Why No State Has a ‘Right to Exist’ and Why That Matters for You | (#043) Beyond Success: Psycholoogy & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

What if the way that you think about countries, loyalty and identity is quietly shaping how you lead, how you relate and how you live? In this episode, we’re going to unravel a phrase that gets thrown around all the time—the right to exist. It sounds noble, it sounds untouchable, but when you dig just one layer beneath the surface, it starts to fall apart.

Why would this matter to us? Because the same emotional logic used to justify wars, to defend borders and to silence dissent is often the exact same logic that keeps you stuck in outdated roles, in fragile leadership identities, and in relationships that no longer serve you. When you understand what a state really is and what it isn’t, you start to question the structures in your own life that you’ve been blindly defending, not because they deserve it, but because you’re afraid of what happens if you let go. [01:08.2]

Leaders who can make these distinctions, who can see where loyalty becomes fear and where strength becomes clinging, are the ones who will evolve, the ones who lead without needing to dominate, the ones who don’t just succeed, but feel free while doing it. But when you don’t confront these myths, when you keep defending old systems that don’t work anymore, whether in the world or in your own head, something subtle but dangerous happens. You harden up. You lose flexibility. You start making choices from a place of fear, not truth, and that fear spreads, it infects your work, your family, your leadership. It can make you brittle, and brittle leaders break. Fearful leaders make decisions out of fear and end up harming others and hurting themselves in the process. Let’s make sure that’s not you.

I’m David Tian, and for almost the past two decades, I’ve been helping hundreds of thousands of people from over 87 countries find fulfillment, meaning and success in their personal and professional lives. [02:04.4]

In this episode, I’ve got three main points, but first, I want to make something very clear. This isn’t about being pro- or anti-Israel. It’s about something deeper than headlines and slogans. It’s about a phrase that’s often repeated but rarely examined, a phrase that carries the weight of moral certainty, while slipping past the need for moral reflection—the right to exist. It sounds noble. It sounds final, but it’s dangerously vague, and when you begin to unpack it, the pieces don’t quite hold together.

This episode is not a call to deny the dignity of any people. Quite the opposite, it’s an invitation to draw a clear line between persons and the systems we build around them, because when we blur that line, we risk protecting institutions at the expense of the people they were meant to serve. [02:54.4]

You have natural rights. So do I. All persons do. That’s because we are conscious. We have a sense of self. We experience joy, fear, loss, love. We are moral agents. That’s what makes each life worthy of dignity. But a state is not a person. A state does not feel. A state does not love. It cannot suffer. It has no consciousness, no inner world. A state is a human invention. It exists for a purpose. No state, whether old or new or large or small, has rights in the same way you and I do.

To say that a state has a right to exist is to confuse categories. It’s like saying a company has a right to love or a currency has a right to be free. These are not the kinds of things that possess moral standing. Yet this phrase gets used to justify violence, to silence dissent, to block criticism. It creates a false moral high ground that cannot be questioned without sounding cruel or extreme. But there’s nothing moral about making the structure more sacred than the people inside it. [04:09.8]

This matters not only on the world stage. It matters in your own life, because when you defend something as if it’s a part of you, even when it isn’t, you can lose sight of your True Self. You can start to confuse your job, your company, your position, even your public image, with who you really are.

Let’s go a level even deeper. In philosophy, rights attached to beings who can reason and choose. John Rawls, perhaps the greatest modern political and legal philosopher, taught that the legitimacy of any political structure depends not on its age or origin, but on whether it protects the freedom and equality of those under its rule. The state serves the people, not the other way around. [04:57.4]

Professor Judith Butler, in reflecting on Zionism and statehood, reminds us that to defend the dignity of a people is not the same as defending the permanence of a state. In fact, those two are sometimes in conflict. To ask whether a given state must exist in its current form is not to wish harm on its people. It’s to take seriously the demand that power serve justice.

Hannah Arendt, the great political philosopher who lived through the horror of statelessness still warned against treating the state as if it were sacred. She understood the state as a necessary tool, a means for creating the conditions of shared life, but never an end in itself.

So, what does this mean for you? It means you don’t have to hold on to every system you’ve built. Not every title you’ve earned or structure you’ve inherited deserves your allegiance forever. If it no longer serves your growth, if it no longer honors your values, it may be time to let it go. It may be time to let go of those legacy burdens. [06:01.6]

The point is not to tear things down. The point is to see clearly, to lead with truth, not fear, to know the difference between what’s essential and what’s just a shell that we’ve mistaken for life.

Let’s move to the second point now by turning to the legal foundations of this phrase, “the right to exist.” It carries the ring of moral clarity, but in the world of international law, that phrase has no formal standing. In fact, there is no such right, no blanket legal doctrine that grants any state an unconditional right to exist. That idea, often repeated in political discourse and propaganda, is rhetorical, not legal, and when it’s used without reflection, it becomes a tool for blocking legitimate criticism and suppressing complex moral questions.

