What are we actually, then, that we can construct an identity out of?
The feeling of missing something only kicks in, I suspect, after the thing that is missed is experienced. A good example is dance: it doesn’t really exist in our society outside subcultures, but I thought that didn’t matter until I took up contra. (Which I really ought to get back into now that I’m in NYC—do they even have it up here? It’s been something like five years, too...)
Similarly, I first noticed the importance of thedish identity, ritual, and traditions when I went to a very interesting summer camp that had a strong local identity backed up by its own rituals and traditions. Most of what I understand about these things now comes from there.
It had several sites; I attended four. One site was shut down for lack of attendance shortly after the rituals and traditions failed to be passed down, and the strongest site was the one with the strongest traditions. I talked to some other people who, like me, jumped ship from a site with weakening traditions to the site with the strongest traditions, and I got the very strong impression that it was causal: weakened traditions made the site worse at the de facto functions it performed for its attendees.
(One unique sociological factor that existed at the site with the strongest traditions was a semiformal aristocracy dedicated to preserving and teaching the traditions.)
Then again, from what I’ve heard of Alain de Benoist, he only understands what he writes about on an intellectual level.
In my mind, the tribe aught to be constructed out of people who 1) care about you, which is accomplished through shared experience 2) who understand you—that is, they are similar enough that when you say something, they hear what you meant. There’s no vast gulf of un-shared ideas and thoughts and notions that separates you, and inferential distance is short.
I definitely see the importance of having one, but in my experience race is a pretty poor proxy for what I talk about above. Shared culture is better, shared experience is best, and optimally those co-occur. (Genetic) family is a decent method, since you’re likely to match in personality as well as culture, but even that is a proxy.
I suspect you are somewhat overestimating the degree to which people in other racial groups identify with each other. Two random Indians in India don’t care about each other more than two random whites in America. That’s because the “white” category (or the “Indian” category) is too large for tribal affiliations to build up. Granted, they’ll understand each other better than they will, say, a Japanese person, but baseline friendliness levels are pretty much set at “stranger”. Minority cultures tend to have a different situation, since there is a very limited number of people who belong to their group, so it becomes an easy schelling point for a community to cluster.
Essentially, your tribe should be a group of <200 people, in close proximity, who share a large number of things in common with you in terms of psychology and knowledge. To the extent that people within Western culture are “damaged” by modern life creating a situation where very few people consistently come into contact with more than 1-3 other people (the same people each time), I agree, but I don’t see a racial identity as a workable solution at all. Humans really don’t form tribes that large in nature, although you can get sort of a hollow illusion of identification by aligning yourself with some sort of abstract concept.
So my answer to “what are we” is basically, [insert church here] [insert small rural home-town here] [insert college here][insert secret-club here], or whatever it is that your social hub is primarily based around. Ideally you can assume people in those groups share a certain understanding with you… and if you don’t have that, it’s probably because modern life has forced you to trade off that stuff in exchange for mobility, and you should try to find ways to acquire it.
You’re right—race is a poor proxy. The “white race” stuff is regarded by many European ethnats as a bizarre Americanism and a total misunderstanding of the situation in Europe—and they’re right, though some other ethnats try to play it up in order to forge Europe-wide alliances against threats from outside.
As I say in my linked post, the negative effects can be significant—up to and including total collapse. Here’s Glubb:
Another remarkable and unexpected symptom of national decline is the intensification of internal political hatreds. One would have expected that, when the survival of the nation became precarious, political factions would drop their rivalry and stand shoulder-to-shoulder to save their country. In the fourteenth century, the weakening empire of Byzantium was threatened, and indeed dominated, by the Ottoman Turks. The situation was so serious that one would have expected every subject of Byzantium to abandon his personal interests and to stand with his compatriots in a last desperate attempt to save the country. The reverse occurred. The Byzantines spent the last fifty years of their history in fighting one another in repeated civil wars, until the Ottomans moved in and administered the coup de grâce.
