this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
830 points (98.5% liked)

Leopards Ate My Face

3330 readers
640 users here now

Rules:

Also feel free to check out [email protected] (also active).

Icon credit C. Brück on Wikimedia Commons.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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).