Politics & Power Quote by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge is needling the grand, self-flattering story nations tell about their violence: that it is, somehow, altruism. The line pivots on an ugly asymmetry. An individual can be talked into martyrdom for a flag - even into becoming an instrument of "death and destruction" - because the nation offers something seductively concrete in return: belonging, honor, a simplified moral universe where killing can be recast as salvation. That first clause is the psychology of sacrifice at its most manipulable.

Then Coleridge turns the blade. Nations, he argues, don’t do martyrdom for humanity. They do it for themselves. The second clause exposes "mankind" as the rhetorical costume states put on when they want their interests to look like ethics. It's not that governments never speak the language of universal good; it's that they won't accept the costs when the beneficiary is truly universal and the payoff isn't national. The nation is a machine built to preserve and extend the nation. Expecting it to bleed for strangers is like expecting a market to feel shame.

Context matters: Coleridge lived through the French Revolution’s moral promises and Napoleon’s imperial reality, an era when ideals of liberty were repeatedly conscripted into conquest. He’d also watched Britain frame wars as civilizational duty while protecting empire and commerce. The sentence works because it refuses consolation. It doesn’t romanticize the individual either; it implies that personal devotion can be weaponized precisely because "saving a nation" is an emotionally efficient myth. "Saving mankind" is too big, too diffuse, too inconvenient to sustain the same organized fanaticism.