The problem with multicultural and multiracial societies and how to, or not to organize society

One way not to organize society is to bring together different groups of people of different ancestral origins based on meritocratic traits which you choose and expect them to gel together based on an artificially created "national identity".

Because of how humans feel and think about identity. It's probably impossible to make a person think of themselves flatly and absolutely as "a citizen of x country" for example. This seems part of the inherent human 'software' and cannot be changed.

People feel and think first of themselves as an individual, then maybe in terms of their nuclear family, and then their extended family and friends, and then maybe in terms of their ethnic group... continuously expanding outwards in that way.

Attempting to bypass or jettison that natural gradation doesn't make much sense. It's contradictory to fundamental human psychology. Maybe even causes psychological issues in humans.

The far better way to organize society is by what is natural, in the way humans feel identity.

Some people think this is unnecessary and that you can reshape anything you want anyhow you want it to be. But that's not true. The natural world isn't infinitely malleable. There are limits to human control over the natural. And then, what is to be gained from a flatness of identity exactly?

Different societies with distinct identities necessarily have their own distinct cultures. If you did bring together people from different cultures, it only makes sense that differences in their cultures would result in clashes between them. So you do not want multiple, non-interoperable cultures in the same broader society.

Why you do not want multiple, non-interoperable cultures in the same society:

(i) Homogenization of culture is fundamental to a functional society. Culture, material and non-material, in the societal sense, really is just about standardization of traits, so that people are as interoperable and able to coordinate as much as is possible. Why, ever, would you want to interfere with that by having competing cultures in the same society?

continued: (https://buttondown.email/tZero19e/archive/the-problem-with-multicultural-and-multiracial/)

(would paste it all here, but there aren't enough character spaces, and pasting in comments might break UI [i don't know how comments are ranked, or if they can be pinned to the top]. can we increase the text space, admin?)

The conflation of "ancestral origin" with "culture" is a modern aberration. Cultural supremacy, and development of cultural cohesion among the ruling class, is historically much more important than mere ethnic affinity. 19th century nationalism massively and ahistorically inflated the importance of race and much of modern discourse still lives in its shadow.

To the extent ethnic groups rightly command allegiance, third cousins should command orders of magnitude more allegiance. When was the last time you did a favor for, or even met, your third cousins?

>>1937
You say this like nationalism was simply made up, rather than being a natural response to conditions. People band together by shared interests. Subjective interests (ie instinct about what is important) and objective interests (ie what states of affairs will benefit one's power in the world) are both heavily correlated to ethnicity. When the scale of political coordination became much larger, ethnic blocs at national scale best reflected political division. It's not like it didn't matter before nationalism, either; the aristocracy was racially different from the peasantry, and medieval peasant revolts and religious conflicts often amounted to killing whoever was too tall and blond. Most large-scale conflicts are at least partially ethnic conflicts, not just because of correlated interests but because ethnicity is a visible good proxy for someone's politics. Culture and ethnicity get conflated (indeed "ethnicity" is a word for the package deal of ancestry and culture) because they are only somewhat separable.

Now days, major political blocs are internal to imperial politics, but the racial character in political conflict is still very visible. You can nail down someone's politics fairly accurately by just looking at their DNA, bone structure, or pigmentation, and much politics these days is explicitly about this because much of the rest is implicitly about it.

The claim that there's more social coherence and less destructive factionalism in a homogenous society is probably true, because the visible and operative difference becomes foreign/self rather than internal faction. LKY said it best something like "in a multicultural society, people vote with their ethnicity". A well functioning multiracial republic is probably impossible. OP is right about that.

But this stuff is also fairly basic and well known.

>can we increase the text space, admin?

No. Brevity is the soul of wit. Comments stay in order though, if you want to break it up into a thread.

>>1936
Frankly, I do not believe homogenous nation-states as they have existed for the last few centuries will remain the dominant paradigm. Not only can men traverse the planet in less than a day now, but culture becomes fundamentally transnational and antilocal with the introduction of the internet. You can be a complete alien stranger to your next door neighbor, something which was almost unbelievable in any prior time.

