There are two elements that constantly recur when native peoples describe what matters most to them: family and land. As animists, they lack our miserly attitude towards personhood, and intuitively relate to the world around them as it presents itself to their senses: as persons (Abram, 1997; Charlton, 2002). A saying like “all my relations,” used in Lakota ceremonials, is laden with meaning in a world where the land is family. Australian songlines bind each aborigine to a specific spot in the land, and to a line of ancestry expressed across a storied landscape. Apache ‘agodzaahi stories likewise bind family into a storied landscape. Clan totems remind human families of their other-than-human relations. The animist world is one of relationship; that is the world in which humans evolved, and to do so, there are two relationships so deeply seated that they override all others: family and land.

Imagine this: you, your parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents, mothers and fathers, children, cousins, second cousins, your whole extended family, has lived the life of a year-round summer camp for as long as you remember. You live together, resolve conflicts, and support one another as best you can, as a family. Your in-jokes have become the stuff of legend, your artistic styles have inspired each other, for countless generations you have collaborated on a vital and celebratory family culture that you enjoy. You make decisions as a community, relying on the wisdom of those you trust. The smallest child contributes to voice of the community as a whole. No police, no bureaucracy, no institutions … instead you have taboos, family consensus processes, and traditions. A Free Family, living your life on the land.¹

For all it’s done to dehumanize us, civlization cannot create the deep emotions needed to knit a society together from whole cloth. Instead, it must co-opt and pervert natural instincts to its own ends. The inherent illegitimacy of the state has made legitimizing activity a fundamental concern for every civilization: how does a civilization justify its existence, when it offers nothing of value and oppresses everyone under it? These two fundamental human loves—family and land—are invariably the key. By shifting the locus of love from actual family to the mythological “nation,” and from an actual ecosystem to the arbitrary borders of the “country,” the state can steal natural human love and twist it into a fanatical devotion—one which, more often than not, shatters actual families and poisons actual land.

A few years back, George Lakoff released a book called Don’t Think of an Elephant!, a guidebook for how to get Democrats elected again that tore through “blue” America like a wildfire and inspired liberals everywhere to not change anything, lose the presidential election, and wonder why they kept failing. Lakoff’s primary argument was that conservatives wanted a “stern father” in a leader, whereas liberals wanted a “nurturing mother.”

What links Strict Father family-based morality to politics is a common metaphor, shared by conservatives and liberals alike—the Nation-as-Family metaphor, in which the nation is seen as a family, the government as a parent and the citizens as children. This metaphor turns family-based morality into political morality, providing the link between conservative family values and conservative political policies. The Strict Father model, which brings together the conservative metaphors for morality, is what unites the various conservative political positions into a coherent whole when it is imposed on political life by the Nation-as-Family metaphor.²

The metaphor is far older than that. The Roman emperor predicated his power on his position as the Pater patriae of the Roman people, a Pater familias on the imperial scale. Even today, we speak of George Washington as the “father of our country,” and describe our Civil War as a conflict “of brother against brother.” We speak of a “motherland” (or, in German-speaking countries, “Fatherland”). The state always defines itself in terms of metaphors of family, in order to usurp the natural human love for actual family. Hence the term, patriotism, from the Latin pater, “father.” But there is no such thing as the “nation” to love. It is a myth, largely invented from the printing press.

A good example is that mixed blessing of the modern age, the shared national sentiment that—especially in its more intense, self-conscious forms—is known as nationalism. This sinewy sentiment, if used deftly by a politician, can erode the power of local rulers, expanding authority. The result—a centrally governed and culturally coherent region bound by a sense of shared heritage, shared interest, and shared destiny—is the nation-state. We take nation-states for granted today, but they didn’t always exist. To understand the printing press’s role in their evolution, we need to first understand the forces that were encouraging this evolution well before the press arrived on the European scene.

The press reinforced the drive toward national rule in two ways. First, it unified the cultural base of large swaths of land, standardizing custom and mythology and, above all, language. In the late Middle Ages, the scholar Adam Watson has written, “one dialect shaded almost imperceptibly into the next, the Romance languages from the Low Countries to Portugal and Sicily and the Germanic from Holland to Vienna.” The press changed that, tamping down dialectical differences, creating large blocks of mutual intelligibility—”unified fields of exchange and communication,” as the political scientist Benedict Anderson has called them.

Second, the press began to foster a kind of day-to-day national con sciousness. By the early 1500s, single-topic “news pamphlets” were harmonizing English sentiment, reporting on battles, disasters, celebrations. In the ensuing centuries, as journals and true newspapers evolved, the printing press would give more and more fiber to national feeling. Whole states would become, in Anderson’s terminology, “imagined communities.”³

In our evolutionary past, human language developed as a function of our ecology (Abram, 1997), inspired by bird calls and the ambient soundscape of where we lived. The “imperceptible shading of one dialect into the next” reflected the shifting ecology, and related real families to real lands, at least to some extent. We can trace the invasive approach to settlement all the way back to the introduction of agriculture in Europe, but the standardization of language and the creation of the “imagined community” of the nation took that invasive attitude to the next level, shattering the linguistic bond of people to land, and replacing it with the concept of the “nation-state,” which directed such love not to the landbase that gave life, but to the government that took it away.

It’s important to note, also, that the nation is an “imagined community”—not an actual one. According to the myth of the nation-state, I am bound by some mystical relationship akin to family with strangers I’ve never met on the other side of the continent, but not with friends I have spent actual time with who live in Canada. According to the myth of the “nation,” I should love that stranger as a brother in my own family, as a countryman, and I should see more in common with him than with my friends. This is obviously no real community, but a convenient delusion that makes our bonds of affection easier to manipulate and control.