In the world, after the horrors of World War II, the foundational document of international law, the Charter of the United Nations, as close to a global constitution as we get, sets forth the principles by which states relate to one another. Among these are the sovereign equality of member states, the prohibition of aggressive or invasive war, and the right of peoples to self-determination. [07:17.4]

These are the legal concepts that guide the conduct of nations, but nowhere in the charter or in any widely-accepted legal text, is there a mention of a state’s right to exist. There is no global statute that declares a country immune from change, transformation or even dissolution. What exists instead is a legal structure meant to protect people from war, coercion and domination. That’s a really important difference. The law protects individuals and groups who suffer under violence or oppression. It does not protect the permanence of a political structure. [07:55.7]

This is not a flaw in international law. It is a feature, because to grant a state an unqualified right to exist would mean giving legitimacy to whatever form that state happens to take, no matter how unjust. That would mean shielding from scrutiny or reform apartheid governments, military dictatorships or systems of ethnic exclusion. Such a doctrine would undermine the very purpose of international law, which is to promote peace, human rights and dignity, not the preservation of power for its own sake.

Now, the right of self-determination, which is protected under international law, belongs to peoples, not to states as fixed, eternal entities. This principle emerged in the wake of colonialism, when many nations sought independence from empires that had ruled them for centuries. Self-determination means that a people have the right to choose their own political status, to form a state, to join one or to dissolve one, but it does not mean that every state once formed is owed eternal life. [09:03.2]

This distinction is not just theoretical. It plays out in history, even in our own lifetime. Take the Soviet Union. It was one of the most powerful states of the 20th century. It spanned two continents and held a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and yet, in 1991, it collapsed. Fifteen independent republics emerged. No major power claimed that the Soviet Union had a violated right to exist. It was understood legally and politically that its existence was not guaranteed. Its people had moved on.

Yugoslavia followed a similar path. A Federation of six republics broke apart in the 1990s through a series of wars, referenda and international interventions. Again, while the violence was tragic and the politics were complicated, no international body claimed that the state of Yugoslavia had some intrinsic right to exist or to survive. The focus was on how to protect people from ethnic cleansing and human rights abuses, not on preserving the flag or the constitution of a particular regime. [10:11.0]

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Perhaps the most morally-charged case is that of apartheid South Africa. For decades, South Africa existed as a state recognized by international law. It held elections. It had embassies and it participated in global diplomacy, but its internal structure, a system of racial segregation and minority rule, was condemned around the world, and eventually, through a combination of internal protest and international pressure, that system collapsed. A new democratic state replaced it. The people remained, but the state in its previous forum did not, and rightly so.

If we had taken the phrase “right to exist” as a legal absolute, we might have had to preserve apartheid South Africa in the name of legal continuity. That would have been a moral failure, and that’s the danger of confusing state permanence with legitimacy. States are legitimate only when they serve their people justly. Their survival is not a right, but a responsibility, a task they must continually earn. [12:09.2]

So, when leaders invoke a state’s right to exist as if it’s some unassailable truth, they are not making a legal argument. They are stating political propaganda cloaked in moral language and, often, that language is used to silence criticism. To question the policies of a government becomes, under this framework, a threat to its very existence. That is a dangerous path. It hardens bad positions. It narrows debate. It turns negotiation into taboo.

As someone navigating the complexities of leadership, power and responsibility, you benefit from seeing these distinctions clearly. Understanding that no structure, no institution, is owed permanence, helps you become more discerning about what does deserve your defense and what deserves your reform. [12:59.7]

What international law protects are principles, like sovereignty, non-aggression, human dignity. It protects peoples, their safety, their voice, their right to shape their own political future. It does not elevate governments or regimes to untouchable status. It does not demand loyalty to borders drawn by history or maintained by force.

When a state uses the phrase “right to exist” to deflect accountability, it’s doing what insecure institutions often do—protecting the structure, not the soul. When the international community affirms or challenges a state, it does so on the basis of how that state behaves, how it treats its people, how it engages its neighbors, not on whether it has crossed some imaginary threshold of metaphysical legitimacy. [13:52.3]

So, if you’re going to engage with global affairs seriously, if you want to speak with clarity and lead with integrity, understanding this legal landscape is essential. Do not let slogans pass for arguments. Do not mistake power for principle, and never forget that law, at its best, does not protect those already in power. It protects the just.

Now let’s move on to the third and final point. When a state insists on its right to exist, what it’s really doing is revealing its fear, a fear not just of invasion or critique, but of collapse, of becoming nothing, of being wrong—and that fear isn’t unique to states. We carry it, too.

