The Combat Guard marches heavily.
It marches on, sweeping away fortresses, with fire in its eyes,
Shining with military orders,
How the drops of fresh blood shine on the swords.A. and B. Strugatsky “The Doomed City”
What does <Insert the name of the country where you were born/lived your life> mean to you? Most people would respond something like this: It’s my family: my children, my mom, my sisters, my nephews! It’s my city, my village, where I ran around barefoot all my childhood. It’s the graves of my grandparents! It’s the place where I feel at home. I really don’t want to make you think too hard or get into a… machine guns Your internal defense system rationalizes the irrational, but the tribe you grew up in, which really needs protection, is absent. You probably don’t even know the names of your neighbors.
Patriotism is an instinct of territory—it’s a magnificent backdoor into the human mind. Give a person a place to channel their patriotism, and even if the land they care about doesn’t belong to them personally, they immediately forget that they live in a microscopic rented apartment in a building with a filthy entrance, that they can’t afford to have children or provide them with an education, travel, or eat healthy food, that their money is just enough to pay the exorbitant interest on loans taken out to buy things they don’t need, and that those in power are thieves and scoundrels, and you can’t even get a medical certificate without bribery.
What’s going on there? The PBZ towers? “The Inhabited Island”? Why all these complications? We’ll be singing marches and anthems with enthusiasm and a lump in our throats anyway.
Now just lean back in your chair and realize that <country name>, if we can even talk about its reality This is a state, but in no way is it about “relatives, children, mother, sisters, nephews, the village where you ran barefoot all your childhood, or the graves of your grandparents, or a place where you feel at home.” The idea has been successfully implanted in you, to the point that you would fight to the death, that the territory from which a group of ghouls collects taxes somehow affects the things that are valuable to you.
I get the same chills down my spine as you do when I hear the anthem of my country. I just realize that “wait, I’m being manipulated.”
Because the authorities needed. The territory for tax collection. In a truly federal society like Switzerland or Germany, the central authority does not have as much power, money, and opportunities for corruption as in centralized countries. The more centralized a large state is, the more problems arise, primarily due to the distance of power from the electorate.