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Is the cult of celebrity holding back an Australian republic? : Comments
By Raffaele Piccolo, published 28/4/2014According to the latest Australian Financial Review/Nielsen poll, support for an Australian republic is at its lowest levels since March 1992.
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I was looking at this question from a broader perspective:
Identity is a problem.
It always ends with pain.
One can be identified with a sports-team,
or with a political party,
or with their gender and sexual orientation,
or with a nation.
The most bitter of identifications is with our human body:
it makes us perceive all the pains of this body as "our" own pain,
and as pains are natural for every living body, we suffer much pain as a result.
You are not a body - you are nothing less than God, but you currently seem to identify with your body and suffer along with it, unnecessarily.
We could do so much better, we could be so much happier without the limitations of identity, just being divinely who we are is sufficient, we don't even need a name!
We are taught at the age of zero to identify with our name - that's already a burden, difficult enough to get rid of, yet the last thing we need is to gain an extra, yet another identity and one of the biggest headaches we could acquire is a national identity.
In the context of this article, I think that having a head-of-state far away and mostly invisible, is a workable antidote against the development of a national identity: that is why I rather keep things the way they are (and not due to some celebrity/fashion as the author suggests).
To the extent that multiculturalism works to prevent a national identity, I welcome it - but we should remain vigilant not to turn multiculturalism itself into a new identity of its own.