In todays episode I am reading and responding to Scott Alexander essay on Atomic Communitarianism.
Liberalism made a promise. Do what you want, as long as it doesn’t break my arm or pick my pocket, and I’ll extend you the same courtesy. Clean line, in theory.
In practice the line never holds. People want to make the world in the image of their values. Often, both sides end up arguing that the other parties way of living counts as harm too, and the fight liberalism was supposed to end just moves somewhere else: control of the same government, fought over by everyone in it.
What if there was something better? Not hard to imagine some cases. One is a tribe federation.
Rather than trying to convert and bash nation states of millions of people to conform to a parody of your world view, what if you just started an aligned community? You gather your friends and likeminded people to your banner and embodied your ideals. You start a new town as an expression of your political will. You go try to create your utopia.
And let others do the same.
That could be the world within a tribe federation.
People are encouraged to build tribes. Communities are given near free reign to organize as they please. There’s a celebration of real culture and distinction, rather its obliteration.
The central tribe federation oversees a few key rules, which we talk about in the episode, but in general differences between groups of people are respected and encouraged. And as a people, we get to run hundreds if not thousands of experiments in policy and organization to see what holds up.
Sounds pretty good to me.
Of course there are many problems which I only begin to discuss here.
Enjoy the conversation.
-Kristian
p.s. join our app to find your tribe, or start one. https://retribalize.ai
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