Patriotism

Patriotism transcends rationality, the rationality of this world. We may be inclined to say "my country is the best in the world", the way we say "I have the best husband/wife in the world." We have simply chosen to love the one we have somehow become intimately bound with exclusively and intensely. And we are willing to lay down our lives for things that do not benefit us immediately, like for our "imagined political community", we are willing to make sacrifices that can benefit this mass of people, some of whom we know but the majority, whom we will never know in our lifetime. How did these strange attachments developed? Maybe it was through logical reasoning, maybe it was our cultural memory or the daily interactions with these people who formed our imagined community. But it does seem that there is a spiritual element to patriotism!