(Originally published in the book Open Systems, Closed Mind)
Part I: The Illusion of Birth-Based Superiority
At the heart of nationalist ideology lies one of humanity’s most persistent logical fallacies: the belief that the geographical coordinates of one’s birth somehow confer inherent worth, specialness, or moral superiority. This notion, dressed in the appealing rhetoric of loyalty and fidelity, crumbles under the slightest rational examination. You did not choose your birthplace any more than you chose your eye color or the decade of your arrival on Earth. It is, quite literally, a genetic and geographical accident—a confluence of circumstances involving your parents’ location at a particular moment in time.
Consider the arbitrary nature of this pride. If your mother happened to be visiting relatives across a border when you were born, would that fundamentally alter who you are as a person? If your family moved when you were an infant, which soil should command your supposedly innate loyalty? The questions reveal the absurdity of the premise. National boundaries are human constructs, often drawn by historical accidents of war, colonial administration, or political convenience. To derive personal identity and worth from these lines on a map is to mistake the arbitrary for the essential.
Yet nationalism asks us to do precisely this—to feel pride in achievements we had no hand in creating, to claim ownership of cultural accomplishments that preceded our existence, and to assume responsibility for a “national character” we played no role in shaping. This is not the healthy pride that comes from personal accomplishment or meaningful contribution; it is borrowed glory, unearned identity, and vicarious achievement of the most hollow kind.
The distinction between ethnic nationalism and constitutional patriotism becomes crucial here. Ethnic nationalism—the belief that blood, soil, and shared ancestry create inherent bonds and superiorities—represents the most toxic form of this geographical accident worship. It suggests that your value as a human being depends on the purity of your lineage and the specific patch of earth that witnessed your first breath. Constitutional patriotism, while potentially less harmful, still often relies on the problematic assumption that you should feel special pride in political documents and systems you had no role in creating, simply because you happened to be born under their jurisdiction.
The historical record speaks with devastating clarity about where such thinking leads. Nationalism, in its various forms, has been the ideological fuel for history’s most catastrophic conflicts. The trenches of World War I filled with young men convinced that their particular piece of geography was worth dying for. The Holocaust emerged from a nationalism so toxic it sought to eliminate those deemed insufficiently connected to the “right” soil and blood. The Rwandan genocide, the Yugoslav wars, the partition of India—each represents nationalism’s capacity to transform geographical accidents into justifications for mass murder.
When we compare nationalism’s death toll with other ideologies, only religious fundamentalism rivals its destructive power. The Crusades, the Thirty Years’ War, and countless sectarian conflicts show how easily humans can be convinced to kill for abstract ideas about divine preference and chosen peoples. Nationalism simply replaces divine selection with geographical selection, trading “God chose us” for “this land chose us.” The result is equally deadly and equally irrational.
Even in its supposedly benign forms, nationalism corrupts moral reasoning. It asks us to value the life of a co-national more than that of a foreigner, to prioritize the welfare of those who share our accidental birthplace over those who do not. It creates in-groups and out-groups based on nothing more substantial than the random distribution of human births across the planet’s surface. This moral particularism—caring more about some humans than others based on geographical proximity of birth—directly contradicts any coherent system of universal human ethics.
The alternative to this geographical chauvinism is not rootlessness or anomie—it is humanism. Instead of deriving identity from the accident of birthplace, we can ground our sense of belonging in our shared humanity, our common capacity for reason, creativity, and moral growth. Instead of pride in inherited geography, we can take pride in personal accomplishments, in contributions to human knowledge and welfare, in the cultivation of wisdom and compassion that knows no borders.
Part II: The Miraculous Geography of Divine Truth
What are the odds? In a world with thousands of religions, hundreds of denominations, and countless interpretations of divine will, you—through no effort or wisdom of your own—happened to be born into the one true faith. Not only that, but you were born to parents who practiced the correct version of that faith, in the right geographical region where that truth was already established, speaking the language in which divine revelation was most perfectly preserved. Truly, you are among the luckiest people who have ever lived.
But wait. Here’s where the miracle becomes even more extraordinary: billions of other people around the world are experiencing this exact same incredible fortune. The Muslim in Jakarta is absolutely certain that his birth into Islam represents the same kind of divine luck. The Catholic in São Paulo knows with equal certainty that her childhood baptism placed her among the cosmically fortunate. The Hindu in Mumbai, the Buddhist in Bangkok, the Orthodox Christian in Moscow, the Protestant in Nashville—all are marveling at their impossibly good fortune of being born into the one path that leads to eternal salvation or enlightenment.
This presents us with a statistical miracle of unprecedented proportions. Not only did you win the cosmic lottery, but somehow billions of others won the exact same lottery simultaneously—except they all won different prizes that they each insist are the only real prize. It’s as if millions of people were all handed lottery tickets that said “WINNER” while insisting that everyone else’s winning ticket was actually a fake.
