The most likely explanation is—I am more or less a Fukuyamaist, I tend to think just about everything comes from social capital i.e. trust—trust, cooperation, coordination breaking down when people look or act to alien to each other.
Or when the system to punish defectors breaks down.
If the goal is to improve, not blame, you are better off playing with individual variables and see if they improve things.
We’ve been doing that for the past ~60 years (WRT black achievement), things haven’t been improving.
Or when the system to punish defectors breaks down.
I have a theory for that, just don’t know how to test it. The idea is that the community the defection seems like happening from is not the actual community. It is based on what Theodore Dalrymple experienced in East Africa, I think Tanzania, which rhymes with some of my experiences near the underworld of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Basically what they do or did there is villages sacrificing a lot to get 1-2 guy educated and into a government job, who will then use corruption, bribery, pull to divert resources into his village. Being corrupted is a community duty and virtue with regard to his village. It looks like defection, but only as long as you think the nation-state and its rules and laws are his real community. If the real community is the village, it is not a defection.
I think e.g. the oligarchical gangsterism in Russia after the Soviet collapse was not defection: there was nowhere from, the state and nation/empire as a community, in the consciousness sense, stopped existing. The actual community these people operated in was the nomenclature’s Old Boys Networks and they did obey the rules and laws of that community e.g. remember a repay favors, deliver the service you were bribed to deliver and so on.
I know very little about the situation in the US, but the anecdote that studying well may be seen as acting white and thus defection from the black community is something you should be investigating. Are the people defecting from the white / national community even parts of it, in their own eyes?
I think e.g. the oligarchical gangsterism in Russia after the Soviet collapse was not defection: there was nowhere from, the state and nation/empire as a community, in the consciousness sense, stopped existing.
The reason the nation/empire stopped existing as a community is because so many people were defecting from it. The “nomenclature’s Old Boys Networks” was a substitute community that developed among parts of the elite, and my understanding is there was a lot of defection and back-stabbing even within it.
Or when the system to punish defectors breaks down.
We’ve been doing that for the past ~60 years (WRT black achievement), things haven’t been improving.
I have a theory for that, just don’t know how to test it. The idea is that the community the defection seems like happening from is not the actual community. It is based on what Theodore Dalrymple experienced in East Africa, I think Tanzania, which rhymes with some of my experiences near the underworld of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Basically what they do or did there is villages sacrificing a lot to get 1-2 guy educated and into a government job, who will then use corruption, bribery, pull to divert resources into his village. Being corrupted is a community duty and virtue with regard to his village. It looks like defection, but only as long as you think the nation-state and its rules and laws are his real community. If the real community is the village, it is not a defection.
I think e.g. the oligarchical gangsterism in Russia after the Soviet collapse was not defection: there was nowhere from, the state and nation/empire as a community, in the consciousness sense, stopped existing. The actual community these people operated in was the nomenclature’s Old Boys Networks and they did obey the rules and laws of that community e.g. remember a repay favors, deliver the service you were bribed to deliver and so on.
I know very little about the situation in the US, but the anecdote that studying well may be seen as acting white and thus defection from the black community is something you should be investigating. Are the people defecting from the white / national community even parts of it, in their own eyes?
The reason the nation/empire stopped existing as a community is because so many people were defecting from it. The “nomenclature’s Old Boys Networks” was a substitute community that developed among parts of the elite, and my understanding is there was a lot of defection and back-stabbing even within it.