‘Love it or leave it’? Rethinking blind loyalty to national identity

By David McElroy · June 14, 2011

The most effective weapon that politicians use to control you isn’t the police or the military they own. It’s not the jails they run. It’s not the laws they write. Their most effective weapon is what you believe in your own mind about your alleged obligation to obey them.

Most people would agree that “patriotism” is a good thing. Most people would also agree that “nationalism” is a bad thing. I have yet to find anyone, though, who can come up with any significant difference between the two. They’re just positive and negative spins on the same thing — the idea that people have a duty to love, obey and be loyal to the governing structure of wherever they happened to be born.

I happen to love the place where I live. I identify strongly with Alabama. Despite the fact that I’ve lived in six other states, I was born in Birmingham and have spent most of my adult life here. The land is beautiful. The lifestyle is enjoyable. The people are no better or worse than anywhere else. But I have no special loyalty to any government that rules my home. That’s true of all the governments that claim power over me, ranging from my local mayor and city council all the way up to the federal government. They have the power to coerce me to obey. Nothing more. Unfortunately, most people obey because they feel obligated, both because of childhood indoctrination and because of blind obedience to authority figures.

As a child, you were probably taught to revere your government in the same way that an adherent of a religion is taught to worship his god. As I was growing up, we were taught that this was “the greatest country on Earth.” I’ve discovered that people in various countries were taught the same thing. The common result of this indoctrination is that the vast majority of us grew up as patriotic little kids who love their country, salute its flag and obey its leaders. In what way is this indoctrination different from that done by various totalitarian governments throughout modern history?

There’s another issue that people frequently overlook. As human beings, we seem to be both wired and conditioned to obey people who are set up to be authority figures over us. One of the most chilling studies to ever look into this was Dr. Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments about obedience to authority, starting in 1961.

Milgram recruited volunteers for a psychology experiment who were told that the experiment involved whether electrical shocks could aid in learning. The volunteer played the role of “teacher,” who had a console of switches that controlled varying degrees of electrical shock being administered to another person, who was presented as the “learner.” The person playing the learner role was really one of the experimenters. When the teacher asked the learner questions — and the learner answered incorrectly — he was required to push a switch to shock the learner. Each time, the shock was a little higher than before. The learner would jump as though jolted, a little more each time. After a number of wrong answers, the teacher would think he was giving the learner huge amounts of electricity, amounts which would have been fatal if they had really been happening. What’s more, the “learner” would be screaming in pain and begging to stop. A white-coated authority figure would be standing with the teacher, instructing the teacher to continue administering higher and higher amounts of electrical current. Although many of the volunteers playing the teacher role were visibly upset and wanting to quit, the majority continued far after the shocks would have been harmful or fatal. (Read a longer explanation of the experiment here.)

Psychologists can argue about how much of the willingness to hurt others is a genetic predisposition to obey and how much is merely a learned response to authority. I don’t know. Other than intellectual curiosity, I don’t care. It doesn’t make any difference for our purposes. The point is that people tend to obey when authority figures tell them to do terrible things, even when they know those things are wrong. Those of us in the United States and many other countries find it convenient to point fingers at Germans during the Nazi era, believing that the evil done in the name of the government indicates that there’s something evil about the German people. But that’s a lie. Evil is done in the name of governments all the time, regardless of the flag the governments fly.

Teaching blind obedience to authority is wrong and it’s dangerous. It leads to people being willing to look the other way when their government does terrible things that they would criticize another government for doing. (For instance, while else would Americans defend and justify their government doing terrible things to suspected wrongdoers that their own government had labeled as torture when another government did it?) Whoever you are and wherever you live, you have no reason to feel smugly proud of your sainted government.

It’s time that we quit blindly teaching children to obey a government and worship its flag just because they were born in a particular country. We’re just creating future generations of people who are willing to do terrible things for politicians who wrap themselves in that flag. Unfortunately, parents and teachers blindly go on enforcing this conformity and blind devotion to governments. (Note the picture of children doing the “Bellamy salute” to the U.S. flag, something that was conveniently set aside after the Nazis started using it, too.)

Someone I used to know taught at a medium-sized school. This scene could have been anywhere, because it’s repeated all over the place, but this particular story stands out sharply in my mind because of the way the story was told. At some regular interval — once a week, maybe — all the kids in the school had to march to some central place in the school where they turned to a U.S. flag and recited the “pledge of allegiance” — written by a socialist minister in the late 19th century — and participated in various “patriotic” activities. It was certainly no different from the training and worship of a civic religion. Why are we indoctrinating children in blind obedience instead of teaching them to think for themselves and question authority?

I understand why governments would want this sort of blind obedience. What’s hard to understand is why the vast, vast majority of people have such an emotional commitment to blindly loving and obeying the authority figures who everyone else chooses for them.

I love the place I call home. I really do. But I’m not going to kill for other people. I’m not going to see people who happen to live elsewhere as my enemies just because politicians say they are. And I’m going to make decisions for myself and my future wife and children based on what’s best for us and (so far as I can) for people everywhere. The state doesn’t own me — and it has no claim on your obedience, either.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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