(referring to the original post but keeping the addendum) I know it’s a Tumblr cliche, but: someone finally said it.
Also, local communities will inevitably be crushing to some in the same way as nuclear families are, even though both are net good things. Any system in which you have to rely on the personal favor of the people immediately around you for basic resources is going to be capable of thoroughly screwing anyone who deviates from the local norm. I have a very strong leave-me-alone-and-get-out-of-my-business drive and for most people with that temperament libertarianism has obvious appeal, and I get that, but ultimately this isexactly why I favor centralized distribution of essential survival needs on a universal entitlement basis. Large-scale centralized systems need to be impersonal, they need to apply to everyone, and that means that in the worst-case scenario, where you drew a bad card in the birth lotto and your family or the local elders are terrible and toxic and abusive and hate you for your nature etc, you as a member of the greater society still have recourse. I’m as suspicious of left-anarchist models that rely solely on mutual aid and solidarity as I am of these tribal utopias [sic as hell] you see proposed by ethnotraditionalists.
Yeah, this is a mess all around – I think the tribalism-boosters are mostly correct about the benefits of that lifestyle, but the folks in this thread are also largely correct about the cost. It seems to me that the hard-tribal communitarian system really is better for about two-thirds of people, and it’s drastically better if you’re optimizing for community or lineage welfare, which is significant because I think large chunks of human moral intuition are designed for that and simply don’t function properly when the individual is the operational unit. But it can be really, really bad for the people it’s bad for.
That kind of society is engineered to destroy me, and I do have an unavoidable bias against societies engineered to destroy me. But I don’t think it’s possible to create a society that isn’t engineered to destroy large swathes of the population, because of the intersection of three constraints:
Firstly, you need to bring the possibility of being ruined by bad luck or abuse to incredibly low levels or that alone will suffice to destroy large numbers of people.
Secondly, people have extremely diverse needs – so diverse that you can’t even have a community for each and allow them to sort themselves, because the inability to easily change communities is itself a need many people have.
Thirdly, the intensity of people’s needs and their tolerance of having them denied varies enormously, so there’s always a large contingent of people who are on the brink of complete collapse because they really, really have to have their needs met and they’re just barely getting enough. This means that spreading small costs across a large number of people isn’t safe – it will still drive a lot of people to ruin, because the nature of the system is that there are always a large number of people just barely hanging on.
So I can’t rule out that a society engineered to destroy me might be better than one that isn’t, which kind of sucks. I’ll still vote for the latter, because I’m selfish, but the whole business really puts a damper on any community engineering ambitions I might have had.
What happens in a tribe where autonomy is a core value and infringing on someone’s autonomy is the sort of thing there’s little tolerance for? I think about this stuff a lot, like i think it is one of the central questions in trying to wrap my head around disability, and that seems like the ideal to me, and like something i’ve glimpsed in my real life.
In briefest terms: one of two things, either of which will fail to get you the magic you want.
Either
(a) “Autonomy” becomes an empty buzzword, equivalent to “the correct display of tribal norms,” and the community enforces conformity through ruthless persecution of “bad people who infringe on others’ autonomy.” You can see this in nigh-unto-caricature form in the worst and least-self-aware parts of socially-conservative red state America, where “we are the Land of the Free” is waved like a flag to show why American culture is the best, and must therefore be preserved at all costs by preventing people from exercising their freedom.
or
(b) People actually take the autonomy thing seriously, and therefore hit the road when things get bad, meaning that there’s minimal concrete interdependence and the community risks collapsing whenever you hit a local maximum of drama.