I found this sentence hard to understand. Our dominant world culture is itself a tribe, yes? So surely it hates *other* tribes, not all tribes (?or the existence of tribes).
Also RH seems to say later it only loves ‘down’ factions, not ‘up’ ones.
Thanks for the great read. It's all a black pill - certainly for anyone who has looked at the numbers. All that said, the white pill would be that there are quite a lot of folks of differing racial and ethnic backgrounds who are establishing enclaves for their own tribes. Whites are part of this trend. Now, are Ozarkia, Orania, Return to the Land, Australian European Movement, the agricultural co-op (that's all White) down the road - are these solid tribes - or tribes full of factions? I think with Whites it is likely the latter, almost always. We are profoundly more individualistic than other peoples. It is both a strength and a weakness. *The way to make the tribe the foundation factions are always subservient to is via a deep shared mythos - and the agreement White unity, always. No matter the cost.
I'm re-thinking what I wrote, and you're correct. That said, to abandon the paradigm so one is a tribe - not a faction of the paradigm - one builds parallel communities - which begin, perhaps, in the ways named above. Yes? Building parallel communities is the standard starting point. You seem to be distinguishing between intent - and the result. I suspect that those examples named above, with exception of the agricultural co-op, are viewed by builders and founders as seeds - not escapes. Voluntarism moves to covenant, external reliance to internal autonomy, and you have a tribe. All I'm articulating here, is that mythos is a part of that. To survive the coming inevitable collapse we do indeed require tribe. As we're descendants of those aiming to divorce physical reality from their ideals, we are fish out of water. We will create an internal life so robust, totalizing, exclusionary, and beautiful - that we are no longer merely a factionalized faction. *You cannot build tribe on policy, economics, philosophy, or shared interests alone. Tribe requires a belief system.
why expect that tribal competition leads to norms that are more likely to be morally correct?
Aren't you making the same mistake that concerns you in this article. You point out that while we see our moral norms as obviously true they might not be. By the same token why assume that the process which lead to our current norms is more likely to lead to good behavior in the future.
No particular reason that selection for survival against other norms leads to moral truth. I'd expect it to do the opposite.
How do states fit into this concept? They’re certainly not tribes, but are they factions? Could we say that a tribe consists of state families? And that within those families there are factions?
Christ taught his followers to be in the [dominant tribe] but not of the [dominant tribe].” Maybe this is a model path forward - groups with radically different norms but reasonable enough to accept and build upon what is good of the current state.
>We hate groups who disagree with world elite consensus on school, medicine, democracy, gender equality, sexual freedom, legal due process, rules of just war, and norms of good parenting.
Yeah, "we" overwhelmingly hate those loathsome reprobates, and yet Trump, whose main selling point is that he ostentatiously defies elite consensus, somehow got elected twice. I think that you overestimate the dominant culture - its nominal leaders have no vision, strategy, or plan to speak of. Instead, they tend to follow the lead of campus activists, who are driven by passionate whims of the moment, and so the prestige/influence cachet gets squandered in senseless purity crusades, while the reactionary populist tide keeps rising. The collapse and fragmentation may just happen much sooner than you hope for...
Thinking along similar lines - my proposal is we create a common ethical language or protocol focusing on chosen bounded circles of personal and institutional primary moral responsibility- a modernized conception of the term "heirs":
If you work through the logic in my proposed moral primitive of life-years, then under non-zero probability of tribes/factions/heir-groups mixing/marrying over time, you're aligned *in the long but finite term with all non-ruinous groups*. E.g.In the simple case, if you have descendants far enough into the future, they will overlap will all of humanity in about 3000 years (depending on how much they migrate, etc), and similarly for anyone else whose heirs are similarly successful.
"Our dominant world culture hates tribes, but loves factions".
This one sentence was sufficient for a "like" from me.
I found this sentence hard to understand. Our dominant world culture is itself a tribe, yes? So surely it hates *other* tribes, not all tribes (?or the existence of tribes).
Also RH seems to say later it only loves ‘down’ factions, not ‘up’ ones.
