I’ve been planning a longer post on this that I just haven’t gotten around to.
Meandering rant/textwall incoming. TL;DR readers: just skim the bolds.
1. The thing to understand is that ingroup/outgroup is actually to do with incentives and information cost. It’s a successful heuristic, rather than some huge irrational distortion that needs to be answered with “why can’t we just all get along?”
- When an outsider comes to our community, we lack information about them. Obtaining this information has a cost, whether we or others bear it. Part of that is time - getting to know others requires effort and time, and as mortals, we could easily spend those scarce resources on something else. As that information is obtained, the outsider can become more of an insider.
- Bad people do actually exist, whether created by conditions or born predisposed that way. (And sometimes, we are the bad people.) The benefit of a new community member is good, but the cost of letting in a bad apple is much more extreme. It could be discord which breaks the community apart. It could be theft. It could be murder. Each of these erodes trust significantly in addition to being harmful, and trust, when not abused, is extremely resource-efficient, so this is even more costly than it first appears.
Losing $5 in cookies to theft doesn’t seem like much, but it will cost a lot more than $5 in the end.
(Resident adjacent guru Slartibart would probably link you to that video showing that all the tail risks we accumulate over a lifetime add up to a much bigger risk than they are individually, so minimizing them is rational.)
- There is significantly less leverage over outsiders, since a considerable portion of our soft leverage is in the form of social sanction. This must be spend wisely, for it can be squandered. So if there is a bad apple within our community, this may be more manageable.
- Ultimately, for any of this to work, there must be either punishment or exclusion. We must be able to either punish the thieves or keep them out of the community. If we can do neither, the community will gradually disintegrate in cohesiveness as trust evaporates.
2. But even that assumes roughly similar preferences that could all be met by one community.
Let us suppose there are the Billys and the Sarahs, who are fans of the obscure Australian faux-anime Emoji no Shoujo Unicode-San (or “Emoji Girl Unicode-san” for our American viewers).
(This example may seem a bit contrived, but I’m avoiding picking a real ethnicity here.)
Billys and Sarahs are rather dorky people with a low average level of social skills. Some have higher social abilities, but the median level for the community sets the expectations, and these expectations are comfortable for the Billys and Sarahs, who do not find them emotionally taxing.
At this point, wearing an Emoji Girl t-shirt isn’t just a sign of having watched the show. It’s also a proxy for being a Billy or Sarah. A cultural signifier that, out in the wild, lets them know they’ve found someone they could connect with. That’s actually a really big benefit! It reduces the social risk of approaching someone to create a connection significantly!
One day, internet celebrity, ironylord, and athlete Bruno Pauerlifter features Emoji Girl on his podcast, and many Chads and Staceys begin to pour into the community.
The Chads and Staceys like to enjoy Emoji Girl on multiple levels of irony, and are suave socially adepts.
Soon they outnumber the “natives.” The median social skill goes up, and with it, the expectations. The level of irony goes up as well.
The Billys and Sarahs do not enjoy the new level of social expectations, and like to enjoy Emoji Girl unironically.
The Chads and Staceys haven’t done anything wrong, per se. They’re not actively trying to exclude others with their irony. They just really like irony, and the others, well, don’t.
The usefulness of Emoji Girl t-shirts as identifiers for Billys and Sarahs is obliterated without anyone even trying to obliterate it.
And that’s how you get gatekeeping behavior on things as “trivial” as video games, anime, and so on.
Now imagine a preference clash over something that actually matters.
3. People will thus ingroup/outgroup automatically. Putting everyone into one big ingroup is not actually possible.
And because it isn’t possible, trying is only going to fail while creating side effects.
4. The idea of multiple overlapping governments in the same area administering different laws to different individuals is a fantasy, because not only will they disagree on externalities, but some externalities are social.
Take polygamy.
Polygamy, as practiced, has lots of bad correlations.
Is it absolutely proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that polygamy must result in worse mental health outcomes for women and children, fewer rights for women, more social control of women, and expelling lower-status men?
No.
But considering that many of these are still issues with polygamist communities in developed countries, it’s likely it does, and it makes sense given the incentives of polygamy. This includes things like child marriages.
Now, suppose a culture decides to have polygamy in the same geographic area as me, backed by their particular overlapping government.
Could their pool of undereducated, unattached, desperate “surplus” young men become my problem? Very much yes.
And this isn’t anywhere near the only social issue with externalities.
