this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2025
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I can explain this one. Growing up in America, you're constantly told that you're a patriot simply because you were born here—like just existing in the same country where Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington lived 250 years ago somehow makes you part of their legacy. It's pushed on you so early and so hard that you don't even question it. You just go to school, and the first thing you do is stand and pledge allegiance to the state—together, as a group. It’s ritualistic. It functions like a cult mechanism. That’s how it gets ingrained.
Most Americans do not have an understanding that they are being tread on.
I don't think being patriotic is such a bad thing. It's not unique to the US either.
But looking back so uncritically definitely is.
doesn’t explain the whole gun thing though. Like it’s the one country that seems wildly out of control from gun violence all because of that one thing regularly and seriously defended in that constitution of your’s all while never arriving to the exact reason it’s in the constitution in the first place..
Until now when that exact thing happens and then suddenly the entire constitution means fuck all and gets trashed and it’s like y’all collectively got quiet about them guns and the constitution.
Not to say I’m like let’s get all violent and blood thirsty, just saying this explicit logic sequence about guns and violence is what makes America extra weird.
As I said, guns cannot protect one from Fox News.
In other words, we are taught, from childhood, to resist classic tyranny, like a British King, or external propaganda like Nazism. That's gun culture: people ready to tell foreign soldiers stepping foot on their home exactly how they feel, from the end of a barrel. A sort of 'people's militia' is the fantasy, and part of our history.
It's so engrained that I think it blinds people to internal propaganda, and surpresses critical thinking. And that was kinda OK for awhile, but now it's gotten out of hand and, well...
ah got you. so it's like "you're supposed to behave this way" it's ingrained in you as a child that this is the proper thing to do but like most kids you just have no idea why it is and you just go along with it. like being dragged to church as a kid.
See my reply below.
But in short, I think its not so much a cult as an outddated fantasy. We're taught to resist external invasions as a people's militia; that's what the Founding Fathers mean to people, kicking out foreign kings. It's what the pledge allegiance meant to me, along with valuing our own diverse ideals and disunity.
...Not to resist internal propaganda.
Hence, that philosophy is easy to exploit internally. On the flip side, it doesn't work when we have to look at ourselves so critically. The patriotism itself isn't a cult, but it's fertile ground to get one rolling when there are enemies to point to.