This is very close to my take on Lindsay too.
He's a classical liberal and an academic mathematician at heart. With the Long March through the Institutions basically complete, a relatively conservative academic simply has no place left in the modern university system. Critical Theory and its children (intersectional feminism, CRT, etc.) were explicitly designed to undermine and supplant modern liberalism; Lindsay has responded to it quite effectively.
That said, I think the root of the problem runs deeper: Classical Liberalism has been deeply flawed from the start. The atomic unit of society is the tribe, not the autonomous individual. In the natural world, a lone human being is extraordinarily rare and incredibly vulnerable. By ourselves we have no reproductive future. A single bad year of food gathering/production, stepping in a hole and breaking some toes, or getting a bad fever that stops us from working; any one of those could be fatal to an individual without the support of a tribe.
Individuals certainly do make choices, but those individuals almost always align into groups that compete with other groups. This directly contradicts classical liberalism's foundational assumption that the informed, rational individual is the smallest meaningful unit of society. The implications of this error of thinking are sweeping.
James has done an excellent job understanding the techniques and tactics of Critical Theory proponents. His breakdowns of how Woke followers operate like a cult are particularly sharp. However, he has baulked at where his own investigation has led him. James's major issue is that once you accept that the atomic unit of society is the tribe, then you realize that a major force within society is tribal conflict. Some tribes are more successful (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) and some are more ruthless (Muslims); the inevitable conflicts are trending towards a vindication of racism as practiced by the Ku Klux Klan; which James hates with a passion. Liberalism was never correct, and he now attacks those who have moved past it.
I agree that liberalism, even the classical kind, was never correct for the reason you listed and a number of other reasons also. I believe you are critiquing libertarianism more than liberalism though (although, libtertarianisn is a branch of liberalism). Liberals believe in individual rights, equality before the law and liberal democracy (universal suffrage where each person's vote is worth the same) as some of their fundamental values which IMO are liberalism's biggest faults. Liberals aren't usually defined by "breaking down the individual into the atomic unit of society" but their lack of recognizing the realities of race is ultimately one of the biggest flaws of liberalism in the modern era.
If you know the roots of liberalism, one of the reasons it came about was because it was the British Empire's adaptation to the expanding costs associated with maintaining their empire and then caught on from there. Essentially, British elites had an issue was trying to manage a vast empire with a small population of Britains. What they concluded was the idea that they could turn all non-British people who were their subjects into peasants equal in standing and contribution to the empire as British people so long as they adopted the values of liberalism in all the colonies they ruled. This is why the elite wanted to promote liberalism. It was to help make managing their vast empire easier and less resources intensive by essentially turning the class of people they ruled into good upstanding citizens that contributed like everyone else.
The largest single failure of liberalism though is that no two people are equal but the most fundamental value of liberalism is to treat everyone as if they were equal. In early liberalism this concept manifested as "equality of opportunity but not equality of outcome". However, this phrase only works when people in your society believe everyone is not equal (so how most people were in times where liberalism was still rather new). Since everyone isn't equal as long as everyone got equal opportunity then their outcomes would be different but that would be justified since giving everyone equal opportunity means any difference in outcome can be attributed to differences in the individual (which was accepted by these early liberals since they're transitioning from a society where everyone being unequal was accepted by most). Unfortunately, this view of liberalism is merely a transitional state because after the concepts of equality get hammered into everyone's brain from equal treatment under the law to universal suffrage democracy and a lack of race realism (a necessary component for the elites to get buy-in from non-Whites, who they were trying to get to act as productive subjects like the peasant Whites), it turns out that people begin to believe that everyone is truly equal such that if everyone truly had equality of opportunity then their outcome should be equal also. A lack of equal outcome is viewed as a lack of equal opportunity then instead of being due to individual differences and even if individual differences are recognized, these differences aren't views as justifying any difference in outcome compared to anyone else. Thus, a lack of equal opportunity is viewed as a product of "oppression" since in the liberal's mind, the only reason you wouldn't give someone the same opportunities as someone else is because you're treating them differently than someone else which goes against the fundamental value of equality under the law. This difference in treatment is viewed then as oppression. Thus, laws must this change to end all oppression so everyone can have an equal opportunity given that they now have equal opportunity and all people are equal.
What I just described is the fundamental issue with liberalism, which is ultimately egalitarianism not libertarianism (though libertarianism is flawed too).
