Liberty misleading

La liberté guidant le peuple, Eugène Delacroix. Source: Wikimedia

There is a reason why national flags are rarely anything but abstract and correspond to the quality of firstness according to the tradition of Peirce. Even there, variations in interpreting the colours give us a rainbow of possibilities as to the meaning of the banner one should rally to.

The reason being that as nations are artificial superstructures, they are in desperate need of vindication by appealing to imagery and other third-party sources, that are in fact grounded in innate qualities of man. Call it branding. Thus the need to zoom out and find a uniting principle to bind together something that in fact was never united. As the magnification level becomes less and less, so does the value of symbolic meaning. What we are left with are stripes that everyone can relate to, but in that inclusiveness they now lack content.

Nation states as such are a tool of interaction, cooperation and defence. They are not sacred and they are not the ultimate in human evolution. It is just the nature of power, even a necessary function of it, to claim absolute supremacy — how many times have you heard that your country's soil/flag/anthem is 'sacred'? — and to demand absolute loyalty. In this regard, religion and nations do not differ. This again is no wonder, as religion likewise fulfills the same basic goal of cooperation etc.

But we do evolve, as those who cooperate are always stronger, and I feel we have moved past requiring this means of organisation. With digital communication, men are already breaking up into smaller communities that are located apart in space, and the current century will need a lot of effort in recognising such structures in an official capacity. For why can I not be a citizen of the world, literally?