National Anthem and Democracy

Humanity has been ruled by individuals who have used power over the majority to sustain own vanity, luxury and pleasures. Kings were tyrants as were military dictators. They lived in splendor even as their subjects languished in poverty. They corrupted our values of justice in such a way that we felt their riches were what they deserved and God had bestowed on them. As to their power over us, their cultural henchmen interpreted that God had entrusted the responsibility of ruling us with them. Different kings and tyrants throughout the ages had different explanations of the divine sanction of their powers, riches, superiority and nobility. These were very often intertwined with the beliefs of theology and religion. Religion was organized to reinforce the notion of divine sanction of the monarch's autocracy over us.

As kings and queens, they expected implicit obedience from their subjects and their soldiers. They wanted us to fight and die for their wars. These wars were always motivated by their vanity, greed and jealousy with neighboring kings. Yet, when they fought, they wanted people to regard the wars as glorious, inevitable and valorous. A king who plundered another country and caused untold suffering to the natives was called a 'conqueror'. To conquer a land became a noble act indicating the 'greatness' of the king. Alexander who raided the countries to the east of him as far as India in a march of unspeakable violence and immorality (causing deaths of large numbers of people and soldiers) became 'Alexander the Great'. The king who gave expression to his lust for supremacy and greed by annexing neighboring lands was lauded as a 'great' and 'powerful' king by historians. Nobody dared to call such kings plunderers, looters and robbers that they were, in fact, judged from the real nature of their actions. Of course, the stories of such kings were laced with accounts of occasional magnanimity, forgiveness and charity - to lend credence to what would otherwise be preposterous assertions of nobility.

All these kings who wanted their subjects to be implicitly loyal and obedient - devised various disciplines of symbolic obedience, deference and expression of loyalty. The national anthem and the flag were the most prominent among these. The idea was to reinforce psychological conditioning of deference and submission to the authority of the king. They were measures consistent with the principles of Pavlovian conditioning - in that every time the flag was flown or the anthem sung emotions of pride in the ruler or his kingdom, loyalty and submission to authority became reinforced in the subjects. A few relevant lines of the English National Anthem will make it apparent how the anthem was worded to reinforce submission and implicit loyalty to the monarch:

God save our gracious Queen
Send her victorious
Happy and glorious
Long to reign over us
Scatter her enemies
And make them fall
Confound their politics
Frustrate their knavish tricks
the choicest gifts in store
On her be pleased to pour
Long may she reign...

The stress, as can be seen, is on making HER victorious, happy and glorious so that SHE can reign over US. Subjects pray to God that the choicest gifts in store be poured on HER. It is easy to understand how subjects will be conditioned, by constant repetition of these words, to surrender their own welfare and safety for the victory and glory of their ruler.

When the transition was made from monarchy to democracy, there were a few things that should have been reviewed for their relevance in the changed circumstances. The national anthem to which the citizens are demanded to stand up in obeisance is one. What we now have is a democracy. The word 'rule' is itself meaningless in a system where we decide to live together in an self-organized cooperative way. For self-governance, what we need is to organize a law and order system that will ensure that none of us harm others in any way, that none of us would break the laws that are necessary for a peaceful and happy social life. This means the basic requirements of life will be distributed to all, no one will be allowed to starve or be homeless. There shall be no infringement of individual freedom, privacy and rights of any kinds between us.

The concept of the metaphorical personalized 'Nation' as the object of patriotic devotion was the inevitable result of carrying over the psychological condition of deferential obeisance to the monarch to democracy. When we started making a system of self governance in the form of a republic, we should have gone for a comprehensive makeover of the concepts of governance in a manner that was suited to democracy rather than persisting with the concepts that had relevance only in monarchy. Instead of doing this, we tried to adapt and accommodate the monarchic values and institutions to fulfill the altered requirements of democracy. In a monarchy, a king was the central figure. Therefore we created the supremely redundant office of the President. However, because we could not give him any power, he was inevitably reduced to a glorified rubber-stamp. Those we elected became equivalent to the advisers of the monarch - and they were called, appropriately, ministers who had, in monarchic days, the job of ministering to the ruler's wishes. For the monarch, God was a necessary concept that endorsed and sanctified his authority over the people. When we transitioned to democracy, the idea of the 'Nation' - often personified as the 'Motherland' - replaced God. The holy scriptures of God were replaced by the Constitution that was imbued with a due amount of sacredness. Naturally, we also retained the flag and the national anthem that symbolized and were used for the reinforcement of the conditioning of people to submit to the rule of the monarch with implicit obedience.

Democracy is a system that upholds the full freedom and human rights of every individual. It cannot discriminate between individuals who live on either side of an imaginary line that is the scar of wars fought by rulers of the past. Therefore, democracy can be committed only to the whole world and its entire people. It is just not possible for a democrat to be partisan to people living in an arbitrarily demarcated area of the globe. If we believe in democracy, the idea of 'our nation' would already have been transcended. Those who believe in democracy and in the responsibility of the law and order system that we the people of the earth have collectively devised to look after our interests and safety, cannot be nationalistic.  In order to be effective, the law and order system cannot be restricted to a geographical segment of the world. For example, the laws necessary for the control of epidemic diseases or global pollution would need to be followed by everyone in the world. There is no point in having a law and order system that is applicable only to the geographical segment that we refer to as our nation.

Once we are committed to the unconditional freedom of the individual that is the essence of democracy, we would, of necessity, become committed to global law and order. Democracy cannot reign within fragmented individual nations sustained by violent sentiments of jingoism and xenophobia. Democracy is, by its very nature, global and will transcend the divisions of mankind into nations, religions and other political demarcations that are created only so that ambitious leaders can control them for their personal benefits.