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It's fair to identify particular values of particular creedal societies as being problematic. But as a trivial proof, an ideal creedal society is always better than an ideal ancestral society because the ideal creedal society can just capture whatever makes an ancestry "good" without the intermediary layer. It's like this: if you want the most law-abiding people in your society, you can admit people based on some proxy for law-abidingness, e.g., good SAT scores-- but that's always going to end up being less effective than just admitting them based on their actual history of abiding by the law. That applies ESPECIALLY if you take a strongly hereditarian position. If your entrance mechanism is looking for common descent, that actually relatively disadvantages the pro-social traits you assume are correlated with the descent.
That theory might work out for a society of completely atomized individuals, but...I dunno, I realize my perspective here is outdated and my even own life increasingly looks unlike it. But isn't a society a rather complex web of relationships? Not just on the level of the individual, but of places, families, institutions, cultural touchstones, language...Just dragging individuals out of one society to drop them into another results not in a society as I understand it but rather in a disjointed mass of people. There's probably a wide inferential gulf between us here. I'm sure that if you throw people into a creedal melting pot and wait for long enough, you do get something that resembles society-as-I-understand-it, but on the other hand I'm also pretty thoroughly convinced that if you keep stirring and throwing in new people that have nothing to do with the ones already in, what you get instead is just atomization again.
I agree that forcefully relocating people is unlikely to end well. The secret sauce is voluntary immigration. Immigrants are self-selected for motivation, risk-taking, ambition, intelligence, and willingness to assimilate. It's not a hard rule, I admit, but it holds extremely often. Isolated ethnic communities often manage to maintain a separate language and culture from their parent state for literally thousands of years (looking at you, Basque country)-- but immigrants to america lose everything except a surface veneer of their homeland within three generations, tops.
Poor phrasing on my part. I didn't mean to imply forced relocation. I was talking entirely about voluntary migration, with at most the usual push and pull factors at work. I don't really see migration as it happens nowadays as the deliberate action of an individual acting on a well-thought out plan (though yes, there surely are some such), but mostly as people who failed to make a life for themselves taking the easy way out and riding on giant preexisting streams of migrants.
That is a hilariously naive view. Yes, there surely are some such, but we live in an age not of singular individuals or families packing up to politely request a shot at becoming Westerners, but millions of people quite literally swarming borders to become undocumented residents or asylum fraudsters, mostly in such societies that offer the most no-strings-attached public welfare.
America isn't the only country that sees immigrants. And quantity matters - one immigrant among a million natives gets assimilated, sure. Throw a boatload of immigrants at a village and leave it at that, and they might get assimilated, okay, but the nature of the village will change in the process - cohesion will be lost, trust will decrease. Put twenty million immigrants next to sixty million Germans and the former don't need to adapt worth a damn. They form their enclaves, their ghettoes, their parallel societies, and given enough weight and time can and, as happens, actually will end up assimilating the natives.
If it's the easy way out, that must be because of either or both of these factors:
If we fix #2 (which to be real, we should be doing regardless of the immigrant question) then there isn't any problem.
That's a europe problem. Luckily, america is better than europe: we get way more illegal immigrants, which are the best kind, because they're ineligible for the most expensive forms of public welfare (in the non-stupid states) and therefore prove themselves to be the motivated kind by working hard for low pay.
You're right. Unfortunately, the whole world isn't america. That's their problem, and they should fix that. They can start by adopting our hyper-assimilationist culture and laws if they're leery of direct annexation, but I wouldn't hesitate to make the UK airstrip one if asked.
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Descent may be harder to fake and easier to test for though, at least at low resolutions.
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