Nationalism is a concept relatively young for mankind. A modern development, the very idea arose in practice during the late 18th century, and began to flourish in critical understanding during the 19th. That said, there is a long chain of citizen commitment to the state—the demes of Ancient Greece; the spirit behind the Roman Empire’s vaunted SPQR; religious leadership and holy devotion to caliphs and popes throughout history; the Kings who ruled in feudal times long vanished from the earth. All are forces that brought people together, united into something larger than themselves. Through top-down organization, inspiration, fear, coercion, or untold means of force (Genghis), as long as there have been people, there has been some societal unit they find themselves living in.

The nation, then, is a natural extension of a basic human need—for inclusion, security, belonging, or to fill some semi-tangible, quasi-spiritual hole. Maybe even for love, who can say? There used to be God for all that. The people who lived in the Dark Ages always thought the world was going to end any moment. It’s true. They called themselves “we who have been placed at the end of days.” It’s dark stuff, the Apocalypse being around the next corner. So they were big on Jesus. Maybe they just wanted to feel some comfort while they still could.

Then, with the Enlightenment, came theories of government based on what was right—morally justified, sound—for mankind. God took a backseat to the individual human life. Not all at once, of course—but there blossomed a seed that held within it the promise of growth into a brighter day. People wrote it all down, luckily, and it was read by some prosperous farmers and merchants who had somehow ended up half a world away. They thought they could swing that whole “government” thing.

Yet they had no shared history, really. Only a limited time of allegiance to each other. A lot of them didn’t even like each other. They just didn’t want to pay their taxes. So because some tightwads were too cheap to fork over a ha’penny for some tea, the earth got a modern nation. This is what history turns on, apparently.

Then they started springing up everywhere, these nations—from lands where there used to be kings, or colonizers, or someone who had always been in charge for no really good reason anyway. People started taking their lives for themselves. It took a long time—still going, really, 193 and counting—but it was pretty noticeable. Some other smart guys started trying to figure out what it all meant.

That need for human connection—that was there. Big time, more than ever, the modern world was scary. Relative geographic proximity—sort of, the borders were maybe getting a little blurred, but they had to live near each other. But this was different. Some called nations “imagined communities”, enclaves of shared interests, people who had gone through some stuff together and wanted to stick it out in the future together, too. Some got fanciful and said the nation was a soul—almost a living, breathing thing. That may be a bit much. Maybe too organic. Still, there’s a kernel of truth there. All those lives taken together take on a life of their own.

By the time Jovak Helm came around, these things had been pondered and re-pondered. Now we’re pondering them again, because we just up and decided to make our own nation. Cause we could; that’s kinda how we roll. Now, looking back on the sum history of mankind and all these ventures over the years, what does our little oddity of a land mean, exactly?

It means we want to be together because we’ve found each other and have collectively decided that life together is better than the alternative. We have put our faith in something larger than ourselves because through it we find ourselves. We like what it stands for—fraternity, peace with honor, rational self-interest, Discordianism, and not taking ourselves too seriously when we talk about all that. Not that we don’t believe in these things, or wouldn’t fight for them.

Jovak Helm is made up of three [now four] lands not especially known for much, none with much value on their own, or related to each other in any way, besides for being sort of cool. They’re remote and obscure and mysterious, which is more than some places can say. Yet three is better than one, or even two. Likewise, our citizens are not the intuitive group of country-dwellers, yet together we work. To some extent all nations are do-it-yourself enterprises; we raised the stakes by creating something from nothing. At its most basic level, the matter is thus: of every country on earth, in how many does each and every citizen want to be there? (Lookin’ at you, Somalia). Probably none. Yet we actually fulfill that imagined community requirement; together, we actually made a soul. And each one of us is here because he or she wants to be here. And if that’s not a good enough pre-requisite for a nation, at least compared to those guys with the tea thing, who knows what is.