comprehending the heart's nationalism

[Steve Kinney]

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On 06/22/2016 09:20 AM, John Young wrote:
> That's pretty damn good. Thanks.
> 
> Although every nation, cult, gang, mafia has a similar rationale.
> 

My take-away:

"The notion of retaliation, as such, is absent from Russian folklore,
as if it were never part of the original 'genetic code' of its people
­ the Russian champion has always gone to war as a liberator."

In regions where the climate tries to kill everyone for months on end
every year, "common sense" social behavior and resulting cultural
norms benefit from a massively iterated sorting process; those who are
naturally inclined toward cooperation and a reasonable amount of
self-sacrifice tend to outlive those who are not so inclined.  Given
enough time this sorting process will affect the physical genome as
well as the implicit semantic content of "culture."

Bad weather makes good neighbors.  I have been saying this since I was
a teenager, having by then lived in a range of locations from tropical
to sub-arctic.

Of course there are a lot of other variables.  Civilization so-called
is pure poison to the human spirit as well as the natural world it
exploits, ruins and discards in the name of Progress.  The pervasive
propaganda narrative describing Western civilization as the ascent of
Man from barbarous savagery to nobility and enlightenment may be the
biggest Big Lie ever told.








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