Civic Nationalism Alone

What do you think civic nationalism is? It is an ideology of “muh values” prevalence over your natural tribal loyalty. This ideology is being used to keep unnatural “nations” “together” (i.e. being content under an arbitrary government), and it automatically suppresses your natural feelings of loyalty and kinship, in essence it performs a substitution of your real genetic kin with a faux-kin that is imagined and propagated by an authority arbitrarily alien to your real kin (sometimes they blab: ctrl+F “The cognitive twist“). But it is not a unit phenomenon, there are multiple components comprising it, each of which makes its own sense. “Muh values” on its own does not imply the suppression of tribal loyalty, this suppression comes as a separate component, a specific application or usage of the “muh values,” and the power it gives to a government is not an innate property of the “muh values,” but it emerges from this particular application of the “muh values.”

Before we dissect civic nationalism any further, I need to explain one fundamental thinking failure of the human brain, one of my favorite brain failures. People always confuse upper bounds with lower bounds, conjunctions with disjunctions, subsets with supersets, claims of existence with claims of universality, sufficient conditions with necessary conditions (recall the famous PCR), and negative rights with positive “rights.”

For a mathematician, this list is very curious, these things are in some sense related, you can express one in terms of another. This elusive commonality is what causes a single brain failure resulting in so many seemingly disconnected mistakes. I believe you can recall numerous examples of liberals “disproving” your statistical claims with counterexamples, or seemingly normal people advocating for positive rights as if they are entitled to your labor, and not being able to see how cruel it is. You can remember yourself struggling with subset/superset logical problems at your logic classes in primary school – it took EFFORT to overcome the confusion, you had to develop your own special thinking tools (visualization, perhaps) in order to liberate yourself from the confusing bloated language of such problems and see the encoded in those problems set-theoretical relations. Still, I have a few more striking examples of the same issue.

In the Soviet civil code, a paid vacation should be offered to a worker not later than 11 months since he began working. In practice, it resulted in rejection of your vacation application that was earlier than 11 months. Same example in Soviet Army, a soldier during “active duty” was allowed to rest at least four (4) hours. In practice, it meant no more than four (4) hours, and officers meticulously kept idle soldiers awake, so that not to exceed four (4) hours in total. It appears as pure evil, like purposeful twisting of the law, or pushing the limits of the allowed cruelty, but I can prove it is a genuine brain failure – the victimized party shared the perception of the law. An average worker read the law as “not later than 11 months” and would say, “You see! You must work for full 11 months before you apply for a paid vacation.” My own mother taught me that! It sounds impossible when is written, but it is happening in reality all the time, in this exact fashion.

More often, it happens in a more subtle fashion, such is the “nature vs nurture” infamous pseudo-debate, which is a manifestation of the same brain failure of the flavor “conjunctions vs disjunctions.”
It appears totally ungraspable for normies that genes and environment work together. An organism is his genes expressed in the given environment. Does it sound difficult or outlandish? No. Not for me. Not for you. But time and again we return to the Lewontin’s Garden Fallacy, even without knowing what it is.
Every time a malnourished child grows X centimeters shorter than a properly fed child, it is somehow challenging the claim of genetic influence on body height. Environment can possibly change the amount of fingers – would you like to claim that the amount of fingers is not heritable?

You realize that for an organism to fulfill his genetic 5-fingers plan, we need the genetic plan itself stating “5-fingers” and some environment that does not cut those fingers off, does not kill the baby, does not give Rubella to his mother, and provides both the baby and the mother with proper nutrition without hormone-mimicking substances. The keyword is “and”! But for a normal brain, it takes effort to notice this keyword.

Exactly the same misunderstanding happened to civic nationalism. People do not take real keywords seriously, especially when those keywords are prepositions or conjunctions – people focus on nouns and numerals, those seem to be meaningful for them, and thus they lose the real meaning of a sentence. Civic nationalism is evil when it is used instead of. But it is not the only way to apply it. You can have civic and ethnic nationalism together, like having genes and nutrition.

Civic nationalism makes perfect sense in conjunction with ethnic nationalism – you have a coherent nation when you share ancestry and “muh values.” The keyword, again, is “and“! As opposed to piling together people having nothing in common, except some political beliefs (or rather declared political beliefs),
the original idea of civic nationalism is to divide a homogeneous population if they disagree on political issues: you have your own sandbox with communism, as long as you don’t invade ours, and we shall see in peaceful competition whose sandbox is better. Some ethnicities are too large to develop a responsible government, and they need civic nationalism to make some meaningful (non-arbitrary) division.
Some need this division simply to keep the peace between political fractions.

Civic nationalism is absolutely advantageous to avoid pushing your beliefs onto people who want to separate from you, while it is being used to the polar opposite, to push your beliefs onto people who don’t even share ethnicity with you. Civic nationalism makes sense to define a subset of an ethnic group, to create some fine separation, more coherent communities.

It becomes complete nonsense when it is used to define supersets of ethnicities.

-By Eugene Panferov