This love is called “patriotism.”

Patriotism is like family love. You love your family just for being your family, not for being “the greatest family on earth” (whatever that might mean) or for being “better” than other families. You don’t feel threatened when other people love their families the same way. On the contrary, you respect their love, and you take comfort in knowing they respect yours. You don’t feel your family is enhanced by feuding with other families.⁴

If the nation-state is a family, then what kind of family is it? Derrick Jensen has been answering that question for years. Having grown up in an abusive family, he easily recognizes precisely the kind of family the nation-state is.

Force is an expensive and inefficient way to exploit. This is as true on the grand social level as it is on the familial. From the perspective of those in power, it’s more desirable to get those you exploit to participate in their own victimization.

One way this can happen is through mystification, where an exploiter convinces victims that the violence is their fault. The abusive father, for example, might tell his children he would not have hit them had they sufficiently cleaned the dishes. This serves the function of causing the children to focus on cleaning the dishes instead of attending to the inexcusable violence of their father. Perhaps more importantly, it convinces them that if they can only be good enough at reading and responding to their abuser’s everchanging wants, they might not get beaten. The question as it relates to free will becomes: if they clean the dishes obsessively and perform every other obeisance, all without him beating them anymore, are they then doing these of their own free will?⁵

Isn’t this what the “patriots” constantly tell us? It’s only those who do wrong who go to jail? It’s only criminals that we punish? If you have nothing to hide, then there’s no reason to object to the loss of your civil liberties? If you’re a good citizen, then there’s no reason to fear your nation-state? Patriotism is always inherently irrational, as Jeff Vail explains:

Rather than digress into a debate over the relative merits of freedom vs. equality, let’s just assume that these noble principles are in fact “noble”, and worthy of our support (whatever they may be). Accepting this assumption highlights the logical fallacy of the second argument: there is no justification for transference of “love for a noble principle” to “love for a Nation-State that exhibits that principle”. It may justify a love for the policy of a Nation-State that upholds such a principle as individual freedom (for example), but no matter how many times one iterates this process it never makes the final leap of logic to justify love for the Nation-State itself.⁶

In fact, that final step—when support for some noble principle transfers to love of a particular government—will always entail a betrayal of the principle, because once that occurs, you empower the state to forsake that principle, because you now love the state, not the principle.

Patriotism perverts not just our love of family, but our love of land as well. At its best, patriots say what they love is their homeland. Our slogans celebrate the land: “oh beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain; for purple mountains’ majesty above the fruited plain…” And yet, their ardent support for the government leads to the rabid despoiling of that land, deforestation, the poisoning of the air and water, and the destruction of the landbase that gives us life. Environmentalism is routinely denounced as “unpatriotic.” All patriotism strikes the same chords; consider this pamphlet circulated in late Weimar Germany, shortly before the rise of the Nazi party and part of the ecological millieu that led to its rise.

In every German breast the German forest quivers with its caverns and ravines, crags and boulders, waters and winds, legends and fairy tales, with its songs and its melodies, and awakens a powerful yearning and a longing for home; in all German souls the German forest lives and weaves with its depth and breadth, its stillness and strength, its might and dignity, its riches and its beauty—it is the source of German inwardness, of the German soul, of German freedom. Therefore protect and care for the German forest for the sake of the elders and the youth, and join the new German “League for the Protection and Consecration of the German Forest.”⁷

And what’s the truth of it?

I believe we all know the story. Of the great multitudes of seabirds I wrote of: “They slaughter them with iron-tipped clubs in such quantity that it is an incredible thing.” Of the native people: “The soldiers mowed down dozens with point-blank volleys, loosed the dogs to rip open limbs and bellies, chased fleeing Indians into the bush to skewer them on sword and pike, and ‘with God’s aid soon gained a complete victory.’”

The great auk was gone by 1844. The last of the billions of passenger pigeons died in 1914. Both hunted to extinction, along with the eastern buffalo, the Eskimo curlew and many, many others. Those who were lucky enough to escape complete annihilation, such as the cougar, the gray wolf and the old growth forest, are greatly diminished in their numbers.

What the man on the street said, what all the signs and bumper stickers and sloganeering politicians say is nearly correct: God, if there is a God, did bless America. Quite generously. But then the Americans came, spit in God’s face, and systematically destroyed every one of those blessings over the course of 400 long, bloody years.

I’d like to see a bumper sticker that says that.⁸

Today is the Fourth of July, “Independence Day,” the annual celebration of American patriotism. This Fourth, reflect on what it is that you really love—the government that exploits you, or your family, and the land that gives you life? Is it “all your relations,” or the elites who conspire to turn you into a serf? Patriotism is the perversion of natural human love, attached to the abusers who destroy you, your family, your land, and everything worth loving. It’s high time to leave “patriotism” behind us; this Fourth, celebrate the things that deserve your love—family and land.

Related Articles

• “Dysfunctional Culture” — civilization as one big, dysfunctional, abusive family, and how tribalism can help us create a healthy family society again
• “Nine Nations: Bioregionalism in North America” — Bioregionalism, including a detailed discussion of what a healthy relationship with the land looks like, and how it’s been perverted by “patriotism” in general, and the Nazis specifically

Works Cited

• Abram, David. 1997. Spell of the Sensuous. Vintage.
• Charlton, Bruce. 2002. “Alienation, Neo-shamanism and Recovered Animism.”