What will initiate this speciation is a major crisis, most likely a pyrrhic or lost war against China (I think this is probable given the current trajectory of total, unthinking arrogance on the part of Americans, the same thing which caused the Ukraine War). Something which shatters the true believers and emboldens separatists. A critical mass of men will be FORCED to leave behind the stability of the old regime for freer pastures, and the various foreign masses present in large swathes of the SW, West, and NE will accelerate this process. Some rough thoughts are that Hispanics will be attracted to "Aztlan" style revanchism, while the broligarchical coast will make attempts at their utopian e-cities. The heartland will be scattered with rural fiefdoms in a similar manner, especially where foreigners are particularly concentrated. Do you really believe Chinatowns, Hindutowns, Moslemtowns will keep pretending they're patriots when the money stops flowing? Ditto for heartland Americans who have long lost faith in the Fed.

>>2945
Adding to my own comment, I still believe further physical concentration of "nations" into certain geographies will occur, since although it is not necessitated, there are still many reasons for it (for example, defense purposes). I just believe that it will take a century or more after this hypothetical Crisis for the world to re-sort itself into even a semblance of the homogeneity which once existed. This isn't even mentioning Eugenics which will re-emerge as a major sociological factor sometime this century. This is based on a belief in high hereditarianism with all observable traits.

>>2946
tldr, I think the invention of the internet means much of the logical basis for many of the currently existing large conglomerated nation-states and empires has failed, and the coincidence of this with mass foreign immigration in the West and the rise of antipathic competitors such as China will eventually collapse primarily America, and perhaps others. This instability will allow the formation of much more specialized and deviational societal projects and personality matrixes, and when eugenic policy becomes popular, a much greater "speciation" will begin with many different actors beginning their own racial projects, but that is farther down the road.

Great Britain founded and contributed to a number of states (US, CAN, SA, RHO, AUS, NZ) with emergent divergence despite a real lack of racial difference. Remove that last element by pouring in every ethnicity in the fucking world, add in a heaping helping of centrifugal forces like the internet, economic instability, and wars, and you have your collapse.

>>2947
>>2946
>>2945
I think you're right on all counts. The nation-state is done, historically at least if not conceptually. The pull of online/commercial/industrial/financial/scientific universal civilization seems to dissolve everything else into tendencies within itself. Some of those tendencies may be ethnic in character, but it's going to have to be a very different and more deliberately futurist kind of eugenic separatist ideology to hold up against the dissolving acid of universal civilization, not like the old nationalisms which were more like nascent universal civilization digesting and homogenizing pre-existing variation than any deliberate cultivation of divergence. Meanwhile the problem with universal civilization is it has no political or reproductive basis of itself. It dissolves and subverts its own substrate. China is going to take the prime position as European and American civilization decay into race-chaos (to large extent this has already happened). They are going to have a very interesting race against undergoing their own version of this.

I agree eugenics is coming back in a big way this century. The old order is increasingly fighting a political rearguard against eugenics as it dies of its own anti-eugenic contradictions. Everyone is going to become very aware of the primacy of human quality matters and the life-laws that govern them (heredity, struggle, selection, fertility). But what that looks like and whether it works is a whole other can of worms. We can hope for a return of sensible adult eugenic scientific Meritocracy, but I think that's on the way out similar to the nation-state. Universal civilization has eaten the human and institutional capital prerequisites of that, and when that did happen it was aligned with universal civilization.

There's a paradox here that I haven't yet figured out: it seems future cultures are going to have to be more adapted to preserve themselves within and against universal civilization, but also will have to draw power from its strengths. Does this mean the parasitic-separatist cultures will win, or more differentiated champions of particular tendencies within universal civilization, or what? I don't think it can be pure parasitism because they can't actually generate the thing they are dependent on. But you also don't want to be just a straightforward universalist because you get taken for a ride by the parasites. The last time this happened, the thing that won was a bit of both (Christianity). What will it be this time?