A Group Dynamics based explanation of the decline of the West

I have an impression that the development of Group Dynamics-based theoretical approaches was a bit neglected lately in NRx. So I will give it a try, but really, understand that I am a hobby level, amateur blogger, not like the major, professional-ish ones, I write like I speak, so I cannot write well at all. If there is any point of me blogging is to kind of push the better bloggers to reformulate somewhat similar ideas in a far better ways.

Group Dynamics basics: two failure modes

So. Group Dynamics. We are essentially tribal beings, and to maximize our output and happiness we need a tribe we can trust and engage in reciprocal altruism with. This is called group cohesion. The cohesion of, and thus the efficient cooperation inside any group depends on competition with an outgroup. This is a major mistake a lot of nice people commit. They start some local stamp collectors club and wonder why the membership is kind of lukewarm. Well, the reason is they lack enemies. And that sounds of course quite weird and back-asswards, why would you need enemies if you have shared values goals or interests? If you have enemies you want to defeat them quickly, not have them around forever? The equilibrium state is no enemies? And if having enemies is good for you, are people who do something good for you really enemies? So it sounds like the most asinine thing ever. And despite the WTFness of it all, it is essentially true – having a hostile outgroup kicks in ingroup solidarity, enthusiasm and esprit de corps like nothing else does. It is a huge WTF but try to digest it somehow. It is illogical, but human nature isn’t always logical.

The nicest civilized way is Ye Olde British sporting spirit, with Fair Play and good sportsmanship and being gentlemen and all, they always had this idea, more often than Americans and far far more often than Europeans that if your local pub is boring, you start playing darts, but you don’t just play darts, you organize a little local darts championship. My favorite Brit TV series, River Cottage, is all about having these tiny fun cooking or even honey-collecting competitions.

So, outgroup competition is a must for having a proper group. And you want to have a proper group, you are human, and humans are tribal, you cannot function without a good “gang” any better than without toes or ears.

The most brutal intergroup competition is war. Then there is business, monetary competition between groups, but it is fucked up in modern capitalism, there is no ingroup identity because everybody could just quit and work for the competition tomorrow. Competition without loyalty, competition without discouraging defection is really asinine and yet this is how modern corporate capitalism works, the boss is all like “FUCK YEAH we are showing ’em aw yiss, we have the largest market share now baby!” and then every employee is just scratching their ass and thinks “meh, maybe I am gonna work for them in two months, it is just a fucking job”.  I can promise you, if only we would make defection i.e. both firing employees and them quitting far far more discouraged, and corporations would form true group identities, going to work could be almost as interesting than going to work as an accountant at your favorite football club. We could make corporate jobs un-boring with just this one move, to make employment more permanent and defection rare and shameful and thus let competition form sports-club like group identities at corporations.

Anyway.  I was at the monetary form of intergroup competition. Then there is prestige competition – like in sports championships or building national prestige projects, like the TGV for France, it was rather obviously about showing the German engineers who is the alpha engineer. And that is why the Concorde was a financial disaster, but it kinda showed the world the Brits and French can still into cool. Then you can have friendlier competitons, and then you can even have that kind of virtual competition when you just sit with your ingroup and just crack jokes at the low-status pariah idiots in the outgroup. Like how political blogging works, OMG conservatives are hatey and opressive, OMG liberals are short-sighted cry-babies, all safely in the ingroup “safe space” echo-chamber.

So one way your group can malfunction is not having a proper outgroup competition, not having a THEM that keeps US together.

The other way your group can malfunction is that, well, people are members of multiple groups at the same time. And as they partially overlap, they partially intersect, this leads to tension. The stronger kind of group identities basically tear apart the weaker ones. If I am fully religious (in the year 1600AD sense) and my cousin is a heretic, then either the cohesion of the family will suffer for it, or the cohesion of my religion, as one member is now chummy with a heretic. Or both. If religion’s cohesion is stronger, I will disown my cousin and treat him like a not related enemy, if my family’s cohesion is stronger, my co-religionists will maybe kick me out as a lukewarm heretosymp. Or, religious divides can tear nations apart. Or the other way around, when Lutheran nationalist Swedes and Danes had a lot of wars against each other, the cohesion of Lutheranism suffered for it.

Now armed with these theoretical tools, let’s investigate the West!

The demise of nationality

The basic group used to be the nation, at least for Europeans. It is highly artificial a group, far too big, far beyond the natural, tribal, gang-like Dunbar number, it was probably created by poetry (see national poets) and similar intellectual activities. The Gutenberg-press enabled intellectuals to create nationalism. It also enabled them to basically abolish it, after 1945.

Nationalism was all glorious until about 1914. Then it went pathological quickly. Maybe Anglophone countries could keep their nationalisms sane in the 1914-1945 period but we Continentals don’t have much  to be proud about from this era. Our nationalisms got too rabid in this era. And thus after 1945 people were tired and scared of it, and were willing to go with the liberal project to end nationalism, especially in countries like Germany where Allied occupation, its ideology provided by the Cathedral, actively tried to demolish local nationalism. It was so extreme that in the late forties, even the term “German language” was forbidden in Austrian schools, they used the term “teaching language” (Unterrichtssprache) instead.

