easily be titled “The Dangers of Narcissism” or “The Dangers of Overconfidence” or a similar extra-contextual synonym. Secondly, if you’ve watched Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, you’ve probably seen a monologue with a similar message to the one in this article. That’s because my article is highly influenced by that monologue. In order to save you some time I’ve embedded the video at the bottom of the page so you may watch that video instead of read the article if you’d like. I won’t be offended. Thirdly, this article get's a little ranty because I'm passionate about this and I wanted my thoughts to be mostly unfiltered. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s explore this idea.

Before we talk about what is wrong with patriotism, we first need to define patriotism. Patriotism is defined as the devoted love, support and defense of one’s country; national loyalty. For the sake of this article I will extend that definition to mean unwavering support of one’s country. Now I am not about to argue that having pride in one’s country is a bad thing. I think there is a place for that kind of pride, and indeed it is necessary for improving one’s country. The word patriotism might be a little misleading, as it carries too positive a connotation; nationalism may be a better word. Whatever you choose to call it, this idea of unwavering support in one's country results in an over-inflated impression of that country.

You know what? I’m gonna drop this objective not-naming-names strategy people normally use for thoughtful posts, cause it’s counterproductive to my point. When our forefathers (sorry Russian readers, I know there’s a couple of you. This is written with US readers as the main audience, but feel free to continue reading and let me know if you agree from an international standpoint) first started the United States it was the greatest country in the world. We were the first major country to explore civil freedoms. We brought democracy back as a government structure after the Greeks developed it. We competed with our peers to lead the world in education and scientific advancement. And while our country has had some (i.e. many) dark times (slavery, civil inequality, witch hunts, Hollywood blacklisting, the list goes on for a while), we had for two centuries sought to improve ourselves so that we were the greatest country. The rest of the world looked to us as the leading power in the world. Our president was considered the most powerful man in the world. And yet, here we are.

Rather than repeat the statistics in the video or list my own I’ll link you to this website. Basically, what that website will tell you is the United States is not number one in pretty much any of the categories that count. I hope that is sufficient evidence for you that our country may have been the greatest country but certainly is not now.

This brings me to my point on patriotism/nationalism. We became the greatest country in the world, and then we said, “Holy crap! We’re the best. We did it guys, we won the human race.” And we never moved on. We kept this state of mind that we were the best country in the world. We have no competition and thus have no reason to improve. And because of this idea that we implanted in all our minds and the minds of our children that we are the best, we stopped improving. We got too comfortable and we got greedy. We tanked our economy. Now we’re trillions of dollars in debt. We are constantly cutting programs in our education. One of our presidential candidates is contemplating cutting funding to the only democratic television network our country has. Other countries laugh at our health care system. Our middle class is rapidly disintegrating. And we've pretty much cut all funding to NASA.

I’m going to cut off my rant there, because I want this article to maintain some sort of cohesiveness. But we allowed ourselves to become comfortable with the idea of being the greatest and stopped doing what it is that makes a people great: striving for greatness. Thus this idea of patriotism, this unwavering devotion to our country, in which recognizing the accomplishment of another country is an unforgivable sin, forces us to ignore progress other countries make, effectively crippling our ability to compete with our global peers.

We should strive for greatness. As a species, we humans have a constant desire to be the best, to be bettering ourselves. And we should, for only through that can our world improve. And by extension our countries should be competing to be the best, because through that competition we can improve ourselves, our peers will improve themselves and the whole world will slowly improve. But if we refuse to acknowledge the achievements of our peers we allow ourselves to fall into cycles of constantly patting ourselves on the back for being the best despite a complete lack of evidence to support that claim. We must put aside our pride, our nationalism, our patriotism in order to improve ourselves.

Note: One way you can work towards improving your country is by voting in the upcoming election. I don’t care who you vote for, just vote. Because that very act of being involved is an improvement over inaction. So yeah. Vote. Participate in the world around you, including your government. If you aren't registered to vote go here and register. It seriously takes two minutes. I did it the other day. You have till the 22 to register. Please do.