WEIRD Nuclear Family and Social Structure as Subjugation
A glorified consequence of feudalism that domesticates the people
Often now, with the increase in discourse of the WEIRD concept and traits, I see poasters riffing about the corruption of Western institutions by ethnocentric non-white groups and families. Contrasted with those peoples are North-West Europeans and the diaspora, who have lived in nuclear families for centuries. These peoples, with their weak familial ties and broken clans, created open, impartial meritocratic institutions and civic organisations and a ‘high-trust’ culture, where you don’t have to be constantly on guard for scams or spend half an hour haggling in the market over a few baskets of fruit.
These institutions and practices essentially define the modern world ranging from academia, the modern judiciary, the corporation, half of Fortune Global 500 companies and the modern state military system. However, essentially all of these institutions and others have been infiltrated and subverted, as many others have written about, implementing policies that disadvantage whites and males, particularly white males.
The response from much of the right-of-Trump crowd has been to advocate for retaking the institutions, and to recreate the high trust societies of the 20th century and before. Yet ‘high-trust society’, and the civic institutions that come with it are the product of the subjugation of the European people by elites and, as we have seen, are fragile and ultimately shatter in the face of even incompetent diversity to be weaponized against the same people that created them.
Poaster Aristocracy
Right-of-Trump internet poasters constantly make references to the old aristocracy of Europe and their habit as something to uphold and restore. They see themselves or at least relate themselves to history as being aristocrats, not as a part of the 99%. A quick mirror test I recommend is if your or your father’s current income matches or exceeds the 97th percentile of income in your country you should relate yourself to history as an aristocrat. If you do not meet this threshold but still see history through the lens of what helps the aristocracy as being innately good, you have been mentally subjugated.
The Perfidious Priest and Aristocrat
The aristocracy is a social class, and that social class has its own interests that it seeks to fulfil. The aristocracy naturally is a very small proportion of the population (0.5% to 2%). To fulfil its interests it steps on the other social classes to their detriment. This ends up being the vast majority of the population. In order to minimise the risks of peasants bargaining or revolting against their lords and to extract maximum taxes, they domesticate the masses. This has the effect of crippling the masses’ means to organise and defend themselves against both the aristocracy and raiders, conveniently fostering further dependence on the aristocracy.
The aristocracy and clergy (the clergy were the second and third sons of aristocrats, wars were fought to continue this) worked hand-in-hand to achieve this, ramping up in west Europe after 700AD. They began enforcing exogamy and monogamy among families, limiting home sizes, criminalising feuding1, criminalising home fortifications2 and expanding the sentence of execution for a wide range of crimes, something was previously unheard of. In the early-modern period this unfortunately went even further, with the ownership of weapons by the peasants being broadly criminalised.
Other means of domestication were coercing the peasantry to live in nuclear families in villages directly side-by-side with the lord’s manor and the church along a common road, allowing effective surveillance, tax enforcement, summoning of forced unpaid labour (corvee) of the peasants to service the church and the lord outside of harvest time.
I want you to visualise the village made of single-family homes next to the church and the lord’s manor as the 15 minute city of 700AD. It succeeded. This lead to the creation of the traits that we associate as being apart of WEIRD. Weak kinship ties, solitary living (separate households from siblings), reliance on services provided by non-kin, high-trust and rule-following.
I have heard and read takes from trad-Cath types and medievalists that the feudal system was a sort of saviour of the weak and vulnerable European peasants, protecting them from open predation. But once you understand that the whole reason why the ‘peasants’ were so weak and vulnerable was due to the intentional policy of the aristocrat-priest elite breaking the peasants’ clans and their literal physical defensive structures the narrative falls apart.
This system of domestication and feudal domination replaced the previous system of self-governing peasant families who formed independent family compounds and administered their own justice through feuding and wergeld (blood money). That previous system was best preserved for our reading in 10th to 13th century Iceland due to its isolation, late Christianisation, low population and geography. It provides abundant evidence of the pre-Feudal order described, albeit with some population-related adjustments until it too belatedly feudalised.
The domestication process always brings immense benefits to the power of the aristocrats and clergy, which comes at the expense of the strength and vitality of the whole. Domestication leaves the people vulnerable to invasion and replacement by the barbarian peoples, who can essentially be defined as free peoples who have not been domesticated in the ways that have been described. Unlike domesticated males dominated by elites, all barbarian males fight, raid and defend for the benefit of themselves and their family, not a just a ‘lord’. They all have extensive experience in doing so.