One mentioned-but-unnoticed point of the intellectually-serious Right is that some of the political pathologies of the States are caused by similar civil wars. Brecht’s Die Lösung applied to democracy: the Blue Tribe fights the Red Tribe by bringing in immigrants who will vote (i.e. participate in a civil war at a remove) for the Blue side. (This probably goes unnoticed because of their support of secession, but that’s just not politically realistic in this country, and a return to federalism is unlikely.)
The evopsych ideal is a group of <200 people in close proximity who share a common context, sure. But one can notice that social technologies for super-Dunbar coordination keep getting developed and keep winning—from subcultures and religions that can provide social capital in a new area (I’ve heard that this is particularly strong with the Mormons) to nationalism in the New World and the Old to the unification of the Mongols around Genghis Khan.
(If you want a particularly shock-value-optimizing example, consider that it took a combination of immense military stupidity on their part (especially from one country that went and made a journalist into their supreme leader) and the USSR cannon-foddering an entire generation of their population to stop a few incredibly coordinated countries in Central Europe and their one ally in Asia from winning a war against pretty much the rest of the world.)
...Actually, there are three things going on, at least for modern Westerners, though the boundaries (especially between the second and the third) are often blurred.
1) Immediate social context absent mobility. Sub-Dunbar tribe with shared experiences and context.
2) Larger (usually regional or religious) identity that provides overarching cultural context, ritual, and a sense of continuity and meaning, of tradition and the transcendent.
3) Nation-scale identity that operates mostly on the metapolitical plane, allowing for internal unity, coordination, and action on the geopolitical scale.
Where this gets interesting is that the first, ‘tribal’ form of identity may not be a thede in the usual sense—I haven’t thought very much about this form of identity (which need not rest on anything even approaching explicit identification—does it?) since I’ve never seen it either personally or from a distance. But that’s not the scale I’m talking about anyway; groups of friends don’t fulfill the second form (outside having the possibility for providing small-scale rites), which is what I’m saying is missing.
The third form is also missing, of course, but that’s entirely a societal/political problem; individuals can get on fine with only the first two forms, I suspect, with the only consequences being those that arise societally from lack of coordination. (Not that those consequences are in any way minor.)
What are we actually, then, that we can construct an identity out of?
The feeling of missing something only kicks in, I suspect, after the thing that is missed is experienced. A good example is dance: it doesn’t really exist in our society outside subcultures, but I thought that didn’t matter until I took up contra. (Which I really ought to get back into now that I’m in NYC—do they even have it up here? It’s been something like five years, too...)
Similarly, I first noticed the importance of thedish identity, ritual, and traditions when I went to a very interesting summer camp that had a strong local identity backed up by its own rituals and traditions. Most of what I understand about these things now comes from there.
It had several sites; I attended four. One site was shut down for lack of attendance shortly after the rituals and traditions failed to be passed down, and the strongest site was the one with the strongest traditions. I talked to some other people who, like me, jumped ship from a site with weakening traditions to the site with the strongest traditions, and I got the very strong impression that it was causal: weakened traditions made the site worse at the de facto functions it performed for its attendees.
(One unique sociological factor that existed at the site with the strongest traditions was a semiformal aristocracy dedicated to preserving and teaching the traditions.)
Then again, from what I’ve heard of Alain de Benoist, he only understands what he writes about on an intellectual level.
In my mind, the tribe aught to be constructed out of people who 1) care about you, which is accomplished through shared experience 2) who understand you—that is, they are similar enough that when you say something, they hear what you meant. There’s no vast gulf of un-shared ideas and thoughts and notions that separates you, and inferential distance is short.
I definitely see the importance of having one, but in my experience race is a pretty poor proxy for what I talk about above. Shared culture is better, shared experience is best, and optimally those co-occur. (Genetic) family is a decent method, since you’re likely to match in personality as well as culture, but even that is a proxy.
