Ep 122: Nationalism Is Bad for the Nation

**Amit Varma** (0:00)
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**Ajay Shah** (0:27)
Welcome, gentle reader, to this important episode of Everything is Everything. We try to add value on the great questions of the age. And today, Amit is going to go after one of the biggest questions of the age.

**Amit Varma** (0:41)
Well, it's one of the biggest questions of the age, as you put it, but it came about where I wasn't really thinking of everything is everything, or doing an episode, or big questions at all. I was sort of scrolling through Twitter the day after the cricket match between India and Pakistan, and we are recording this episode three days after that match, though it will release a couple of weeks from now. And I was deeply disturbed by what happened during this recent tournament that India won. We played Pakistan a number of times. Our players refused to shake hands with their players. You know, there was a lot of aggressive belligerent noise during press conferences from our captain and from others, and in fact from politicians on the outside about the match. It was almost like it was a kind of war, war minus shooting, as I try to use George Orwell's phrase.
And it was incredibly ugly and disturbed me a lot, especially the noises on social media after the win. Like it so happens that we won, but every game in a knockout tournament is, there's a little bit of a lottery element to it, you never know. We had a far superior team, so we won. And yet all the noise around that disturbed me, not just from the politicians, but also from the players. And that made no sense to me, because in the past when I've seen cricket, Indian players and Pakistani players have always been friendly. Pakistani players are incredibly popular in India. You listen to Wasim Akram and Commentary, or Vakar Yunus and Commentary, Rameez Raja. They are superbly popular among our people, our players have gotten along well. And this in particular disturbed me, because it makes absolutely no sense. I mean, when we think of how should we treat Pakistan, you can point to terrorist attacks and you can point to the old enmity between the two countries. But an important distinction to draw is a distinction that is really a distinction between two Pakistan's. And multiple Pakistan's, really, but one simple way to think of it is that there isn't just one Pakistan. You know, you have the people of Pakistan, the civil society, and you have what our friend Pranay Kutasane calls a military jihadi complex, or the Pakistani state as it were. And the point is that the interests of those two are not aligned at all. They are exactly the opposite. In fact, the Pakistani state gets a lot of its legitimacy and power from constantly painting India as an enemy. And if they treat us as an enemy, they oppress their own people, right? So, treating the people of Pakistan badly or showing belligerence or aggression towards them just makes absolutely no sense and it kind of blows my mind. So, that is one level at which I found this disturbing. Another level at which I found this disturbing is that fundamental absurdity of a feeling of nationalism in the common person. We can come to why the states use nationalism and it's convenient for them. But for a common person to feel nationalistic, you are doing what Doug Stanhope once described as hating people you have never met and taking pride in accomplishments you had nothing to do with. And suddenly as a country, we just rose up as a whole and seemed to do that all across social media and it deeply disturbed me. And from there, you know, I was chatting with it while we were driving to where we shoot with Vaishnav. And I spoke to him about this and I sent him some links and he said that he couldn't sleep properly at night. He was pretty disturbed by the whole thing. And I figured we should do an episode about it because it's an important subject. Now, in the past, we have spoken about the dangers of nationalism. We once did an episode in populism where we distinguished populist from popular. We did an episode on understanding labels. One of my favorite episodes. Gentle readers, please do check that out. Where we looked at different labels like liberal, conservative and so on and what they really mean and what they have come to mean. And there we spoke about how nationalism is very different from patriotism and is very different from the national interest. The national interest is what is good for your country, what is good for the state. Patriotism is love for your country. Nationalism is an ideology that I largely tend to think of as kind of toxic. So my broad argument through this episode is going to be this. Nationalism is bad for the nation. Any nationalism, any nation. And that's what I'm going to hope to convince you of.