Patriotic Ingenuousness

This booklet contains four chapters, which treat ingenuousness on an individual, professional, institutional, and collective level. The latter is also known as misguided patriotism. All these levels have in common that the people involved do not at all understand why the outsiders consider their views as ingenuous (naive). The key point I make in this book is that the largest danger for a country’s future is an abundance of misguided patriots. In order to make “good patriots”, as they obviously think of themselves, reconsider their deeply rooted world view, the booklet starts out at showing the insanity of adoring certain patriotic heroes. To begin with my own country, all Dutch heroes we have are pirates with an all but exemplary lifestyle (this holds for Spain and England, too). France has Napoleon. Spain has Philip II. Germany has Hitler. Please mind, I am writing about misguided patriotism. This is usually an extremely tiny percentage of the whole population. Yet, the message of this book is meant for all good patriots (that is, the large majority), not for the few misguided ones. The only people who can read this book are profoundly humble people, who do not get emotional when reading my many non-coinciding, unconventional, and sometimes hurting opinions.