I suspect you are somewhat overestimating the degree to which people in other racial groups identify with each other. Two random Indians in India don’t care about each other more than two random whites in America. That’s because the “white” category (or the “Indian” category) is too large for tribal affiliations to build up. Granted, they’ll understand each other better than they will, say, a Japanese person, but baseline friendliness levels are pretty much set at “stranger”. Minority cultures tend to have a different situation, since there is a very limited number of people who belong to their group, so it becomes an easy schelling point for a community to cluster.
Essentially, your tribe should be a group of <200 people, in close proximity, who share a large number of things in common with you in terms of psychology and knowledge. To the extent that people within Western culture are “damaged” by modern life creating a situation where very few people consistently come into contact with more than 1-3 other people (the same people each time), I agree, but I don’t see a racial identity as a workable solution at all. Humans really don’t form tribes that large in nature, although you can get sort of a hollow illusion of identification by aligning yourself with some sort of abstract concept.
So my answer to “what are we” is basically, [insert church here] [insert small rural home-town here] [insert college here][insert secret-club here], or whatever it is that your social hub is primarily based around. Ideally you can assume people in those groups share a certain understanding with you… and if you don’t have that, it’s probably because modern life has forced you to trade off that stuff in exchange for mobility, and you should try to find ways to acquire it.
You’re right—race is a poor proxy. The “white race” stuff is regarded by many European ethnats as a bizarre Americanism and a total misunderstanding of the situation in Europe—and they’re right, though some other ethnats try to play it up in order to forge Europe-wide alliances against threats from outside.
That last sentence should make it clear that there are (at least) two different things going on within the concept of thedish identity: shared context/low inferential distance and fostering internal cohesion to avoid the negative effects of failure to coordinate.
As I say in my linked post, the negative effects can be significant—up to and including total collapse. Here’s Glubb:
One mentioned-but-unnoticed point of the intellectually-serious Right is that some of the political pathologies of the States are caused by similar civil wars. Brecht’s Die Lösung applied to democracy: the Blue Tribe fights the Red Tribe by bringing in immigrants who will vote (i.e. participate in a civil war at a remove) for the Blue side. (This probably goes unnoticed because of their support of secession, but that’s just not politically realistic in this country, and a return to federalism is unlikely.)
The evopsych ideal is a group of <200 people in close proximity who share a common context, sure. But one can notice that social technologies for super-Dunbar coordination keep getting developed and keep winning—from subcultures and religions that can provide social capital in a new area (I’ve heard that this is particularly strong with the Mormons) to nationalism in the New World and the Old to the unification of the Mongols around Genghis Khan.
(If you want a particularly shock-value-optimizing example, consider that it took a combination of immense military stupidity on their part (especially from one country that went and made a journalist into their supreme leader) and the USSR cannon-foddering an entire generation of their population to stop a few incredibly coordinated countries in Central Europe and their one ally in Asia from winning a war against pretty much the rest of the world.)
...Actually, there are three things going on, at least for modern Westerners, though the boundaries (especially between the second and the third) are often blurred.
1) Immediate social context absent mobility. Sub-Dunbar tribe with shared experiences and context.
2) Larger (usually regional or religious) identity that provides overarching cultural context, ritual, and a sense of continuity and meaning, of tradition and the transcendent.
3) Nation-scale identity that operates mostly on the metapolitical plane, allowing for internal unity, coordination, and action on the geopolitical scale.
Where this gets interesting is that the first, ‘tribal’ form of identity may not be a thede in the usual sense—I haven’t thought very much about this form of identity (which need not rest on anything even approaching explicit identification—does it?) since I’ve never seen it either personally or from a distance. But that’s not the scale I’m talking about anyway; groups of friends don’t fulfill the second form (outside having the possibility for providing small-scale rites), which is what I’m saying is missing.
The third form is also missing, of course, but that’s entirely a societal/political problem; individuals can get on fine with only the first two forms, I suspect, with the only consequences being those that arise societally from lack of coordination. (Not that those consequences are in any way minor.)