5. Satisfying preferences has economies of scale.
The easiest way satisfy the people who want to live among Parisian architecture, and not some mish-mash of ugly whatever in the name of freedom, is to have a city or city district where all other building styles are prohibited.
(The above isn’t secretly about race. I literally mean architecture.)
This applies to many, possibly most, preferences.
6. People will therefore act to rule over others and enforce their preferences wherever they must live with the consequences.
They may not even do this legally.
7. The natural boundary in the absence of nations is around religion, ethnicity, race, class, or clan, not “human.”
Religion is a natural boundary for reasons that should be obvious. Also, many adherents ACTUALLY BELIEVE religion and are NOT SECRETLY JUST LIBERALS FAKING IT UNDERNEATH.
Race forms a natural boundary because it’s a team you can’t quit and you’re stuck with the actions of others in the same race whether you agree with them or not.
Ethnicity is a bit of a mashup between the two, but a bit less strong.
Clan, of course, genetic relations, etc.
All of these subgroups are going to be more likely to back you up in a conflict than the unified “Earth ingroup”, and organizing around them presents negotiating advantages.
Removing the nation will not remove armed conflict. It merely moves it inwards one step.
Like, say, a white man ramming unarmed Muslims exiting a mosque with a van as an ethnic revenge killing in retaliation for van attacks by other Muslims.
8. The nation is an engineered pseudo-ethnicity.
This is GOOD, because we can use it to create a bigger ingroup (as it still has exclusion, punishment, and shared traits for cohesion) and overpower lesser subdivisions that might normally cause issues.
Additionally, because people are more likely to help the ingroup than the outgroup, by putting them in a cross-class ingroup like this we might be able to actually fund welfare programs.
It’s also necessary to defend territory, and by God can nations defend territory. (And no, you’re not going to be able to just stop defending territory.) People feel like they own the nation. That matters. A lot.
Each nation can then be specialized, with different rules to fit different preferences, and limited cross-border migration which does not exceed assimilation levels.
9. Open Borders has bad incentives.
- Extract the maximum value from your area of residence, then leave before the bad side effects catch up with you, moving out to an area that excludes by pricing the poor out of the market.
- Don’t bother helping the poor outside your immediate group, since you have no connection to them and can replace them with new immigrants at a moment’s notice.
- Prohibited from excluding trouble-makers by any other means, pricing is again used to keep out both the regular poor and the criminal poor. (Any sufficiently large area exclusionary private-buyout counts as “creating borders/nations again” and will be legally destroyed for ideological reasons.)
- The way to deal with poverty in foreign territories is for those areas to PRODUCE MORE. You can help them produce more, but only what is produced can be consumed. Everyone talented who can leave escaping will not accomplish this.
And so on.
But it gets a lot worse.
10. Open Borders means World Government.
Someone has to track criminals across the opened borders.
And people aren’t going to sign up to fight and die for territories they don’t really own - and if they can be swamped with migrants that can vote at any moment, they don’t really own the territory.
This means the creation of a world police.
The creation of a world police requires the creation of a world law.
Power flows upwards and centralizes. As the national governments degrade under open immigration, power will shift upwards towards what little world government there is, which will gradually expand.
US Federal power expanded. EU power expanded. This is the natural course of things.
11. World Government is very, very bad.
11.A. The larger the pot, the bigger the spoils.
This means that every political and ethnic faction has near-maximum incentive to subvert control of the world government because it controls all of humanity and the entire economic output of Earth.
Almost any price is worth paying to a political faction to take over Earth and permanently enshrine their ideology or religion as a global dictatorship.
Likewise, the government won’t allow any breakaways, since that would cause a chain reaction that would destroy it. This includes space colonies and any infrastructure on the Moon.
So if you make an Earth Sphere Federation, don’t be surprised when you get Gundam-tier interstellar colony-drop war bullshit. Just, you know, with power armor, because mobile suits are too large to be practical.
11.B. The larger the pot, the less your chip matters.
Meanwhile, individual voters have little incentive to pay close attention, because their vote is marginally worthless.
This means the quality of the world government will be terrible. In fact, the median government on Earth is probably much closer in quality to Brazil than it is to the United States of America.
And it plays into 11.A above, since that makes more extreme actions more cost-effective versus worthless voting.
11.C. There is nowhere to flee to if it fucks up.
Seriously.
Plus a whole bunch of other stuff, like weaving an environment that people can put themselves in and have some semblance of identity, forms a perimeter for arguing against bad social effects in general, and so on and so forth.
But I should probably be more surprised no one is noticing that eliminating nations is the clearest pathway to a world dictatorship.
