The Promised Land Project: The Problem of Nationalism and False Prophets

Turning Vision into Action....at least hypothetically

Strike up the music of the band
We're blazing a trail for the promised land
Heaven on earth is within you.

Through the writing of stories, poetry, essays, and a novel, I’ve creatively contended with the consumer culture and the problem of the ideal in the modern era. This preoccupation in time would lead to a vision of cultural transformation and where I believe our democratic society needs to go to truly progress beyond the modern era. Conceding my limited credibility, this blog provides a synthesis of recognized visionaries, poets, and writers with the objective of making a credible argument. Ultimately, it is a certain feeling the project strives to inspire and sustain on a certain level, making more vital use of poetry and the arts; consequently whether one agrees or not is less important than whether one senses it and feels it over time.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

The Problem of Nationalism and False Prophets

Coming through the collective movements of the twentieth-century, it's understandable we'd be suspicious of collective movements and collective mindsets. We are suspicisous of top down coercive policies that suppress individualism to promote the power of the state. Communism, Fascism, or National Socialism enacted such policies with horrific results. But there's no denying our collective identities because there's no denying our collective nature. The problem of nationalism in the modern era, as the the end all of collective identity, is that it separates ourselves into an "us" and "they" and leaves us susceptible to false prophets.

To me, Hitler is the classic false prophet: in the wake of defeat and humiliation in the Great War, promising to restore Germany to great heights, in fact, he led it to its destruction and other abysmal lows. The Nazi regime provided the German society with a false collective narrative, or ideology, to initiate an agenda of war and conquest. To a defeated country in dire economic straits, the collective narrative went something like this: their humiliating defeat at the end of the first world war was due to a “stab in the back” implicating the Jews, and that the Germans were a “master race” destined to assert their superiority and required “lebensraum”, or living space, and thus destined to rule Europe, if not the world.

While the Nazi ideologues provided this collective narrative that successfully restored a sense of national pride among a critical element of the German populace, it was necessarily backed by the use of coercive power and suppression toward those reluctant or unable to go along with this narrative.

A national spirit should fall under the greater context of the human spirit: the encompassing ‘we’. The Promised Land Project provides a collective narrative aligned with the truth -- as best we understand that to be -- to promote the human spirit and what I call the cross-cultural divine law to love each other as you love yourself.