I did a little post on the metaphor of worship of the NATION as a virus, the idea being that when people become nationalistic and worship the NATION, the STATE is normally the outcome of that mental idea. Hence, NATION worship begets both the STATE and State worship. As an anarchist, I view support of the “Republic”, the “Nation”, the “Union”, the “Military”, the “Constitution”, the “Homeland”, the “U.S. borders”, all as supporting the State and causing it as well. It’s common for people who support the State also to fall back on “SOCIETY” as an ideological support. They are thinking of ONE society, like ALL AMERICANS or something similar. This idea is also inimical to anarchy and it’s an idea that is statist in nature. The same goes with “ONE PEOPLE”, where the “people” idea is broad-reaching and comprises the Nation. The idea of society is fine, if properly understood as being a group formed by people who have a common interest in doing so, but there will actually be thousands and thousands of such societies within what statists are thinking when they employ the term SOCIETY as a monolithic thing.

That’s an introduction to a video that James Jibbety alerted me to. It’s called “A Virus of the Mind”, and it’s very, very good at explaining a related metaphor, which is that the State is a virus. After about 2 minutes of biological explanation, the narrator elaborates his idea of the State as a virus. He does mention some of the supports to this infection, one being the nationalism I focused on. At 4 minutes in, he mentions the support to the infection from a mixture of nationalism, communism, and arguments centering on the “public good”. As with the other aggregative terms that manifest the virus, so does PUBLIC GOOD also show that the virus has taken root. The moment one supports this idea as an appropriate political and social goal, one is apt to be led into support of the State. By the way, both major parties strongly support the nationalistic, communistic and public good ideologies that undergird the State. If the State is an ideological virus, then it is currently being nurtured by these ideas.

A Virus of the Mind

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