On the very (belligerent nationalist) idea of a special cultural collective identity to affirm

Judeo-Christian civilization? Capitalism with Asian values? A century from now perhaps an African one? (Just a century ago many people were dreaming of a, perhaps socialist, Jewish state). Good and bad characteristics apply to collective formations that have an identity or character by definition. Every kind of subject, dwelling in whatever be its proper territory, may enjoy cultivating the authentic and ethically compelling character that a form of life possesses by definition. Say that it is good, will it, maximize its potentiality and power, cry for what it must exclude, or not. Perhaps the only problem is when this is overly particular when true subjectivity is generic and universal somehow? Nations with the support of their ideologues may go to war against each other on the (false) premise that it is about defending their culture. Anyone remember WW1 (and WW2)? That ideological work provided the legitimations for wars of great destruction fought between claimants to global empire.

Collective narcissism is useful but to criticize effectively it is not enough to reject nationalism (which is the correlated cause and consequence) or even the calls to personal authenticity that match it on an individual level, because the critique of selves that defend their character and manifest their pride, would only make sense from the standpoint of an implicitly posited spiritual empire that claims instead that there is a divine absolute. This was done before: it was the Christian transformation of the Roman empire based on the idea that something is a problem to be criticized and that thing is sin, above all, pride. If individuals or tribes or nations then suppose that the question is, am I/we existentially threatened, maybe that is not the most useful problematic to be pursuing. (If 'we are all threatened', then the implicit claim is for a world government that protects everyone against the threat, which would be a global empire not so different theoretically from the thought of insular and maritime power England's seventeenth century figure Hobbes). Moral discourse is normally hollow when applied to the political realm. Its function then is largely to underwrite the state’s unacknowledged claim to absoluteness. This means in practice that if the police target outsiders, they can do anything they like, particularly with intellectual dissidents. They will be criticized psychologically. (This is of course little different from calling them great sinners and supposing that they might be, like heretics, outside the church altogether - except that in the late modern world religious discourse was supplanted by medical rather than moral psychology in articulating the principles of the normal and the excluded. When efforts are made to return to religion as basis of social control, they are either used by the state for repressive purposes, as conservatives regularly try to do in the United States), or by dissidents for ones that are positioned governmentally as outside and thus appear more violent but also more easily controlled.). The horizon of all of this is the social control of subjectivities whose economic function is to be useful for capital. We might think of cultural identity politics as like work houses where among the prisoners leaders emerge who say, as a prison guard might in a different context, “Assume your position!” where by this is meant your beautiful identity. Fascism is like this.

Name an identity that someone wants to claim, they will then want to tell you how beautiful is the substance of this category, but actually what matters both consequentially and in the intention of those claiming, naming, pretending to honor and celebrate, this collective self, is who is excluded, and that someone is. Inclusion implies exclusion and may even be merely the latter's excuse.

When someone says, this is who we really are and we're so proud, etc., ask, why are you doing this? What are you trying to achieve by making this statement, asserting this claim to 'be' in this space, here and now?

If the claimant is a minority that is figured (or can be) as marginalized and susceptible of exclusion, then this claim has the tactical value of resistance and opposition to that exclusion. This tactical meaning evaporates when it is not longer or not in the instance a marginalized or excluded population trying to fight this status but is doing something else. This is the danger of American-style identity politics (which lead to black, feminist, and gay corporate liberal diversity claims which serve the logic of capital and undermine resistance to it through cooptation of some of the forms of that resistance) as well as all post-colonial nationalisms, and it is the basis on which resistance to European antisemitism and the fascist uses of late colonial nationalist capitalism in which it became caught up in the later modern period - was able to utilized and transformed by elites positioned to do so into the very contrary of resistance to this logic, that is, into its continuation with the coopted rhetoric of opposition to oppression leveraging the potential of identity claims of population groups to shift their valence rhetorically and functionally in this way. Capitalism has so far typically involves violent subjugations of particular national and other social groups, but the locations of those wielding and benefitting from economic and political power and those suffering tend to shift. That shifting has been part of the logic of capitalism.

No one today knows exactly what will follow its demise, if it faces one, and if anything will. But we can identify common, and attractive, stupidities and lies.

And we can always resist power without buying into the idea that to be against something (this or that particular action on the part of this or that powerful large scale actor), it must be because we are 'for' something else (some new god, state, empire, religion, identity, will, project, plan, idea, etc.). Much good has happened in historical in thought and practice by refusing bad propositions.