OnlySubs Episode 62: Nobody Is a Global Citizen is now available exclusively for New Discourses contributors on the following platforms:
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I recently came across a surprisingly heavy use of a peculiar phrase: “global citizen.” The phrasing was, “I am a global citizen,” and “I’m raising my children to be global citizens,” and “we need Critical Race Theory in our schools to help children become good global citizens.” The phrase came up so many times in such a short span that it got me thinking about the idea of a so-called “global citizen.” Why? Because there’s obviously no such thing, not if we properly understand what the term “citizen” represents. For there to be citizens, there has to be some sovereign entity associated with it that confers and secures citizenship, typically in exchange for civic duties, but no such entity exists on a global scale. Nor should it. So, there’s no such thing as a “global citizen” at all, but so many people, especially those who have taken up with the Identity Marxist ideology of today’s globalist Left, seem to repeat the phrase not only as though it has meaning but also as though it has important meaning. That’s strange. We shouldn’t trust this term. Join me on this episode of my subscribers-only podcast, James Lindsay OnlySubs, to hear me discuss the strange and probably crooked idea of the “global citizen.”
Previous episodes of OnlySubs can be found here.
3 comments
“Global citizens” is similar to the phrase “international law”. There is no such thing as “international law’ because where is the global government passing such laws? There are international organizations and international treaties,; but these involve sovereign entities who decide whether to belong to the former or sign on to the latter, without in any way relinquishing their sovereignty.
Progressives want to be global citizens who still allow some countries sovereign authority over themselves except the USA. They are emotionally abusive, narcissistic bullies who think that brow beating or silencing people means they’ve won.
In case you were curious, the term “global citizen” first took off in the mid-1980s according to Google Ngram Viewer.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=global+citizen&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cglobal%20citizen%3B%2Cc0
For that matter, so does “empowerment”.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=empowerment&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cempowerment%3B%2Cc0