Every leader I’ve worked with at some point has faced these fears. It usually doesn’t look dramatic. It shows up in meetings, in marriages, in moments of silence. It shows up when you feel the need to prove yourself, when your hands clench before saying what you actually feel. When criticism doesn’t just sting, it burns. That burn doesn’t come from the words themselves. It comes from what you’ve tied those words to, a role, a title, a carefully built persona. [15:06.5]

Somewhere along the way, you decided that a part of your identity had to stay intact, no matter what. Like a state defending a flag, you started guarding an image of yourself as if your life depended on it, and this is where it gets really dangerous, not just for governments, but for you, because once you believe your worth depends on your image, then every disagreement becomes a threat. Every challenge feels like an attack. Every change starts to feel like a death.

That’s when the real damage happens. That’s when you stop listening. That’s when you double down. That’s when you start to defend a version of yourself that may no longer be alive. Carl Jung called this the Persona, the mask you wear in order to function in society. [15:51.2]

You develop it over time. It helps you survive school, get through your 20s, earn respect in the boardroom. It works in the short term, but not in the long run, because beneath that mask is something else, something quieter but more enduring, not a fixed self, but a living presence, a deeper current, and when the Persona hardens too much, becomes inflexible, that deeper current gets ignored and pushed down, exiled. The more you cling to your external identity, the more disconnected you become from what moves you from within.

Internal Family Systems therapy, IFS therapy, goes even further. It helps you notice the different parts of yourself, the ones that protect, the ones that strive, the ones that still carry the most pain. In IFS therapy, who you really are isn’t one fixed thing. It’s a system full of voices, roles and reactions that originally had good intentions. The goal isn’t to destroy these parts. It’s to get to know them, to see how they’ve helped you survive, and then to lead them from a place of calm clarity, not from fear. [17:02.5]

But when you confuse one part of yourself, like the achiever, the provider, the fixer, for your whole Self, then you’ll start to fight for it like it’s your only ground, just like a state confuses criticism of its policies with a denial of its right to exist. You might start confusing feedback with an attack on your value or a breakup with a rejection of your being, and so you go to war, maybe not with guns or speeches, but maybe with silence, with blame, with withdrawal, with stonewalling, with a quiet, cold of emotional distance.

Leaders do this all the time. A founder clings to a vision that no longer works. A CEO resists a restructuring that could save the company. A parent refuses to see their child’s independence as growth and not betrayal. Why? Because letting go of the old frame would mean admitting that it’s no longer needed, and that sounds to the ego like death. [18:07.2]

But it’s not death. It’s just the crumbling of a structure that no longer serves. What’s underneath is still there, maybe for the first time. You’re just being asked to meet it now. It takes more strength to let go of a false identity than to fight for it. It takes more clarity to update your inner framework than to double down on what no longer fits.

But that’s what real leadership is—not the defense of your image, but the deep listening to your parts, the patience to let old roles retire, the courage to let something new emerge, even if you don’t fully understand it yet, because the truth is, what matters isn’t whether your current identity survives. What matters is whether your next step comes from fear or from truth, and when you can stop defending your mask, you can start leading from presence. The world doesn’t need more hardened, fixed identities. It needs leaders who remember who they are when the mask is off. [19:16.8]

So, let’s bring this all together. We started by breaking down a phrase that sounds absolute, “the right to exist.” It’s often used by states to shut down moral inquiry, to mask fear with certainty, but under international law, there is no such thing. What the law protects are people, not the permanence of states or governments. Structures rise and fall. What matters is how they serve the people they claim to protect.

Then we turned to you, because the same mistake shows up in your life when you confuse your role with your value, when your job title, your dating success, or your reputation starts to feel like your reason for being. That’s when you cling. That’s when you defend something, not because it’s true, but because it feels safe. [20:01.4]

I once worked with a client, let’s call him Adrian. He was a founder. He built his company from nothing. He grew it to more than 50 employees, and he became a big name in his industry, but it was clear that the company had outgrown his old way of doing things. Every time someone suggested a change, he took it as a kind of betrayal. He said he was defending the culture, but really, he was defending himself from feeling irrelevant, from being left behind, and it wasn’t until we separated his identity from his role that he had his huge breakthrough.

He grieved it, not dramatically, just quietly, and he let go, and in that space, he started leading again, himself and others, not from fear but from presence. That’s what I want for you, not to prove yourself, not to have to protect an image, but to meet the moment without needing the mask—and that starts with asking the harder question: what are you still defending that no longer needs to exist? [20:59.5]

Thank you so much for listening. If this has helped you in any way, please send it to anyone else that you think could benefit from it. If you liked it, hit a like or give it a good rating on whatever platform you’re listening to this on. If you have any feedback whatsoever, I’d love to hear it, especially on this episode. Send me a message or leave a comment. I’d love to get your feedback.

I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out. [21:20.8]