The geographical distribution of this divine luck reveals patterns that would make any statistician suspicious. How remarkably convenient that the “true religion” tends to cluster in specific regions and correlate so perfectly with the accidents of political history, trade routes, and military conquest. The truth about God, it seems, spreads in exactly the same way that languages, cuisines, and folk tales spread—through human migration, cultural transmission, and political power. What are the chances that divine truth would follow the same distribution patterns as entirely human phenomena?
Consider the historical implications of this miraculous geography. When Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Americas, they encountered millions of indigenous people who had somehow failed to discover Christianity despite having thousands of years to figure out the correct path to salvation. Were these civilizations simply unlucky? Did God forget to send them the memo? Or perhaps the divine plan required them to wait centuries for European ships to deliver the truth—along with smallpox, slavery, and territorial conquest.
The same pattern repeats throughout history. The “true faith” always seems to arrive with armies, merchants, or colonial administrators. It travels along trade routes and spreads through political networks. Truth, apparently, needs human institutions to carry it across the world, and it seems to be remarkably bad at crossing cultural and linguistic barriers without military or economic assistance.
But let’s return to the personal level of this miracle. Not only were you born into the right religion, but you were born into it at exactly the right time. If you had been born a few centuries earlier, you might have been unlucky enough to be born into a version of your faith that is now considered heretical. If you’re a Protestant, imagine your misfortune if you had been born into pre-Reformation Christianity. If you’re a Catholic, consider how unfortunate it would have been to be born into one of the early Christian sects that the Church later declared heretical.
The timing of your birth was also perfect in terms of theological development. You arrived just after all the major doctrinal questions had been settled, just after the correct interpretation of scripture had been established, just after the proper rituals had been codified. How lucky that you didn’t have to live through centuries of religious uncertainty, schisms, and theological debates. The truth was already packaged and ready for you.
This miraculous timing extends to your specific denomination as well. If you’re a Christian, you weren’t unlucky enough to be born into one of the other 45,000 Christian denominations that have gotten crucial details wrong. If you’re a Muslim, you avoided the misfortune of being born into the wrong branch of Islam. If you’re Jewish, you landed in the right movement within Judaism. Each level of religious specificity represents another lottery win, another impossible stroke of luck.
The psychological comfort of this belief system is obvious. It means you don’t have to do the hard work of examining different religious traditions, comparing their claims, or grappling with the possibility that your deeply held beliefs might be products of geographical and historical accident rather than cosmic truth. You can simply assume that the universe arranged itself to deliver the correct information to you through your parents and local religious community.
But this comfort comes at a staggering intellectual cost. It requires you to believe that billions of equally sincere, equally intelligent, equally devout people around the world are all fundamentally mistaken about the most important questions of human existence. It requires you to believe that geographical location is a reliable indicator of theological truth. It requires you to believe that divine revelation follows the same patterns as human cultural transmission—which raises the question of whether you’re actually dealing with divine revelation at all.
The alternative explanation is far simpler and requires no miraculous coincidences: religious beliefs, like languages and cultural practices, are learned from the social environment in which we are raised. They spread through human networks, adapt to local conditions, and evolve over time through entirely human processes. The passionate conviction that believers feel about their faith is real, but conviction is not evidence of truth—it’s evidence of effective cultural transmission.
Part III: The Accident of Supremacy and the Holy Trinity of Evil
The most destructive force in human history is not natural disaster, disease, or scarcity—it is the toxic combination of two fundamentally stupid ideas that have convinced ordinary people to commit extraordinary evil. The first is the delusion that your accidental birthplace makes you inherently superior to other humans. The second is the fantasy that your accidental religious upbringing connects you more directly to the Supreme Being of the Universe than the billions of other humans who happened to be born into different traditions.
When these two accidents of supremacy combine, they create a psychological nuclear weapon: the absolute certainty that you are not just different from others, but divinely ordained to be better than others. You are not merely lucky—you are chosen. Your random geographical and theological coordinates become evidence of cosmic favoritism, transforming life’s arbitrary circumstances into proof of your special relationship with ultimate reality itself.
This lethal combination has been the ideological fuel for humanity’s most catastrophic violence. Consider the Crusades, where European Christians convinced themselves that their accidental birth into Christianity and their accidental residence in Christendom gave them divine permission to slaughter Muslims in the Holy Land. The Crusaders didn’t see themselves as invaders or murderers—they saw themselves as instruments of God’s will, their violence sanctified by the miraculous coincidence of their birth circumstances.
The Spanish conquest of the Americas represents this toxic fusion at its most devastating. Spanish conquistadors combined their accidental European birthplace with their accidental Catholic upbringing to justify genocide on an unprecedented scale. Indigenous peoples weren’t just different—they were inferior by virtue of their wrong geography and wrong religion. Their annihilation became not just permissible but holy, a divine mandate delivered through the accident of Spanish birth and Catholic baptism.
The Holocaust elevated this poisonous logic to industrial efficiency. Nazi ideology fused nationalism (German soil) with pseudo-religious mysticism (Aryan chosen-ness) to create a supremacist death cult. Jews, Roma, and other targeted groups weren’t just different—they were cosmically wrong, their very existence an offense against the natural and divine order that supposedly favored the accidentally German-born adherents of accidentally acquired racial mythology.
