Circles of love

Since we're finite we have some limitations. We love and sacrifice for our immediate family--work two jobs, feed the kids first, and so on. The next ring, neighbors and more distant family, we will still sacrifice for, but not usually as much. You start to hit the "150 limit" here--you just can't know all these people. The tribe or the city we don't love as strongly, and the nation (a relatively modern extension of the tribe) is even more abstract. The rest of the nations you just don't meet at all. If you travel, a very tiny fraction of them become, for a few short moments, your neighbors. The rest you never see.

AVI wrote "When we pretend to be better than we are we are in enormous danger, and those who are loyal to international enterprises smuggle in some much more primitive prejudices. They do not transcend nationalism, as they imagine, but replace it with something that aims higher but strikes lower."

Uncle Screwtape put it well: "Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary."

Do I need to cite examples?