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Notes -
Oh, I'm aware that what I want is essentially imperialism.
I've struggled with how to think about this.
I think that America's individualism and liberalism are highly unnatural and bad fits for human nature. That's why we had to have the wealthiest and most technologically advanced nation in human history, brainwash most of the nation for 13 years via school and media, cultivate a culture of ripping families apart through an expectation of moving out of your parents' house, and impose a taboo on cousin marriage to make it all work.
This is my difficulty. Once we've done all that. Once we've inculcated individualism and little L "liberalism" in the population, then it seems like you can have a form of federalism (AKA imperialism) that is compatible with a form of libertarianism (AKA doing what you want outside of what you're being forced to do via imperialism.)
But I do understand that the basic counter argument is that maybe we shouldn't strip people of the non-liberal parts of their cultures. Maybe we shouldn't impose an incest taboo, encourage the degraded form of the extended family we call "the nuclear family", and do all the other things that make the form of life we have in America possible.
I genuinely don't have a good answer for this. Individualism and little-L liberalism are the only way of life I know. I'm the child of two parents who both moved to different states than my grandparents, and I now live in a different city than my parents.
I've never known a collectivist society. I've never known a tightly knit small town community. I'm mostly happy, and a foolish part of me honestly believes we're a few reforms away from making this bizarre system of ours work with the 2 million year old hardware humankind is running on. But maybe the neo-reactionary and post-liberal right are correct, and it was all a doomed experiment from the start.
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