I think many liberals are extremely tribal among other liberals though, they just aren't tribal on race. Just look at how leftists engage in politics. It's highly tribal. However, the least tribal of all groups are liberals who call themselves conservative. This, imo, is mostly because these people are confused about politics and don't realize where they actually stand. The "just leave us alone" conservative individualist crowd are a group and many of them are liberal but mostly because most people are liberal. Most people can be described as a liberal who just wishes liberalism was somewhere in-between 90s-now liberalism. Many of the leave us alone crowd want 90s liberalism but in lieu of that they must want to be ignored until death, as an adaption imo, to the political powerlessmess of their situation in life. You never hear someone with a lot of power saying he just wants to leave everyone alone as much as he can but if someone doesn't have any power they often say they want those with power over them to have none (the leave us alone crowd).
If liberalism stopped begin egalitarians then they would become both racist and tribal but if liberalism stopped caring about the individual and only cared about the tribe, they'd just become antifas. The biggest problem thus, imo, of liberalism is egalitarianism not individualism; however, staunch individualism is essentially individualism to a fault such that these people undermine their own authority such that a foreign collective group will usurp the power of the individuals then take control for themselves against the now comparatively weaker power of the individuals. This failure from a lack of collectivism because of an overemphasis on individualism tends to be attribute to libertarianism though, not liberalism imo.
I appreciate the thoughtful reply. We actually agree on far more than we disagree here.
You're spot on that liberalism's biggest failure is its egalitarianism: the insistence on treating everyone as interchangeable equals despite the obvious reality that no two people (or groups) are equal. The slide from "equality of opportunity" to demands for equal outcomes, the empire-management origins you described, and the way it blinds itself to race realism all flow from that core flaw. I also agree that many self-described "conservatives" are really just classical liberals who don't realize they're not truly right-wing; they're the least tribal of all, clinging to an individualism that leaves them politically powerless.
That said, I still see the deeper root in classical liberalism's individualism itself. Humans have never been equal; for individuality to exist, differences must exist, and those differences create advantages or disadvantages depending on context. Equality could only exist in a world with no meaningful variation at all. Once you accept that the atomic unit of society is the tribe, not the autonomous individual, it follows that tribes compete. Some tribes have more successful or adaptive traits than others on average. It is also clear that observable differences exist between races of humans; otherwise there would be no perceivable distinctions.
James Lindsay is terrified that conservative White males will accept the Critical Theory tribe's demolition of liberalism, organize along racial and cultural lines, and see that the appropriate response is a race war. He knows that the White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant (or Lutheran) people have more capability and economic production than the rest of the world put together (see WWI and WWII). Should this group become sufficiently motivated, they will be more effective than any other group in history. Lindsay feels that accepting reality as it is leads directly to a racial pogrom to reclaim the western world from a (literal) invasion from Africa and the Middle East.
Humans have never been equal; for individuality to exist, differences must exist, and those differences create advantages or disadvantages depending on context. Equality could only exist in a world with no meaningful variation at all.
Once you accept that the atomic unit of society is the tribe,
Brother, while I agree with a lot of what you've said, I must point out that these two statements are mutually exclusive, and you undermine, rather than support, the latter with the former.
The smallest unit of society MUST be the individual, specifically BECAUSE people are unequal. Tribes are formed when enough people, who are all unequal, willingly set aside enough of their differences to form a tribe. If there exists one or more contentious concepts on which only some individuals are willing to agree upon while others are not, multiple tribes are formed, and begin to compete.
The tribe is the smallest molecule of society, certainly, but not the atomic unit.
If you, hypothetically, had three men alone on an island, and each of the three had wildly competing ideas, they would end up in an arrangement that, from the outside, looked like the worlds smallest diorama of tribal conflict. You'd see disagreements, alliances, betrayals, trade, and everything else.
Brother, I see the point you're making with the three-men-on-an-island example, but I think it actually supports rather than undermines the tribal view.
In reality, those three men would almost certainly die fairly quickly. As soon as any one of them is unable to provide food for himself for even a couple of weeks (injury, illness, bad luck hunting/gathering), he is at a massive disadvantage. In a tropical environment where food might seem plentiful, infections run rampant; the first time one cuts his foot badly, he will likely die of infection without group support for care, sharing, or protection.
