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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   35127 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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Arguably, low social cohesion would manifest in a less cooperative and thus less productive society with more defectors and worse tragedies of the commons, thus lower GDP. Lower life expectancy could then be downstream from that, in addition to lower social cohesion probably making people less happy and unhappiness is unhealthy in general.

OTOH, I suppose one can (and I would) argue that a society can be cohesive even when its GDP and life expectancy decrease due to reasons unrelated to social or cultural questions (e.g., for reasons of hard economics), and that these metrics are only partially downstream of and partially orthogonal to social cohesion.

... and decrease even as it's GDP is increasing. This is true especially if we assume the liberal theories on the benefits of free trade and immigration are correct.

Increasing GDP per cap makes civil war less likely. Every dollar is another cushion between us and cannibalism.

And I don’t think social cohesion is correlated to likelihood of civil war. The country most likely to fall into civil war would be one containing two groups with high social cohesion who hate each other. Historically they’ve been ethnoreligious groups. A bunch of low social cohesion individuals are not likely to fight one.

I don't disagree with the first statement, but it feels like moving the goalposts. About the second one: I don't know if you can call a society consisting of two groups that hate each other a "cohesive" one, even if there's high cohesion within the subgroups.

He asked me for this:

give me the metrics by which you judge social cohesion, peace and prosperity to be increasing

I don't even know what you accuse me of moving the goalposts from, you're the one who pretended he only said social cohesion.

Taking that one step further - do we need to break down the bonds between people, atomize them as hard as possible, so as to maintain social peace?

No, that is not necessary. I love individual freedom, but if people want to self-segregate, have a trad marriage, wave a flag and sing a song, the state should not intervene. But I don't want individuals forced into collectives, or punished for victimless crimes either, even though it may be good for social cohesion.

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