Why Nationalism Now — Economics, Psychology, Philosophy
Sinclair ends his Himmler essay by pointing at the present: Trump, Netanyahu, the nationalist wave everywhere. The question is not who they are, but why now, and why us. The answer is small — three mechanisms, one sentence each. Then one cure. Watch the video.
1. The Economic Cause: Merit Became Unreachable
For three centuries, the West ran on a working bargain: effort roughly correlated with reward. Learn a trade, work hard, buy a house, retire secure. That bargain is now broken at the bottom and hollow at the top. Housing outpaces wages; stable employment dissolves into gig-work; the ladder’s lower rungs were removed exactly when automation and financialization concentrated the gains upward. The visible result is a generation that can work and still not arrive.
This is the sufficient reason. Nationalism is not primarily an idea people hold; it is a product people buy when the market of real achievement is closed to them. The Little Man cannot afford a house, but he can afford — for free — the belief that he is nonetheless above someone: the migrant, the elite, the other side of the border. Chauvinism is the cheapest status good on the market. Its price fell precisely as the price of everything else rose.
Economically, then: nationalism is the compensation good. When real merit-arrival becomes unaffordable, false merit is the only thing still on sale.
2. The Psychological Cause: The Little Man’s Arithmetic
Reich’s Little Man is not stupid — he is armored. The chronically tensed organism cannot tolerate the truth “I failed because I am unfinished,” because that truth threatens the rigid identity that holds his anxiety down. So he runs the swap: I am not small; my nation is great. My poverty is not mine; it was done to me. The nation functions as an ego-prosthesis — a borrowed grandeur, paid for in obedience.
This is the false-merit machine. True merit requires two inputs the Little Man actually lacks:
- Motivation — blocked by armor: energy that should drive unfolding is spent holding the self together.
- Opportunity — blocked by the economy above: the rungs are gone.
With both inputs zero, the rational (if ruinous) move is to counterfeit the output. He cannot achieve merit, so he claims it — by birth, by blood, by faith, by flag. All four are nouns. All four require nothing. And here the Dark Triad enters: narcissism supplies the grandeur, Machiavellianism supplies the scapegoat-craft, psychopathy supplies the cruelty that proves the grandeur is real (“I can hurt them; therefore I am great”). The triad is not an aberration of the Little Man; it is his business model.
3. The Philosophical Cause: Thumos Misdirected
Plato named the missing ingredient: thumos — the spirited part, the fire that wants to matter, to be seen, to win glory. It is neither reason nor appetite; it is the engine of the hero. Healthy thumos orients toward beauty — toward excellence that can be beheld and admired. It builds.
But thumos is energy, not intellect. In hands that have no pursuit of truth — no hidden knowledge sought, no discipline of verification — it does not disappear. It falls into the nearest available channel. And the channels available to the modern Little Man are pre-built and free: the nation, the religion, the tribe, the team. Hero’s energy, poured into a noun, becomes chauvinism. The same fire that would have built a workshop, written a proof, or raised a vineyard is spent defending a flag’s honor at a demonstration — because the flag asks nothing of him, while excellence asks everything.
The philosophical failure, then, is the failure of the quest. Every civilization that contained its thumos gave it a genuine object of pursuit: the mysteries, the pilgrimage, the masterpiece, the proof. Ours dismantled those objects and offered, in their place, consumption and content. The fire, given nothing true to burn toward, burns sideways — and finds the arsonists waiting, because a polity that abolishes the quest creates a surplus of thumos and a market for false quests. The nationalist demagogue is not the cause of the fire. He is its cheapest customer.
The Synthesis — One Sentence
When the economy closes the doors of real merit, the armored psyche counterfeits it with borrowed nouns, and the hero’s fire — given no true beauty to pursue — burns for the false ones; nationalism is the simultaneous sale of house, identity, and quest to people who can no longer afford any of the real things.
The Cure — And Why Meritocratia Is It
The diagnosis implies its own remedy, and it is not moralizing. You cannot argue the Little Man out of his counterfeit — it is holding his psyche together. You must make the real thing affordable again.
- Economically: restore the ladder — resource abundance, land-efficiency, real ownership (the village model; the 70/30 with vesting — merit measured, not decreed).
- Psychologically: de-armor — the Shackle-Breaker work; an organism that can breathe does not need a flag to hold itself together.
- Philosophically: give thumos back its true object — the quest, the hidden knowledge, the beauty. The channel’s essays exist for exactly this: they are the alternative quest, the one that survives its own audit.
Himmler’s SS was the terminal case: all three failures at once, industrialized. Today’s nationalisms are the same failure at lower intensity — the Little Man with a smartphone instead of a castle. The sufficient reason for optimism is that the failure is structural, and structures can be rebuilt. The fire is not the enemy. It is waiting for its true work.
Six Axioms series. Cf.: The Anatomy of Servitude; The Noun Trap; Capitalism or Eros and Civilization; The Shackle-Breaker Protocol.