So, right now there is not even the mildest form of nationalism in the West, like investing money into money-losing prestige projects, man on the Moon, TGV, Concorde, because taxpayers are no longer willing to sacrifice money for glory. Simply put, people don’t value their national identity anymore, don’t want to throw a few beers worth of money into a hat just to build something impractical but impressive they can collectively brag about.

The other kind of problem, intersecting and overlapping group memberships, well, we had that too and the weird part was that originally it participated in nation formation. I mean, it all began with the French Revolution type class-struggle, sans-culottes against the aristocracts, which can be interpreted as two groups, placed vertically as rich vs. poor inside the same horizontal national group hating each other. This is supposed to weaken national identity, and yet, many historians say the French Revolution not only didn’t weaken, it CREATED nationalism. This is confusing for me.

Yet, it is clearly true that since from about Marxism these vertical group identities weakened national identities. Communists explicity wanted to replace national identity with a class and ideology based one, saying proletarians have no country.

The longer-term effect of Leftism and Liberalism was that more and more competing group identities were created inside nations, and that more and more eroded national identity. First it was just workers against capitalists, then later on gays against homophobes, feminists against chauvinist pigs and so on, all these group identities acted as a centrifugal  force and shattered national identities more and more.

In fact, this model leads us to predict why was fascism so brutal. You can define a fascist as someone who wants to rescue national identity, national cohesion, where the poor no longer hate the rich and generally no “accepted” groups hate each other, and he wants to rescue it at ALL costs. That is of course done by focusing competition, or desire to conquest, or hatred, or contempt of an outgroup. It is clear, ALL  group dynamics works like that, this is teh basic rule: if you want to have cohesion in any tribe, you need an opposing tribe. But because the national identities were already on the brink of shattering, only truly extreme amounts of hatred on the outgroup could keep these nations together. They had two choice, either to abandon the project of saving national unity, or to really do it at ALL costs, no matter how much innocent blood needs to be spilled to do it.  The price of temporarily rescuing national unity was thus mass-murderous hatred on the outgroup and an insatiable hunger for  conquest in order to focus all the aggressive energies outward, not inward. The only way to have Prussians and Austrians in the same nation and not hate each others guts is to hate someone else with a fierce, bloody force. And North and South Italy still dislikes each other, so they only way the old Axeface could beat serious cohesion into them is trying to go on a rampage of conquest against any random Mediterrean outgroup and valorize heroism and heroic death and all that. This is why it all was so cruel and bloody, they wanted to save national unity at ALL costs and thus accepted to pay any price in blood for it, no matter how high. (I am not making excuses: they were evil. I am saying it was the particular kind and subset of evil where evil means were used for goals that are more understandable, like national unity. You don’t need to have all your goals being evil in order to be evil, for being evil it is enough if your methods or means are evil.)

Which suggests it is perhaps better not to rescue national identities.  To let them fail. Do they even worth rescuing in their 19th century form? Is there even any rational reason why Austrians and Bavarians, Valloon Belgians and French, should belong to different nations? We could have a West defined culturally and loosely ancestry-based, or perhaps larger areas in it like Greater Anglo-American Sphere, Scandinavia, Francosphere, Mediterrania, and then just just city-states inside it, Patchwork-style. But that does not sound likely. What would worth rescuing is ethnic cultures and shared ethnic ancestries as such, not necessarily every aspect of the nation-state. Nation-states in many cases even repressed ethnic cultures: it was easier to be an out-and-out Venetian or Neapolitan  before the unification of Italy. Germany is a myth that represses the actuality of Bavaria. Or at least that is one way a lot of people see this.

Anyway, we can conclude that nations were killed both by an explicit liberal postwar anti-nationalism, using the the excesses of 1914-1945 nationalism for their own goals, and subnational group identites, especially rich vs. poor, egged on by leftism, which ended up shattering national identities.

Unfortunately, it was not possible to replace national identities with other functional group identites – like religion – so the origin of our modern malaise is simply individuals being atomized and thus their productive output and enthusiasm sapped, because most people today don’t feel they belong to any serious tribe.

This is our root problem. The nation was the FORM in which Western civilization lived, it was the framework holding everything together. Without this form, everything is falling apart: without group cohesion, all kinds of social pathologies emerged.

History seems to teach us that most kind of groups, like political movements or sexual identities, can only destroy, not build. We saw only two kind of groups so far that can build, that can create the systems of trust and cooperation for their members which is necessary for maximizing output and enthusiasm. One is something loosely kinship, ethnicity  and sometimes geography based, like tribes or nations, the other is religion.

So either we do what Spandrell says and start a New Religion – or revive an old one – or find a different, non-national way to keep ethnic kinship based groups with their distinct languages, cultures and ancestry alive.