Every barbarian family unit interlinks with an extended family (clan), which in turn interlinks with a tribe, which in exceptional circumstances can interlink with other tribes to form tribal confederations. As such, barbarian peoples can rapidly rally a massive proportion of the male population to war, and war is something they are very good at. For example, the peak mobilisation of the Roman Empire between 100 and 200AD was 400,000 men out of a male population of 25 million, comprising a mere 2% of all males.
Compare this to the Zulu during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, where they managed a peak mobilisation 50,000 men out of a male population of 125,000, comprising 40% of all males3. Considering that the Germanic peoples were once a warrior barbarian people, it is reasonable to estimate that they could in Roman times rally a similar proportion of their males to the Zulu of 1879.
This feature of the undomesticated barbarian’s social organisation allows the barbarian to routinely topple feeble civilised peoples that vastly outnumber them as they are in the best of cases defended by an upper-crust of warrior aristocrats and their unmotivated and underfed conscripts; or as conscription is often non-viable at the sunset of an empire, mercenaries, when migration pressures bring barbarians upon civilised lands.
Why was all of that relevant? It is relevant because the once impartial and competent institutions that so many on the right wish to restore are the elite controlled substitutes for what was once provided by the clan and the tribe. The clan provides employment, security and justice for its members you see, though it may be less ‘efficient’ than a peak performing, homogeneous high-trust society.
The clan structure was dismantled by long dead elites, but now there is also widespread institutional dysfunction which has left the nucleated peoples (that is, modern whites) without any organisational power which has lead to reduced security, infamous and frequent miscarriages of justice at court, and reduced access to employment.
“We don’t call 911 in this house”
These institutions, even if they could be restored to what they once were, rely on broken kinship structures in order to remain effective. Otherwise, they just become a vehicle for particular families or ethnic minorities, which is not how they once functioned. Maintaining weak kinship required sustain these institutions leaves the group still weakened, vulnerable and impotent in this feralising world. So reject the idea of these institutions. They are the product of an empowered elite and a weakened people and work to further weaken the people.
Anglo-Saxon Castle Doctrine is truly a beautiful thing, and a good manifestation of the attitude I support but limited to the scale of the nuclear family. It lets the individual defend himself and his family and eliminate a criminal from his community without police intervention and fear of prosecution.
Compare this to Europe, like the Prussian slave-state that many rightists worship, even in the 19th century and before there were similar laws to modern Australia with arbitrary ‘force proportionality’ or in France and other areas ‘duty to retreat’ requirements for victims of burglary and home invasion. All laws that reject Castle Doctrine exist solely to spiritually castrate and remind the people of their subjugation to the state.
As we have seen, to go beyond home defence to community-preserving defence we must go beyond the nuclear household, to the clan. Otherwise, as the second half of the 20th century all the way to today shows, when conditions grow bad all the nucleated groups can do is move neighbourhoods or even cities. That is what losing looks like.
Not joining (making use) of these institutions and jobs such as the police when your alternative is being a retail/hospitality/warehouse serf out of a sense of solidarity is the wrong position as we aren’t in conditions where there is any alternative counter-police institution. Yet right now you could use the high pay and status to start and support a large family and acquire property. The idea of ‘retaking the police’ is misguided though, as if the police ever muster the strength defy the courts they will all be fired and removed by the military if necessary.
On a separate but related note, I have seen writers suggest that state-worship and overtly hierarchical or authoritarian impulses are alien to Anglo peoples. Rightists remain befuddled because their options are gay stoner libertarians or some variety of Greek or German-coded aristocrat-ist or totalitarian. The latter two are joke ideologies in the 21st century Anglo world, if not the 20th too.
No one really wants it outside of the fantasy of being able to rule in such a way, which I used to indulge in. But Castle Doctrine, a more fundamentalist interpretation of Castle Doctrine, that expands its scope and scale is drawing from the Anglo well, and can unlike ‘aristocratic fascism’ actually be arguable to both regular and politically engaged people, elite and non-elite alike, even today. It is quite a reasonable thing you see.
A Castle Doctrine which not only encompasses the home, but all space within the property-line would be the first major step. Another could be expanding protections for citizen’s arrest. Fortunately, some Anglo regions are moving in this direction, though others against, with Britain expanding the scope of self-defense in the home in the 2010s and Castle Doctrine immunity being codified across many parts of the United States.