Individuals on their own die alone and have no reproductive future. As a result, they actively seek out people of like mind or values and join forces with them, or they adapt their values and behaviors to fit the tribe in order to survive. For roughly four hundred thousand years of human history, shunning or exile was effectively a death sentence.
This doesn't deny that individuals are unequal or that they bring different strengths and weaknesses. Quite the opposite: it is precisely because people are unequal that they form tribes, allying with others who complement their weaknesses and amplify their strengths in the face of a harsh world.
Think of individuals as sub-atomic particles. They exist, they have unique properties, and they can interact; but they are far too unstable and vulnerable on their own to form the basic building blocks of a functioning, long-term society. The tribe is the atom; the smallest stable unit that can actually survive, reproduce, and compete in the real world. The tribe isn't just a "molecule" that emerges optionally from individuals; it has been the essential survival unit for our species across almost our entire evolutionary history.
Equality could only exist in a world with no meaningful variation at all.
This is what liberals want. Thus a group of 100 individuals compared to another group of 100 individuals compared to another group of 100 individuals will always have the exact same outcome, thus tribes are unimportant because there are no differences between them since there are no meaningful variation among individuals. This is what liberals want and what they believe is reality (even though it goes against reality). To a liberal, if there are meaningful differences between individuals then it's because of oppression so they must work to eliminate oppression. To a liberal all people who want to eliminate this oppression so that there becomes no meaningful differences in outcome between individuals and thus no differences between groups (tribes) of individuals are his tribe and he's very tribal about his tribe. He just fails to see race as a factor in making a tribe because he doesn't believe there are meaningful differences between races except by those caused by oppression which must be eliminated at all costs by his liberal tribe. Anyone who points out the reality of genetics leading to differences among individuals is in the Nazis tribe and must be eliminated at all costs by the liberal tribe because people who accept race realism promote oppression in the mind of a liberal.
So ultimately the problem isn't a lack of tribalism, it's egalitarianism. Liberals refuse to acknowledge the differences among individuals which is why they don't think racial tribes matter.
Yes, exactly. It is the natural conclusion of the liberal world view.
If liberalism is the axiom, then people must be the same to make the philosophy work. We are watching people adjust reality to fit their pet theory, rather than throwing out a broken idea to better understand the world as it is.
This is very close to my take on Lindsay too. He's a classical liberal and an academic mathematician at heart. With the Long March through the Institutions basically complete, a relatively conservative academic simply has no place left in the modern university system. Critical Theory and its children (intersectional feminism, CRT, etc.) were explicitly designed to undermine and supplant modern liberalism; Lindsay has responded to it quite effectively.
That said, I think the root of the problem runs deeper: Classical Liberalism has been deeply flawed from the start. The atomic unit of society is the tribe, not the autonomous individual. In the natural world, a lone human being is extraordinarily rare and incredibly vulnerable. By ourselves we have no reproductive future. A single bad year of food gathering/production, stepping in a hole and breaking some toes, or getting a bad fever that stops us from working; any one of those could be fatal to an individual without the support of a tribe. Individuals certainly do make choices, but those individuals almost always align into groups that compete with other groups. This directly contradicts classical liberalism's foundational assumption that the informed, rational individual is the smallest meaningful unit of society. The implications of this error of thinking are sweeping.
James has done an excellent job understanding the techniques and tactics of Critical Theory proponents. His breakdowns of how Woke followers operate like a cult are particularly sharp. However, he has baulked at where his own investigation has led him. James's major issue is that once you accept that the atomic unit of society is the tribe, then you realize that a major force within society is tribal conflict. Some tribes are more successful (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) and some are more ruthless (Muslims); the inevitable conflicts are trending towards a vindication of racism as practiced by the Ku Klux Klan; which James hates with a passion. Liberalism was never correct, and he now attacks those who have moved past it.
I agree that liberalism, even the classical kind, was never correct for the reason you listed and a number of other reasons also. I believe you are critiquing libertarianism more than liberalism though (although, libtertarianisn is a branch of liberalism). Liberals believe in individual rights, equality before the law and liberal democracy (universal suffrage where each person's vote is worth the same) as some of their fundamental values which IMO are liberalism's biggest faults. Liberals aren't usually defined by "breaking down the individual into the atomic unit of society" but their lack of recognizing the realities of race is ultimately one of the biggest flaws of liberalism in the modern era.