But these two accidents of supremacy never operate in isolation. They are amplified and weaponized by what we might call the Holy Trinity of Evil: tribalism, racism, and isolationism. Together, these five forces create a psychological cocktail that transforms humans into monsters while convincing them they are heroes.
Tribalism takes the accident of birth and expands it into an us-versus-them worldview where loyalty to your accidental group becomes the highest moral value. Your tribe—defined by the random circumstances of your birth—becomes the center of moral concern, while all other humans become either irrelevant or actively threatening. The Rwandan genocide demonstrates how quickly tribalism can turn neighbors into enemies, how radio broadcasts can convince Hutus that their accidental ethnic identity made them naturally superior to their Tutsi neighbors, justifying mass murder as ethnic destiny.
Racism adds biological pseudoscience to geographic and cultural accidents, claiming that your random genetic inheritance determines not just your appearance but your intelligence, morality, and worthiness of life itself. American slavery lasted centuries because white Americans convinced themselves that their accidental European ancestry made them naturally superior to people of accidental African ancestry. The accident of melanin production became proof of cosmic hierarchy, turning human beings into property and torture into economic policy.
Isolationism completes the trinity by making ignorance a virtue and curiosity a threat. Instead of learning about other cultures, religions, and ways of life—which might reveal the arbitrariness of your own accidents of birth—isolationism encourages you to reject outside influence and view foreign ideas as contamination. The accident of your birth circumstances becomes not just superior but fragile, requiring protection from the corrupting influence of other accidents of birth.
When all five forces combine—nationalist supremacy, religious supremacy, tribalism, racism, and isolationism—they create humans who are capable of extraordinary evil while feeling extraordinary righteousness. They transform the basic human capacity for group loyalty and meaning-making into engines of dehumanization and violence.
This toxic combination makes people less human in the most literal sense. It shrinks their circle of moral concern from the universal human family to their accidentally defined in-group. It replaces curiosity about other ways of life with fear and hatred. It substitutes the earned pride of personal accomplishment with the borrowed glory of group membership. It trades the difficult work of understanding complex moral questions for the simple comfort of assuming divine endorsement of your prejudices.
The psychology is seductive because it offers everything humans crave: specialness without effort, purpose without uncertainty, community without responsibility, and righteousness without self-examination. You don’t have to accomplish anything meaningful—your birth circumstances already make you special. You don’t have to grapple with moral complexity—your group membership provides ready-made answers. You don’t have to earn respect through your actions—your accidents of birth entitle you to superiority.
History’s greatest monsters were not born evil—they were ordinary people who became convinced that their accidents of birth made them extraordinary. Hitler was a failed artist who transformed his personal inadequacies into national and racial superiority. Pol Pot was an unremarkable student who turned his accidental Cambodian birth into a justification for murdering anyone with accidental markers of education or foreign influence. Osama bin Laden was a privileged construction heir who converted his accidental Islamic upbringing into divine permission for mass murder.
Conclusion: The Choice to Be Human
The antidote to this poison is the recognition that all human worth comes from what we choose to do with our lives, not from the circumstances into which we were accidentally born. Every person you meet won the same lottery you did—the lottery of human consciousness, the ability to think, feel, create, and care. Their different birthplace, different religion, different language, different appearance are just different outcomes of the same cosmic randomness that produced your own circumstances.
Humanism offers what nationalism and religious supremacy promise but cannot deliver: a basis for community that is both inclusive and earned, both meaningful and rational. It asks not where you were born or what religion your parents taught you, but what you have done with the gift of consciousness. It measures worth not by passport color or theological pedigree, but by contribution to the human project of understanding, creating, and caring for one another across all artificial boundaries.
True human dignity lies not in the accidents of birth but in how we use our brief time as conscious beings. Do we choose to learn from those who were born into different circumstances? Do we create beauty, knowledge, or compassion that enriches the human experience? Do we expand our circle of concern beyond our accidental in-groups to embrace our shared humanity?
The love of one’s immediate community—one’s neighbors, local environment, and familiar places—need not extend to claims of superiority or special chosenness. You can appreciate your hometown without believing it superior to all others. You can work for local improvement without nationalism’s toxic brew of pride, superiority, and us-versus-them thinking. You can find meaning and purpose without the delusion that cosmic forces arranged themselves for your particular benefit.
The choice is always before us: we can worship the accidents of our birth, or we can transcend them through the conscious choice to become fully human. We can remain prisoners of geographical and theological lottery tickets, or we can recognize that our only true birthright is the capacity to think, choose, and care beyond the narrow boundaries of our accidental circumstances.
In the end, the accidents of supremacy are just that—accidents. What matters is not where the cosmic dice landed when you were born, but what you choose to do with your consciousness now that you have it. True belonging comes not from the accident of geography or theology, but from the choice to contribute meaningfully to human flourishing, wherever that contribution might be needed.
