When the Nation-state Rebels | Clarissa's Blog

When the Nation-state Rebels | Clarissa's Blog: Scapegoating seems to occur when people have an identity that is unknown and hard to pin down. This produces paranoia. Add to this the factor of people suffering within themselves. If they are not intellectuals, they will be suffering for unknown and unfathomable reasons. They’re not economists, they’re not psychologists and they are not historians. Therefore they resort to the common human default when education is not present, which is to come up with a crude moral explanation for their suffering. That is why it is so easy to pin something onto the Jews.

As intellectuals, on the other hand, our overly refined default is to attribute rationality or the capacity to think about abstract ideas to others who are not intellectuals. We can come up with explanations that the Jews seemed to threaten the nation state. I very much doubt that that is particularly true. It may become more true to the extent that people are intellectuals, but the majority of people are not.

As for imagined communities and pointless sacrifices, isn’t that the human lot in general? Or, are we going to suddenly come up with a line delineating true communities from imagined ones, so that we never again make any mistakes and cast people as our friends when they are enemies, or overestimate alliances, or that we never continue to project parts of ourselves out there into the world (bearing in mind that empathy is also a common form of projection). And we all die, after working as well as we can and leaving what we do behind as our legacy, so we all make sacrifices– all of us with our lives.

In any case, all of these realities are very complex and it seems a bit farfetched to suggest that we will one day suddenly separate truth from fiction (or that we would be better off in all ways if we did).