Dear Friends,
It seems to me, a nation is a group of people held together by a set of ideas. It is not race that makes up nations, for there have been many that were not based on race, the US being the most obvious, they are not based on religion, since uncountable nations have allowed multiple religions practiced within their boarders, and it cannot be geography either, since Israel existed for millenia, without any geography to call home, it existed in the minds and hearts of the Jewish people. It was an idea. A nation then is a group of people bound by a system of ideas. The most expedient way to destroy a nation then, is not with arms, but with guile, turn the people away from the ideas and the nation must dissolve. If a nation is made up of ideas binding people together, remove the ideas, and the people are no longer bound.
It can be said that the nation is in fact the ideas that hold the people together. George Sorel called it the societal myth. The foundational ethos that often takes on a nearly religious significance among the adherents. Socialism is a religion to socialists, the “general Strike” to the syndicalist, the infallibility of the Catholic Church to the Catholic, etc… it is an idea that is unassailable by logic because it is a faith. The ideas of a nation can also be said to be a faith. Nations that are vital raise their children in the ideas that bind the people together. The ideas that made the people come together in the first place are regularly celebrated as well. All nations do this, from the Jews when they were diaspora to the Armenians today, a nation is a people held together by an idea.
Take away those ideas and you take away the glue that holds the people together. If we accept the ideas as resin, and people as the mass of a nation, then we have compared a nation to ply wood, particle board, fiberglass, or any of a thousand other composite materials. Both the strength and the weakness is in the binding agent. In the case of a nation… in the ideas. If the binding agent in a laminated wood lumber failed, so would the member, catastrophically, if it were put under load. A pile of gravel will only last a short time before wind and rain has eroded it to nothing, but add cement, and that same pile of pile of gravel can hold water for centuries. The resulting concrete will only last as long as the cement binding it together, once the cement ages, the gravel will become gravel once again.
History shows this to be true. People think that most empires, city states, and nations collapsed all at once, in some catastrophic war, but in reality the collapse came from within, and the exterior collapse only mirrored what had already happened inside. Like a ship with ship worms, it doesn’t sink until it is under a load, in a storm. Many huge and authoritative books have been written on the fall of Rome, but it all boils down to… the Romans abandoned the idea of what it meant to be a Roman. No more and no less than that. Like the resin breaking down from weathering in oriented strand board, the failure comes slowly without a load, and rapidly under strain. Every city state, country, nation and empire that has existed has fallen, because the foundational ethos was abandoned, usually for luxury.
The US is based, not on ethnicity, religion or geography, but of it’s founding ideas, life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, limited government, fundamental natural rights, freedom of… religion, association, speech, the press, to keep and bare arms, in our persons, papers, homes and the various states themselves withholding every power not expressly given in the Constitution to the Federal government. These are the ideas that hold the nation, the United States together, it is the glue, the atomic force and the gravity. They are also the ideas that formed the apex of the Enlightenment. Abandon the ideas, the resin, that holds the people together and we will quickly separate. Which means… the battle over over the ideas that make up America, is an existential one for our nation.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
