I came across a meme the other day where a right-wing troll asked why left-wing people accept various anti-natalist, anti-nationalist (and presumably anti-white) tenets.
In the average person, issues like abortion and immigration are functions of one’s kinship group that holds certain tenets to be good and true. Those functions will shift over time (just as the Apaches, moving east, shifted the household to patrilocal1). But the principle will never be “reproductive rights” or “the right to be whatever gender” or “the right to marry no matter what” themselves, but rather affiliation with the kin group, which in this case is with a political party that dominates their schools and mass media.
Being critical of these functions is pointless, because you are simply being critical of one’s kin.
By kin, I don’t mean one’s biological family. The idea that kin is purely biological is a modern conceit. One’s kin is simply one’s association. Kin can include everything from biological kin (or not) to cousins, neighbors, pastors, rabbis, cats, celebrities, and imaginary aliens. Some simple litmus tests are, “If you are murdered, who will avenge you?” and, “If X were murdered, would you avenge him/her/it?” Another example: “Who can you marry? Who can’t you marry?” or “Who gets your inheritance? Who absolutely cannot have your inheritance?”
(If I had to identify my kin group, it begins with my children and then my parents in the first degree, then some biological and affinal family members and certain fellows in my professional, faith, and philosophical groups in the second degree, then my broader biological/affinal kin and professional fellows in the third degree, etc. Celebrities, politicians, and animals and other non-humans are on the far outskirts. To use the Chinese system of mourning as quoted by de Groot in The Religious System of China, those would be beyond the fifth degree and therefore not worthy of any of my mourning. I won’t be upset if most (or any) politicians or celebrities die, even ones I like (unless I am personally connected to them, and I’m not connected to any politician), because I have too much attention directed at my inner kin groups. Those groups comprise both left- and right-leaning individuals, so I like to think that politics and mass media have a minimal influence on my kin sentiments. I have no precedent for my personal orders of kinship, but I don’t think many people have such precedents. We’re in an age when each person is sort of in free fall and trying to establish a kin group, or escape one for some other broader kin group.)
Being critical of these functions blinds the right to the fact that their kin group only exists because the left kin group exists. Just as two gears mesh to drive a water wheel, two kinship “gears” mesh to drive the American economy. For every function on the left, there are reciprocal functions on the right. And since kinship is upstream from religion and language, a Christian who is steadfastly against abortion finds himself looking at the homeless population as a product of social disease, instead of as fellow, fallen people. They also advocate the nuclear, patrilocal family and universally abhor polygamy, the levirate, and cross-cousin marriage, even though these are advocated in the Bible.
(A simpler example is one’s perspective of Disney: the right sees “pre-woke” Disney as good, which is odd because all “pre-woke” Disney films still advocate breaking from the nuclear home and going out to the frontier, which is gone in the USA and is producing all kinds of mess. More on that later…)
Language is also downstream from kinship. The right and left use the same words like “equality,” “gender,” “property,” and “mental health,” but they have vastly different (even opposite) meanings. These again are enmeshed in a kinship system. They have nothing to do with the Bible. Both sides read the Bible very differently. Normally this would cause a split into dialects, but mass media erased the linguistic “frontier” and now everyone’s fighting over the definitions of the same symbols.
Even one’s scientific beliefs are dictated by the kin group. For instance, the right has fallen for myths like the notion that chimpanzees can fight with weapons, or that “pre-civilization” was comprised of various wandering nomads who had no kin groups. The worst is like what Jordan Peterson claims, that the single mother household is due to the “hypergamous woman” who has evolved to stupidly mate with dangerous men who abandon the home, leaving her and her children to the care of the state. This is nonsensical: there is no marriage in ancient society, no bride OR groom, who felt they were marrying “down,” and yet to complete the cycle of kinship, half of all situations involving “down-marrying” are justified as “up-marrying” by adjusting the marriage price. If single mother households tended to vote red, the right would have some other evolutionary explanation. But facts are beside the point. One will simply believe these myths if their kin group demands it.
This is all easily understood as a kinship system. Functions like “pre-woke Disney is good”, “homelessness is a social disease,” “equality = meritocracy,” “legal guns are net-net deterrents,” and “family = bilateral patrilocal monogamy without divorce or levirate” are functions of the right-leaning kin group. Religious views, language, and scientific beliefs are all downstream from that.
The right accuses the left of not having principles. In reality, the kinship system that underwent huge changes with the frontier-grab is still trying to find its footing, and all the weird social stuff is an off-gassing of this. The right must naturally follow along, or else there’s no political economy. I would love to see the political economy fizzle out somehow, just as the “afterlife economy” has mostly fizzled out (we make fewer payments to the dead than was common in ancient China, Egypt, Rome, Greece, etc.). But changing this requires some kind of radical change against the current vector.
If one wants to set their kin group to spec, the best one can do is simply not partake in the broader kin groups. In ancient China this was illegal. If you didn’t make offerings to your dead ancestors, you could be flogged and blamed for outbreaks of plague or famine. In modern America, political abstinence is still scorned (“You didn’t vote???”) and abstaining from certain token (and rushed) vaccines cost many people their jobs. But at least we’re not asking each other, “What are you doing for LGBT awareness month?” or “How are you celebrating our forefathers this Fourth?” People who ask these things are clearly instigating and we seem to be well guarded against that. I do see a trend toward a live-and-let-live approach to one’s kinship group, but at the same time the two parties seem all up in each other’s business more than ever, and if this blows up it will likely harm many innocent onlookers.
The more one puts their attention solely in mass media, universities, and the political system, the more one will naturally fall in with these monolithic kin groups running the USA, and by extension the world.2