Your identity

Patriotism - An Identity For Those Lacking Their Own?

Is it meaningless to identify with where you were born? Which, after all is completely outside your control. How can your place of birth have anything to do with your personal identity? I mean, maybe you were born in a dumpster, does that make you a Dumpsterite with shared or consistent ideologies, philosophies and politics with all other Dumpsterites? You didn't choose to be born a man or a woman, so we don't run around saying "I am proud to be a man". Why should the country we are born in, make any difference to our personal identity either. Are those who claim to be "patriotic" and who trumpet their pride and sacrifice for county, just overcompensating for the lack of an authentic identify of their own? Or, was Samuel Johnson right when he proclaimed that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel"?

"My national identity seems to me to be both contingent and coincidental. Being born British, while quite lucky in terms of my life chances and political rights, wasn’t something of my own doing. Therefore it is no more something for me to be proud of than my being born in the middle of the twentieth century. I was once told a (possibly apocryphal) story about a former Prime Minister of Belgium who, when asked if he was proud of his nationality, replied that the question was ridiculous and that he might as well be asked if he was “proud of being a man.”"

Or, as Krishnamurti states, are we being violent towards others when we create divisions based on nation, language or religion?

"When you call yourself an American or a Muslim or a Christian or a Nigerian or anything else, you are being violent. Do you know why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind."
Amah-smiles