NewMonia

I first began to learn about national personhood after I migrated to NewMonia.   Of course I had my own personality at that time, which was rather shy, extremely dutiful and generally full of anxiety.  I also had a mischievous side, but this did not find much of an outlet in an environment that was far from natural to me.

But people started to teach me about the lovable, or infamous rogue that they thought of as my country of origin.  They taught me this by imposing what they considered to be the characteristics of this country onto me.  Presumably, I was very arrogant and conceited and replete with infamous deeds, for instance those that could have been committed by adult males, if they were out of control.

Whenever I made an error of judgment or asked for assistance to find out how things were supposed to work, I was treated in this light. 

Eventually --- and this is strange, too – I gained some of the characteristics of whom I was supposed to be.   I began to feel very aggressive and even at war with those around me.  It is not as if this manner of treatment of me was relenting.  The more afraid I was that it would start again, the more it brought this out in people.  After more than a decade of different levels of experience, but in a left wing work place, where people seemed to really feel vindictive about the supposed characteristics of my supposed country of origin, I felt like I was going to be totally erased by the force of hostility bought against me – which once again seemed like the kind of animosity you would bring against an enemy soldier who had dared to cross your lines.  Then, I realized that the only way to counteract this level of psychological antagonism was actually to give myself some of the characteristics already attributed to me, which would enable me to start to fight back.

This is how it is when a person is perceived as a country.  But what is it that responds to the other person, not as an individual but as a country?  Certainly, it must be the country within them, that is responding to another country. 

So we see that people draw their boundary lines in the dirt, and act out their particular country’s fears and hostilities.  In NewMonians I saw that they were suffering from a good deal of colonial guilt, so it made sense that they would try to deflect their discomfort about their own identity by projecting their sense of a dark, shadowy, evil potential onto me.

And there are other ways that people of particular nationalities set out to make themselves look good.  One of the biggest ways is by denying that anything exists outside of their psychological boundaries, or that they are even capable of engaging in hostilities of any sort.  They might explain the effects of their hostilities in totally different terms, for example in terms of training others about ethics, or I terms of diagnosing another person’s alleged pathologies.  In any case, part of the perfection of political boundary defense is in not seeing it as entailing any form of proactive aggression or hostility.