https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=CVizRMIbUrg
So, Nikolaus says, what would be a proper Christian understanding of a nation? This question is particularly important to me as I’m coming from a former country of Yugoslavia where a war broke out twice in a 10 year span because various people claimed their local nationhood to be more important than our previous joined one. We can see similar things going on in Eastern Europe right now. I also suspect this pattern will keep occurring more and more in the coming years and not just in Eastern Europe. Yes, you’re right. That is what’s going to happen and it’s going to increase. It’s been happening for a long time. This started a long time ago and a long time ago. It started 100 years ago, more than 100 years ago. It’s two opposites. There are two opposites happening at the same time. It’s like on the one hand, there’s a desire to crystallize the nation very strongly, to crystallize groups, to crystallize nations, to crystallize identities, fix them very strongly. And then there’s a counterweight to that, a counterreaction, which is a desire then to mix and to confuse because we see the nation or the identity as being too strong and too tight. We have to remember that in the era post and after World War I, there were massive displacements of people all across Europe and the Middle East where nations were now all segregated. All the Greeks left Turkey and all the Turks left Greece and they created these segregated nations that were as homogenous as possible within themselves. That is a problem. We created these hermetic borders around states that are supposed to contain in them these now displaced people that have their own common identity completely closed off. That was one of the reasons that justified even the existence of the state of Israel, was this move towards saying every nation needs their land and their country and their borders and every group has to be closed off. But of course that’s ridiculous because that’s fractally true. You can imagine that at every level people can now say, well, we’re not really part of this group. We’re not Greeks. We’re not really this group. We’re actually this smaller group. So it can fragment indefinitely. You saw that in many respects. But then that leads to a kind of other opposite, which is this problem of mixture and of wanting to eliminate all the differences. In the communist time, the communist states, they had this problem where they just wanted to eliminate nationhood and eliminate tribalism. So they just created these countries that contain all these tribes inside and basically said you’re not allowed to be that. You just have to be the proletariat or whatever. But that doesn’t work because we don’t exist that way. We exist in these fractal relationships. So when the wall came down, then everybody clung back into their identities. And then it was just like my group against your group. So this is the problem of not having proper normal hierarchies of relationships across the board, which is that in a normal world, people would have their families, people would have their tribes, people would have their groups, and then people would all participate nonetheless in higher identities, whether it’s something like empire. But it doesn’t have to be empire, but it could just be Christianity. For example, in the West, you had all these little kingdoms that nonetheless somehow attended to a higher good together so that they wouldn’t just constantly be at war, although they still were at war way too much. So I think it’s going to get worse. There’s no way around it, and it’s going to play on that issue. Yeah, it’s really tough. It’s a tough time.