Four legs good, two legs bad.
Humanitarianism good, racism bad.
Nationalism good, cosmopolitanism bad. (Or internationalism, or globalism, whatever!)
I think you all know what I’m talking about.
Sacrificing the rights, the interest, and the wellbeing of individuals to an abstract ‘collective interest’ is never right.
Admittedly, identities are indeed important. And the manner in which people work with their identities, and with the identities of others, does indeed impinge on the wellbeing of individuals.
But this doesn’t change the fact that interests are never collective.
Interests are always, always, entirely and without the merest qualification individual in character.
I don’t particularly like Theresa May, but she is perfectly correct that “a citizen of the world is a citizen of nowhere.”
I doubt, however, she will be so keen to say that “the interest of a nation is the interest of no-one.”
But that, of course, is no less true.