I feel like the Marxist left points out a lot of real problems in society relating to alienation, dehumanization, the lack of meaning, etc. But they get the cause of these things all wrong. The cause is not capitalism and private property, but living in a mass society where you coexist with thousands of people living and working together in one town or city neighborhood, and hundreds of thousands to millions in a single midsized metro area. We are built to coexist with a few dozen to a few hundred friends and relatives for life, and mass modern societies cannot provide that. This is why real world attempts to abolish private property and capitalism arguably worsened, rather than improved, the problems Marxists worry about in those societies.
Interestingly, I think certain kinds of social conservatives see the same problems, but also misread the cause.
For both Marxists and social conservatives, the cure is worse than the disease.
The only hope, in my view, is some kind of liberal communitarianism, but I’m not sure such a thing is possible.
Endorsed
This is why one third of my online thought is devoted to a blog trying to figure out how tribalism works and whether it can be used to good ends.
Either we can make a society with Universal Justice that does not have systematic problems that turn person against person… Or we can’t.
If we can’t, we should find the second best alternatives, and investigate them even when they perpetuate some injustice (since in such a case, it’s impossible not to.) I think there’s a good chance such a “second best” resembles tribalism more than liberalism, and at least this question needs to explored seriously.
nationalism. the concept you are looking for is nationalism
this is confused by the fact that people use ‘nationalism’ to refer to nationalism, the thing one meta level up from zionism, ethnopolitics in any form including merely engineering an ethnicity-specific culture, debates over immigration policy, and whatever dumbass shit jasbir puar tortured the word into
imo the important question that falls out of this is roman empire ‘civic nationalism’ vs the thing i’d call metazionism except back when moldbug’s comments section was relevant handle went and called it multizionism instead – if civic nationalism (which in the US would require a lot of engineering, both in the style of the ‘60s ‘black nationalists’ – or for that matter the finnish nationalists who went out and made the kalevala a thing – and in the form of redrawing the flows of information and people that give rise to shared context) is viable it’s obviously preferable, but what if it’s not