The omnipotence of the state

Abstract

One of the deepest roots of our modern tyrannies in South America is the Greco-Roman notion of patriotism and the Fatherland, which we owe to the classical middle education that our universities have copied to France.
The Fatherland, as understood by the Greeks and the Romans, was essentially and radically opposed to what we so understand in our modern times and societies. It was an institution of religious and holy origin and character, equivalent to what is today the Church, not to say more holy than it, for it was the association of the souls, people and interests of its members.
His power was omnipotent and boundless from the individuals he composed.
The Fatherland, thus understood, was and had to be the denial of individual freedom, in which all modern societies that are truly free are free. The individual man was all due to the Fatherland; He owed his soul, his person, his will, his fortune, his life, his family, his honor.
To reserve to the Fatherland some of these things was to betray her; it was like an act of wickedness.
According to these ideas, patriotism was not only conciliable, but identical and the same as the most absolute and omnimodo despotism in the social order. The great revolution that Brought Christianity into the notions of man, of God, of the whole family, of society, changed radically and diametrically the foundations of the Greco-Roman social system.
However, the rebirth of ancient civilization among the ruins of the Roman Empire and the formation of modern states preserved or revived the foundations of past and dead civilization, no longer in the interest of the States themselves, even reports, but in the majesty of their rulers, in whom the majesty, omnipotence and authority of the Fatherland were personified.