Reflections on the West's "Societies of Strangers" (Part 1)

You know, if you think about the totality of our history, human beings have not really lived in sprawling cosmopolitan communities for very long. It's only been relatively recently that we came up with nonfamilial, nontribal formulations to organize ourselves. The most natural organizing principle has always been the family and then extended family and then growing out from their tribes. And these sorts of configurations operate with more or less naturally developing sources of authority and order within families, within extended families, within tribes. But when you get bigger and you, you start having communities and societies being brought together with no familial or tribal interconnections, societies of strangers, essentially, then you have to codify the rules.

You have to implement sort of synthetic codes of order and conduct. And the sources of authority in that type of community or that type of society derive from those codes. Authority figures, leaders, and politicians, and so on don't attain their positions through the natural process of proving their usefulness and their value to the family or to the extended family or to the tribe, but through the, manufactured agreed upon system of order. They're functionaries, and their authority is derived from the system. In other words, it's the system that matters because the system is the only thing that makes a society of strangers even viable.

Everyone has to agree to abide by the system, and that includes both written and unwritten laws. So basically, legally acceptable and unacceptable things and socially acceptable and unacceptable things. And all of this must be enforced very rigidly. If the legal matters tend towards lenience, then the social matters must be more coercive. If the official codes of conduct, the laws as it were, provide for greater liberty, then the social codes of conduct will demand greater conformity because a society of strangers is always gonna be on the verge of falling apart.

And the only thing that prevents that from happening is this system. So law enforcement, for example, has prisons. Social code enforcement has ostracization. It has banishment. It has canceling.

You ostracize and marginalize people whom you deem, to be too risky to the system of order, people who don't conform or who seem, less invested in maintaining the artificial organizing principles of the society because everyone has to agree to abide by the system, the official and unofficial system, the law of the land and the of the community. And anyone who does not do that has to be strictly punished because that punishment is basically a form of self defense by the community to preserve the existence of the society itself. But the fatal flaw in all of this is that the system's authority is unconvincing because it is unearned. Conformity with it is simultaneously arbitrary and mandatory. In other words, you have to adhere to it whether you believe it or not simply because it is necessary to adhere to it because of its function.

It has to be this way because it has to be this way, and this doesn't really inspire heartfelt conviction. So So then you have to find a way to make it convincing, and that's where indoctrination comes in. This nation that you have built of random people, has to be invested with moral meaning so that the system of order and control can be understood as something that is preserving moral good. But you have to be very careful about what the indoctrination presents as the moral rationale. Because if, for example, your moral rationale is, say, freedom, then you have just created more problems for yourself.

You have complicated the task immeasurably of conformity enforcement. And if you are even more specific and say that the moral the the the the moral rationale is individual liberty, then you've made it even more difficult. So you can see some of the problems that the West has been carrying, particularly The United States for a very long time. I mean, it's very tricky to sort of balance the moral primacy of individual freedom against the existential social need for conformity. And the more you emphasize freedom, the more you have to sort of covertly enforce the restrictions on freedom, with the result being that, the indoctrination collides with people's lived reality, and this causes profound cognitive dissonance because the system that people are living in, bears little to no resemblance to the way it's packaged to them, the way the system is packaged to them.

I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but what Westerners are told is their liberty is actually their irrelevance. It's like being in a prison yard. You can do whatever you like in a prison yard, but no matter what you do in the prison yard, it has no liberatory element. You are confined, and you call that confinement freedom.