Notices by an actual bear in a hazmat suit (guizzy@pleroma.guizzyordi.info), page 4

@oxblood @RikaDerufu I like to frame it under the concept of “social capital”. Social capital is accumulated in a community by shared common experiences between people; everything that makes you look at neighbors and make you think “these are my people”. Solidarity could be a synonym of this aspect of social capital, but I want to emphasis its finite nature which is why I prefer to call it social capital. It’s spent by policy that require individual sacrifice for the community (taxation, draft, restrictions to personal freedoms) and by actions that reduce the ease to which they identify with their community, like “diversity initiatives” and assimilation of immigrants. Once assimilated they are no drain on it, but the act of assimilation requires spending some social capital, usually in proportion of how different from the local population the immigrant is.

Moments where societies were able to make big social capital spends were after large traumatic shared experiences like wars. Maybe the virus will be one, but our governments seem to be spending all of it as it happens, so I’m not sure there’s going to be any solidarity accumulated by the end of it. Other than that, it’s important to note that since social programs and diversity use up the same “resource”; they are in a sense mutually exclusive. You’ll usually find that societies that can afford generous social safety nets are not diverse (Scandinavia, Japan, etc…), and vice-versa, except in authoritarian or totalitarian countries where social capital doesn’t matter at all until it all blows up into civil war. Countries that try to do both are seeing their social order decay, as people are increasingly unwilling to make concessions to a people they are not identifying with.

I’m not necessarily opposed to leftist goals, but the refusal to accept that there are limits to societies that are simply due to basic human nature and not due to “evil greedy racist right wing white people” means that they are currently pushing us towards an abyss. And there are also next to them global liberals cheering them on, salivating at the thought of the authoritarian societies they’ll have the opportunity to build on the ruins of destroyed nation states. Which, as authoritarian societies, will appear immune to the effects of social capital debt, until it suddenly isn’t.