Thanks for the great read. It's all a black pill - certainly for anyone who has looked at the numbers. All that said, the white pill would be that there are quite a lot of folks of differing racial and ethnic backgrounds who are establishing enclaves for their own tribes. Whites are part of this trend. Now, are Ozarkia, Orania, Return to the Land, Australian European Movement, the agricultural co-op (that's all White) down the road - are these solid tribes - or tribes full of factions? I think with Whites it is likely the latter, almost always. We are profoundly more individualistic than other peoples. It is both a strength and a weakness. *The way to make the tribe the foundation factions are always subservient to is via a deep shared mythos - and the agreement White unity, always. No matter the cost.
Those seem to me more like new factions than new tribes.
I'm re-thinking what I wrote, and you're correct. That said, to abandon the paradigm so one is a tribe - not a faction of the paradigm - one builds parallel communities - which begin, perhaps, in the ways named above. Yes? Building parallel communities is the standard starting point. You seem to be distinguishing between intent - and the result. I suspect that those examples named above, with exception of the agricultural co-op, are viewed by builders and founders as seeds - not escapes. Voluntarism moves to covenant, external reliance to internal autonomy, and you have a tribe. All I'm articulating here, is that mythos is a part of that. To survive the coming inevitable collapse we do indeed require tribe. As we're descendants of those aiming to divorce physical reality from their ideals, we are fish out of water. We will create an internal life so robust, totalizing, exclusionary, and beautiful - that we are no longer merely a factionalized faction. *You cannot build tribe on policy, economics, philosophy, or shared interests alone. Tribe requires a belief system.
why expect that tribal competition leads to norms that are more likely to be morally correct?
Aren't you making the same mistake that concerns you in this article. You point out that while we see our moral norms as obviously true they might not be. By the same token why assume that the process which lead to our current norms is more likely to lead to good behavior in the future.
No particular reason that selection for survival against other norms leads to moral truth. I'd expect it to do the opposite.
How do states fit into this concept? They’re certainly not tribes, but are they factions? Could we say that a tribe consists of state families? And that within those families there are factions?
Christ taught his followers to be in the [dominant tribe] but not of the [dominant tribe].” Maybe this is a model path forward - groups with radically different norms but reasonable enough to accept and build upon what is good of the current state.
>We hate groups who disagree with world elite consensus on school, medicine, democracy, gender equality, sexual freedom, legal due process, rules of just war, and norms of good parenting.
Yeah, "we" overwhelmingly hate those loathsome reprobates, and yet Trump, whose main selling point is that he ostentatiously defies elite consensus, somehow got elected twice. I think that you overestimate the dominant culture - its nominal leaders have no vision, strategy, or plan to speak of. Instead, they tend to follow the lead of campus activists, who are driven by passionate whims of the moment, and so the prestige/influence cachet gets squandered in senseless purity crusades, while the reactionary populist tide keeps rising. The collapse and fragmentation may just happen much sooner than you hope for...
Hard as it is for those who hate him to see, Trump represents a different faction within our same tribe.
Of course he does. My point is that his appeal is the sign of incoherence and instability of the "mega-tribe".
I'm confused, is your baseline prediction that Western civ will be replaced by watered-down global-civ?
Or that, by becoming a monoculture, we'll have a fragile global-civ which will collapse (those damn amish hordes)?
Our population will decline, causing our economy to decline. Amish/Haredim double every 20yrs, eventually dominating.
Amish are currently 0.12% of US population. Haredem is a little more.
When do you expect the curves to cross?
As those 2 become a larger % of US population, might isolation/rigidity of their cultures change, leading to changes including fertility rate?
This seems pretty far down on my p(doom) list.
Christians took over the Roman Empire by doubling every 20yrs for 3 centuries.
Thinking along similar lines - my proposal is we create a common ethical language or protocol focusing on chosen bounded circles of personal and institutional primary moral responsibility- a modernized conception of the term "heirs":
https://pragmaticfutures.substack.com/p/heirs-of-life-years-a-meta-ethics
If you work through the logic in my proposed moral primitive of life-years, then under non-zero probability of tribes/factions/heir-groups mixing/marrying over time, you're aligned *in the long but finite term with all non-ruinous groups*. E.g.In the simple case, if you have descendants far enough into the future, they will overlap will all of humanity in about 3000 years (depending on how much they migrate, etc), and similarly for anyone else whose heirs are similarly successful.