Since @kenny-evitt is poking me about what I want, and @balioc is calling me out talking about tribalism here, this is a good opportunity to express some of my more positive vision, instead of complaining endlessly about capitalist ideology.
There’s an important distinction between utopian and practical goals, between long term and short term. If you talk your long term goals you get dismissed as irrelevant (or worse, a Leninist who will cruelly bend the world to your ill-thought out vision), and if you talk your short term goals you get dismissed as doing very little to fix things and leaving most of the underlying problems of the world intact, erasing whatever short-term progress you make. So it’s important to state clearly that you have both.
In the utopian sense, I am a Christian universalist. I really do believe in consensual anarchy and universal justice. Some day we can resolve all the major social problems that lead to fear and anxiety that cause us to do stupid, destructive things on a society wide scale.
I believe this will look like a humanist love towards every other person that exists. They are not just a commodity who can buy your stuff or sell their body to you, and they are not just a soldier who represents the threat of the Enemy. They are a person with their individual story, who cares about small things and big dreams, who can have effective dialogue, and be understood as a friend and a source of help. And it will be natural to share whatever we have with the, when it leads to overall higher enjoyment. This is taking all the good things about tribalism that balioc says
And – don’t get me wrong – there are many great things about families. It is cool that, due to the power of collective identity, resources can be distributed in a literally final-stage-communist fashion with very little friction. It is cool that you can get to know everyone super well, and keep an accurate map of all the relationships. It is cool that people care about you, no fooling, they really care about you, they are not going to drop you just because you’ve become inconvenient or whatever.
...applied to every other person who exists, not just one small group. This is the love of Christ (whether or not He exists.) It’s not just saying “you are a person so I guess you get this”, but seeing them as a full person, and because of that, wanting to share.
This is obviously very hard. I do not expect it in our lifetimes. But it remains that without this end-state, we’re basically never going to be happy on a wide scale. All other social utopias leave in place a lack, an anxiety, that this person may deceive you or be taking advantage of you, so you must remain ever on your guard against them.
Maybe it is even impossible. Maybe there will never, ever be universal justice. Humans are just too fallible, you know? What do we do if that’s the case?
Okay then, then we are not working on total solutions. We are just talking about harm reduction, acknowledging that any solution we come up with will still leave problems.
In that case, what I note is that in our current moment, our society’s ideology places way too much weight on the benefits of liberal individualism, and puts very little normative weight on the benefits of tribalism and communities. Tell someone you’re moving for a job or your spouse, ok. Tell them you’re moving for the weather/local culture, well you’re short sighted and hedonist but still reasonable. Tell them you’re moving for a non-spouse family member, or a group of friends, or some sort of club, and you get increasingly rattled looks asking are you insane???
(This is an exaggeration, but you take my point.)
Tribes - not just your family, but any time you’re thrown together with a group of people and all caring about something at the same time, and suddenly find yourself respecting the others as individuals because of that attachment - are a tremendous source of joy and support. But at the moment, rhetorically, they are mostly treated as a way conservative parents oppress their gay children, and as a cult if they are anything non-familial. (Rationalists, do you even know what they say about your Bay Area houses?)
It’s terrible. It scares people away from something that could make them happier and do all the things Balioc talks about. Sure, they aren’t perfect - there will be some abuses of power, some flakes and defectors who ruin it, some even terribly exploitative stories - but those stories happen under liberal capitalism too. We’ve just decided that the pains suffered because of individualist society are acceptable and due to “bad apples”, whereas the ones caused by tribes are reason to be wary of the whole concept.
(You can interact with people on the basis of what you know they actually like and can handle, and not on endlessly trying to find one-size-fits-all rules about what sort of approach is inappropriate or not. It’s so great!)
So my tribalism blog explores the short term solutions of embracing our tribal opportunities. It’s not a utopia, and there will always be problems in a society based on tribes. But there’s a source of happiness there that we can reach out to now, and take advantage of. And that seems a lot better than the impossible project of trying to refine liberalism and social justice and individualism into a contradictory morass of rules where no one ever gets hurt.
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