Nationalism, pride, and compassion: thinking of adapting to an uncertain future. by Kevin Patrick Fitzgerald.  First published on Medium, August 2026, reissued by Mnoty Press October 2026. 

My basic argument here is that we have a major problem and I don't really have a concrete solution. I mean, the solution, as I see it, is to cultivate compassion so that whatever shit-storm is on the horizon, we might have enough to pick up the pieces and create a new world where people are free to take care of each other.

What we have now is not working, and the pressure is mounting. I'm not saying that humanity is doomed. I don't think that Mad Max provides an accurate picture of the future, but it could. I suppose I'm kind of on a Mencius angle here, arguing that a structure of humanitarianism is possible, yet it will require cultivation.

One of the main differences I have with the Abrahamic faiths is that they see the core of humanity as pride. I agree that pride is the root of sin, but I disagree that such is the root of humanity. When I look around at my fellow humans, I see compassion. It gets stifled by pride, definitely. Yet, I do not believe that pride comes first.

Of course, one can read the stories of Eden in such a way as to argue that compassion was there before pride, and so I could have my theory just as easily within any of the Abrahamic traditions.

The thing is that it's not really the religious scholars who have decided that pride is the essence of humanity. That's more of a Renaissance idea. It was there in Medieval Europe, but the Renaissance political philosophers, attempting to re-establish reason as the beacon for human salvation, put forth the foundations of modern western political theory that treat people as fundamentally selfish sinners.

So, before democracy was proposed and fought for, the ideas of what was and what was not the job of the state was established by people working in extremely hierarchical, and patriarchal, institutions. They were trying to figure out how to most effectively use those institutions in a military-economic competition.

Then came the Philosophs and their universities, and the Enlightenment of reason, and Hobbes' assumption that throughout human history, life has been 'nasty, brutish, and short'. European intellectual elites were assuming this while assuming that everyone else in the world was still living that kind of life.

The idea that European intellectuals were more advanced than the intellectuals elsewhere in the world was a fantasy. And this fantasy informed generations of Europeans on how they saw humanity.

When Bismark came along with his 'Realpolitik', he was speaking for the mainstream of European military-economic leadership. Compassion was assumed to be unreal, while military and economic power were seen as the only real measures of prosperity.

Decades before Bismark's rise, however, the early nationalist movements demonstrated the power of compassion. Getting people all fired up about defending a 'nation' of which they believed themselves to be a part was political dynamite, and its influences could transcend military-economic power. Compassion was not only real; it was dangerous.

In the twentieth century, the bloodiest century yet, nationalism was the key motivator of political movements in Europe and around the World. This was true of the communist movements as well as the fascist. There were international organizations, such as COMINTERN, but those organizations lacked the influence of the Bolsheviks, the Chinese Communist Party, and the Viet Minh: influence rooted in nationalism.

The real power of nationalism has been used by tyrants in the past couple of centuries to seize and maintain power. People are so susceptible to manipulation along nationalist sentiments that it is one of the key ways military-economic elites have learned to control people; to keep them distracted, separated, and working fervently against each other.

So, it should be no wonder that with the advent of the internet and social media, nationalism has returned as one of the key methods of manipulation to prevent any sort of global unity against the global military-economic elites. And it should be no surprise that so many people are so passionate about defending their national heritage, the invented myths of their fictional community boundaries, to bring forth the original sin of pride to cultivate a spiritual disease among the people that makes them weak even as they feel they are gaining strength.

Again, with the Abrahamic traditions, I part ways. I don't see salvation as an external working of infallible and inevitable justice. I see the task at hand to be not a matter of fate, or one big wheel of justice spawning from a working out of the original sin.

I see it more like Mencius described the individual: as basically ambivalent and able to cultivate virtue so as to live a good life. It seems to me the chief guiding virtue to be cultivated is compassion, yet we have to be careful the kind of compassion we cultivate. If it is compassion for one group of people, and not another, then it becomes a tool for tyrants.

And, so, returning to the imaginary premise of what happens after the dust settles and whatever happens with global warming, nuclear weapons, pandemics, and the next stage of colonial exploitation on behalf of military-economic elites, people will be better prepared with a whole lot of the real power that comes from cultivating compassion that is not beholden to some sort of tribal loyalty or another.

Anyway, thank you very much for reading. It's been a while. I missed you. I hope you are healthy, wealthy, and wise, and that you have a life illuminated with compassion. Please take good care of yourself and those around you.

Power to the People

Freedom of the Soul