If you know the roots of liberalism, one of the reasons it came about was because it was the British Empire's adaptation to the expanding costs associated with maintaining their empire and then caught on from there. Essentially, British elites had an issue was trying to manage a vast empire with a small population of Britains. What they concluded was the idea that they could turn all non-British people who were their subjects into peasants equal in standing and contribution to the empire as British people so long as they adopted the values of liberalism in all the colonies they ruled. This is why the elite wanted to promote liberalism. It was to help make managing their vast empire easier and less resources intensive by essentially turning the class of people they ruled into good upstanding citizens that contributed like everyone else.
The largest single failure of liberalism though is that no two people are equal but the most fundamental value of liberalism is to treat everyone as if they were equal. In early liberalism this concept manifested as "equality of opportunity but not equality of outcome". However, this phrase only works when people in your society believe everyone is not equal (so how most people were in times where liberalism was still rather new). Since everyone isn't equal as long as everyone got equal opportunity then their outcomes would be different but that would be justified since giving everyone equal opportunity means any difference in outcome can be attributed to differences in the individual (which was accepted by these early liberals since they're transitioning from a society where everyone being unequal was accepted by most). Unfortunately, this view of liberalism is merely a transitional state because after the concepts of equality get hammered into everyone's brain from equal treatment under the law to universal suffrage democracy and a lack of race realism (a necessary component for the elites to get buy-in from non-Whites, who they were trying to get to act as productive subjects like the peasant Whites), it turns out that people begin to believe that everyone is truly equal such that if everyone truly had equality of opportunity then their outcome should be equal also. A lack of equal outcome is viewed as a lack of equal opportunity then instead of being due to individual differences and even if individual differences are recognized, these differences aren't views as justifying any difference in outcome compared to anyone else. Thus, a lack of equal opportunity is viewed as a product of "oppression" since in the liberal's mind, the only reason you wouldn't give someone the same opportunities as someone else is because you're treating them differently than someone else which goes against the fundamental value of equality under the law. This difference in treatment is viewed then as oppression. Thus, laws must this change to end all oppression so everyone can have an equal opportunity given that they now have equal opportunity and all people are equal.
What I just described is the fundamental issue with liberalism, which is ultimately egalitarianism not libertarianism (though libertarianism is flawed too).
I think many liberals are extremely tribal among other liberals though, they just aren't tribal on race. Just look at how leftists engage in politics. It's highly tribal. However, the least tribal of all groups are liberals who call themselves conservative. This, imo, is mostly because these people are confused about politics and don't realize where they actually stand. The "just leave us alone" conservative individualist crowd are a group and many of them are liberal but mostly because most people are liberal. Most people can be described as a liberal who just wishes liberalism was somewhere in-between 90s-now liberalism. Many of the leave us alone crowd want 90s liberalism but in lieu of that they must want to be ignored until death, as an adaption imo, to the political powerlessmess of their situation in life. You never hear someone with a lot of power saying he just wants to leave everyone alone as much as he can but if someone doesn't have any power they often say they want those with power over them to have none (the leave us alone crowd).
If liberalism stopped begin egalitarians then they would become both racist and tribal but if liberalism stopped caring about the individual and only cared about the tribe, they'd just become antifas. The biggest problem thus, imo, of liberalism is egalitarianism not individualism; however, staunch individualism is essentially individualism to a fault such that these people undermine their own authority such that a foreign collective group will usurp the power of the individuals then take control for themselves against the now comparatively weaker power of the individuals. This failure from a lack of collectivism because of an overemphasis on individualism tends to be attribute to libertarianism though, not liberalism imo.
I appreciate the thoughtful reply. We actually agree on far more than we disagree here.
You're spot on that liberalism's biggest failure is its egalitarianism: the insistence on treating everyone as interchangeable equals despite the obvious reality that no two people (or groups) are equal. The slide from "equality of opportunity" to demands for equal outcomes, the empire-management origins you described, and the way it blinds itself to race realism all flow from that core flaw. I also agree that many self-described "conservatives" are really just classical liberals who don't realize they're not truly right-wing; they're the least tribal of all, clinging to an individualism that leaves them politically powerless.
