Why Your Nation is nothing but Plebs. An Empire is a sacred, top-down order led by spiritually superior beings who follow a divine principle, while a Nation is just a modern mob of ordinary people who only bond over things like blood and feelings, which is why your country will never be an Empire.
The Empire as a “Form” versus The Nation as a “Force”.
Nation-state is based on ethnicity, language, or popular sentiment. That is sentimentalism.
A sacred, universal “Empire” is based on shared spiritual principles and hierarchy. The first appeals to the masses, the second to the aristocracy.
There is nothing transcendent, universal, or hierarchical about nationalism. It is the debased, mob-driven version of the aristocratic ideal. A nation is not an empire.
The nation-state is built on sentiment—a horizontal bond between people who feel they are the same. This is a deeply modern and “bourgeois” concept.
A true Empire is not merely a big nation that has conquered others. It is a political structure that is the temporal arm of a transcendent principle.
In such a structure, authority flows from above. The aristocracy is not just a class of wealthy landowners, but a spiritual elite—the “men who are different”. The various peoples within such an empire are united not because they share the same blood, but because they recognize and serve the same transcendent idea (for example, the universal claims of the Holy Roman Empire or the Roman Pax Deorum).
This structure is inherently hierarchical. Hierarchy, Not Equality. It doesn't matter if you are a Gaul, a Syrian, or a Roman in the Empire; your place is determined by your proximity to the spiritual center.
True aristocracy is an inner condition. It is comprised of the “men who are different”—individuals who, through spiritual realization and adherence to Tradition, have actualized a higher state of being. They are closer to the divine, to the principle of pure being.
They are the law, because they embody the transcendent principle.
A nation is not an empire. The nation as a horizontal, egalitarian bond of sentiment versus the Empire as a vertical, hierarchical structure rooted in a transcendent principle.
Matter versus Spirit. Nationalism's basis in the physical and psychological (blood, language, sentiment). Empire is based on the metaphysical and spiritual.
Quantity versus Quality: The nation as a mass phenomenon versus the Empire as the domain of the “men who follow in the steps of Ulysses.”
Nationalism is a modern, sentimental, and materialistic counterfeit of the ancient, spiritual, and hierarchical reality of a true Empire.