Imagined Communities

I've been bashing the society in my last entry. But do you know what I really think of society? Since BJ (my teacher in school whom I have learned a lot from), I've been a firm believer of Social Constructivism, not because it's a good excuse for everything but because it actually makes sense. But what does it say, anyway?

I don't intend to make a lecture here, but in Benedict Anderson's book, Imagined Communities, he basically says there that a Nation is an imagined community. Imagined? Yes. It is not real. It's just a figment of our imagination. It's a myth. Now, what's striking here is that not all people know this. I remember, during BJ's lecture, one of my classmates even initiated a debate with him, saying that a Nation can't be imagined. Oh, but it is. It's just that we don't realize this. This is because the myth is too strong. We think that the Nation has been here since forever but the truth is, the notion of the Nation is actually pretty recent. There weren't Nations in ancient civilization, or even before it. We know for a fact that there was such a time when nations were being formed, and that wasn't too long ago.

Discussing that would be to run away from my point so I won't be saying too much about it. It is better to read the book and fully understand that theory. This theory really left a mark on me because since then (knowing it and understanding it), I've changed a lot. Well, for BJ, how it affected him took effect even on political duties such as voting. He doesn't want to take part in those things anymore because he believes it's not real. Come to think about it, everything we do seems like a joke anyway since everything is imagined. We just sustain the myth by actually acting upon and in fulfillment of it. I'm still trying my best to be active in politics because I believe that we can't just get out of the system; however, there are things, such as singing the national anthem or even taking pride in being Filipino, that I don't really do anymore. I don't believe in those things anymore. I honestly think that we're too immature because we're supposed to be nationalistic before, not now. I don't know why nationalism is such a trend now, and I find it insulting that people use this for fashion but they do not understand this. I don't see anything bad about being nationalistic-- I do not judge people who are, and I do not try to convince them that what they believe in is just a figment of their imagination. There's nothing bad about that anyway. So, it's fine. It's just that I can't bring myself to be like them. However, during Philosophy class, I realized something. At first, I thought that these people who are nationalistic are people who don't know that they are just sustaining the myth. I never really realized that some of them actually know that it's just a myth but still chose to sustain it. There are different reasons, perhaps one of the most common and consoling reasons would be so that there's something to hold on to, but I never really took the chance and thought that maybe it's because they understood that we need the system, that without they system, we are all lost souls, and we can't afford that. We need society, no matter how fucked up it is. 

I guess one of the reasons why it felt easy to turn away from society is because it is fucked up, and escape is the most convenient thing to do. Change would mean we have to change everyone else, and that would cost us a lot, although the return would be so much better. But we can't do that.. can we? It's so easy to say, "Oh fuck that, it's a social construct." So much easier than changing our lifestyles, our attitudes, everything! But we don't realized that we need it.

Now I'm thinking, is it actually better to tell people that the Nation is a social construct, a figment of our imagination? Because if we did tell them, we might have more people escaping and that would be a bigger problem for society, isn't it?