That said, I still see the deeper root in classical liberalism's individualism itself. Humans have never been equal; for individuality to exist, differences must exist, and those differences create advantages or disadvantages depending on context. Equality could only exist in a world with no meaningful variation at all. Once you accept that the atomic unit of society is the tribe, not the autonomous individual, it follows that tribes compete. Some tribes have more successful or adaptive traits than others on average. It is also clear that observable differences exist between races of humans; otherwise there would be no perceivable distinctions.
James Lindsay is terrified that conservative White males will accept the Critical Theory tribe's demolition of liberalism, organize along racial and cultural lines, and see that the appropriate response is a race war. He knows that the White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant (or Lutheran) people have more capability and economic production than the rest of the world put together (see WWI and WWII). Should this group become sufficiently motivated, they will be more effective than any other group in history. Lindsay feels that accepting reality as it is leads directly to a racial pogrom to reclaim the western world from a (literal) invasion from Africa and the Middle East.
I see why this makes him uncomfortable.
Brother, while I agree with a lot of what you've said, I must point out that these two statements are mutually exclusive, and you undermine, rather than support, the latter with the former.
The smallest unit of society MUST be the individual, specifically BECAUSE people are unequal. Tribes are formed when enough people, who are all unequal, willingly set aside enough of their differences to form a tribe. If there exists one or more contentious concepts on which only some individuals are willing to agree upon while others are not, multiple tribes are formed, and begin to compete.
The tribe is the smallest molecule of society, certainly, but not the atomic unit.
If you, hypothetically, had three men alone on an island, and each of the three had wildly competing ideas, they would end up in an arrangement that, from the outside, looked like the worlds smallest diorama of tribal conflict. You'd see disagreements, alliances, betrayals, trade, and everything else.
Brother, I see the point you're making with the three-men-on-an-island example, but I think it actually supports rather than undermines the tribal view.
In reality, those three men would almost certainly die fairly quickly. As soon as any one of them is unable to provide food for himself for even a couple of weeks (injury, illness, bad luck hunting/gathering), he is at a massive disadvantage. In a tropical environment where food might seem plentiful, infections run rampant; the first time one cuts his foot badly, he will likely die of infection without group support for care, sharing, or protection.
Individuals on their own die alone and have no reproductive future. As a result, they actively seek out people of like mind or values and join forces with them, or they adapt their values and behaviors to fit the tribe in order to survive. For roughly four hundred thousand years of human history, shunning or exile was effectively a death sentence.
This doesn't deny that individuals are unequal or that they bring different strengths and weaknesses. Quite the opposite: it is precisely because people are unequal that they form tribes, allying with others who complement their weaknesses and amplify their strengths in the face of a harsh world.
Think of individuals as sub-atomic particles. They exist, they have unique properties, and they can interact; but they are far too unstable and vulnerable on their own to form the basic building blocks of a functioning, long-term society. The tribe is the atom; the smallest stable unit that can actually survive, reproduce, and compete in the real world. The tribe isn't just a "molecule" that emerges optionally from individuals; it has been the essential survival unit for our species across almost our entire evolutionary history.
This is what liberals want. Thus a group of 100 individuals compared to another group of 100 individuals compared to another group of 100 individuals will always have the exact same outcome, thus tribes are unimportant because there are no differences between them since there are no meaningful variation among individuals. This is what liberals want and what they believe is reality (even though it goes against reality). To a liberal, if there are meaningful differences between individuals then it's because of oppression so they must work to eliminate oppression. To a liberal all people who want to eliminate this oppression so that there becomes no meaningful differences in outcome between individuals and thus no differences between groups (tribes) of individuals are his tribe and he's very tribal about his tribe. He just fails to see race as a factor in making a tribe because he doesn't believe there are meaningful differences between races except by those caused by oppression which must be eliminated at all costs by his liberal tribe. Anyone who points out the reality of genetics leading to differences among individuals is in the Nazis tribe and must be eliminated at all costs by the liberal tribe because people who accept race realism promote oppression in the mind of a liberal.
So ultimately the problem isn't a lack of tribalism, it's egalitarianism. Liberals refuse to acknowledge the differences among individuals which is why they don't think racial tribes matter.
Yes, exactly. It is the natural conclusion of the liberal world view.
If liberalism is the axiom, then people must be the same to make the philosophy work. We are watching people adjust reality to fit their pet theory, rather than throwing out a broken idea to better understand the world as it is.