Amerika

Things have become fragile in the West of late. Under assault by the failure of its own policies, including diversity, democracy has morphed in the minds of its audience from a hopeful future to another one of the many threats that hold the future of humanity in the balance.

We are still pretending that the system works, that voting for professional narcissists solve problems, and that the bureaucracy is taking care of us. We are also pretending that we are still societies instead of civil Cold Wars about to erupt into open violence.

We are also pretending that words on paper can magically save us, but that too is fading. We bought into diversity and pluralism, where like in a courtroom groups engage in adversarial competition for power, but the thin veneer of even that is cracking:

Western society can often feel like what the filmmaker Werner Herzog calls, “a thin layer of ice on top of an ocean of chaos and darkness.” In the United States, polls indicate that many people believe that law and order is the only thing protecting us from the savagery of our neighbors, that the fundamental nature of humanity is competition and struggle. This idea is often called “veneer theory.”

At this point, where we face an election of “normal Americans versus diversity Communists,” it has become clearer than ever before that culture is more important than rules written on paper. We are what Samuel Huntington predicted: tribes defined by religion, race, culture, and ethnicity.

This explains why politics is so unstable. If someone from your tribe does something, you support it; if someone from another tribe does it, it is bad and should be opposed. Morality properly understood is an outgrowth of culture, and that starts with loyalty to the tribe and celebration of those who make it succeed and conquer.

Consequently morality itself becomes a political weapon as individuals forgive those in their group who are valued because, through promoting the group, they have power:

“We were interested in why individuals like Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, and even those with no power, can get away with unethical behavior and why no one steps forward to blow the whistle,” Hildreth said. “It seems intuitive that loyalty might explain why close friends wouldn’t come forward, but it’s less obvious why those who aren’t directly connected to perpetrators wouldn’t step forward.”

The researchers surmised it might be because loyalty—or, more specifically, the obligations of loyalty to direct ties, such as colleagues and friends—might transfer through a person’s network to other ties, and that this might explain why indirect ties don’t raise an alarm.

The researchers found that the obligations of loyalty to friends transfer to indirect ties even if they’ve been accused of wrongdoing such as sexual harassment, theft, false advertising, fraud, bribery, plagiarism and dishonesty. This transfer occurs regardless of the wrongdoing type, or the strength of evidence presented against the accused.

The good news is that when the veneer cracks, we are heading toward a world ruled by culture instead of bureaucracy, ideology, symbolism, and rent-seeking. Those things replaced culture, and now we want culture-rule again because it delivers a sense of purpose.

For example, consider those who pursue certain careers simply to have the role value as part of their life experience:

On the surface, centuries-old cheese-making traditions in a remote valley in northern Spain might seem worlds apart from modern business practice. But Sarah Wittman, assistant professor of management at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at George Mason University, argues that the Roncal farmers represent a common type of organizational activity overlooked by past researchers.

Her recent paper in Organizational Theory, co-authored by Frédéric Godart of INSEAD, investigates what motivates “purist” organizations, like the Roncal cheese artisans, for whom success is not entirely defined by market-driven metrics.

Speaking of the world-renowned Trappist monks, who brew what many claim is the best-tasting beer in the world out of monasteries in Belgium and the Netherlands, Wittman explains, “They’re not doing it because they’re in the market. They’re doing it because that’s what enables them to be monks.”

In a democracy, the sense of purpose that people feel in life is replaced by participation in class war. We are told that our economic status determines our enjoyment of life, therefore everyone tries to get as much wealth as they can lest they be dragged down beneath the wheel.

With culture-rule however people like having a unique identity. Being the person who brews beer, fixes plumbing, grows grain, or ferments wine for your local community is an identity like being a doctor or gunfighter in an Old West town. The anonymity of modernity goes away when culture mediates the markets.

Not surprisingly, our current system leaves people anxious and miserable because you can never have enough wealth to be a big shot of enough status to feel comfortable in the class warfare of the Have-Nots-versus-the-Haves. What most call “greed” is not driven by the rich, but by those who aspire to be wealthy.

Tags: clash of civilizations, culture-rule, ethnonationalism, tribalism