Hold no loyalty to the institutions, do not lament their corruption. When certain groups defraud daycare subsidies, think ‘how can I make use of that?’ or ‘how can we eliminate those subsidies’, not ‘we gotta save the daycare subsidies from those fraudsters!’. When crime increases in an area, it is due to the choice of the courts for not prosecuting, as all crime is committed by a tiny fraction of re-offenders. Those same courts will prosecute you for fighting that crime.
Quadrupling policing resources will not eliminate the crime, but to build an apparatus that may be used against you. The solution is to advocate for greater autonomy and protections for citizens to take action, not to advocate for growing the power of the police state which can always be weaponized by the courts if they have a change of heart.
Petty thieves, perverts and drug zombies which are most of the crime issue in urban areas can be solved at the community level, if the people are simply enabled to physically stop them. This should be the right-of-center ‘activist’ focus area, not tripling police budgets and giving them M4s and Bearcats.
Conclusion
To conclude, WEIRD traits must stop being glorified. These traits are the product of subjugation and the destruction of the European peoples’ autonomy by the elites and the state. This strengthened the power of the elites and the state and came at the expense of the whole. The institutions which were created to act as substitutes for these formerly kin-based services are being subverted, but the response to ‘take back’ these institutions is wrong, as is the desire to retreat but without any kin-based alternative. The institutions will always be weaponized against the mass population, and the nucleated people will be most vulnerable. Use the institutions, take their high salaries if they are available to you to advance yourself, your family and your life and build your own alternative. You don’t need your alternative to be written down explicitly, as a connected family helps family naturally.
This post was more disorganised than I would have liked, there is much more to add. But, to have it connect together smoothly would require too many paragraphs and anecdotes that the length would blow out or otherwise be too jumbled. There is still much to write about on this topic, particularly regarding the death penalty and imprisonment. I hope it gave some food for thought.
§ 78. Feuds and Private Wars. The Truce of God. https://www.ccel.org/s/schaff/history/4_ch06.htm
[Note how the historical sources portray anti-feuding legislation as a ‘peace movement’. The common people were illiterate at this stage. We only have the perspective of the church.]
Edict of Pitres cap. 37 C. “[after reminding people of their fidelity to God] And we wish and expressly command that whoever constructs in these times castella [castles] and firmitates [small fort] and haias [high fences/small-defensive-wall/palisade] without our order, on the Kalends of August they are to have pulled down all such firmitates, because their neighbors and those living nearby put up with much pillaging and hindrances as a result. And (if) any of these men are not willing to pull them down, the counts, in whose counties they have been built, are to pull them down. And if anyone objects to the count’s actions, he is to see that it is made known to us at this time. If anyone neglects to carry out this obligation as we order, the counts are to know, because, just as is preserved in those capitula and capitularies of our predecessors, we will seek such men who are willing and able to accomplish our command as counts and station them in the counties of those (who fail to do so).”
Considering that so much of this document, written in the 9th century, is about addressing the Viking raiding crisis and then they go about criminalising fortifications, even blaming the devastation of the lands on independent men building fortifications, well it’s hard to put into words how frustratingly modern this reads. You know what else is funny, while skimming through the document, I came across a section on the punishment for debasing currency (cap. 23). For gentiles they were to be both fined and stripped naked and beaten with rods, while Jews were only to be fined. Very kind of them. Based feudalism.
This is from a table in the appendix of War Before Civilization by Lawrence H. Keeley. I’ll probably add the number later. It’s a good short book.
Great post. One area where I think much of the modern right is misguided is its high esteem for the nuclear family. I don’t think nuclear families are optimal at all; large, extended kinship networks seem far closer to what humans evolved for.
In my view, this is part of why modern marriage struggles so much. Sustaining a nuclear family places an enormous burden on two isolated adults, and that load is often simply too heavy. The idealisation of the 1950s, arguably the high point of the nuclear family model ends up being quite detrimental when treated as a timeless norm rather than a historical anomaly.
I also think prioritising the nuclear family has contributed to the broader atomisation of society, which shows up today in widespread loneliness and social fragmentation. I’m planning to write more on this, including how the dominance of the nuclear family may have unintentionally contributed to the rise of modern feminism.
I’m not familiar with the acronym WEIRD. I looked it up and found: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Is this what you mean?
Very interesting essay with some very novel ideas, something rare and fascinating unlike most of the dreck and sloppy nonsense that floods my daily feed on this platform. This article along with a few other writers might just keep me from abandoning this platform. You got your points across very well and if you felt this was disorganized, then please do it again!