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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12416 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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(cross-posted from dsl)

I recently listened to the Tucker and Piers interview, and specifically want to talk about the part on population replacement. Pierced framed the idea of whites becoming a minority in the future with 'so what' and I felt tucker inadequatedly answered the question. (He is not a good debater). More broadly, much of the inadeqacy generally, is folks tripping over themselves to avoid claims of racialism. Everyone is trying so hard not to sound like a racial essentialist, while the other side, gotchas on anything not nailed down.

While thinking about it, I have come up with a propostional idea, I want to share here. I will call it thenetics, a portmaneu of genetics and Theseus (as in the ship). Thenetics is the empty bag that carries genetic and memetic transmission. Much of the disagreement with replacement population (aside from the conflict theory), is one side thinking thenes alone is enough (or better).

Genes tell the story of bodies. Memes tell the story of ideas. But thenes tell the story of arrangements. The social graph, the occupancy of roles, the alignment of persons in an institution across time. When people talk about “losing a country,” they often mean the fading of memes and gene. Thenes are the structural continuity during that transmission or loss.

My thesis is that thenetic continuity without memetic or genetic is empty, and hides actual noncontinuity. It simply preserves the shell of the institution while its substance may have changed entirely.

Consider four churches in one town.

  • Church One is the easy case: a multi-generational congregation with healthy memetic transmission. The families remain, but newcomers are welcomed into the liturgy, the stories, the shared habits. There is continuity of body, of belief, and of arrangement.
  • Church Two loses its founding families over time, but it holds fast to its doctrine, its rituals, its internal grammar. The pews are filled by new faces, but the culture is strong enough that the ideas replicate themselves. Here the genes depart, but the memes endure. Most people still say, yes, it is the same church.
  • Church Three begins like the first, but its memetics fail. The congregation dwindles. The shared language collapses. In desperation, the church reinvents itself attempting to attract a new audience new doctrine, new sensibility, a total cultural rewrite. It never closes its doors, but by the end it is a different creature entirely. Only the thene remains.
  • Church Four suffers the same decline, but its end is literal. The church dies. The building goes dark. Eventually another congregation purchases the property and plants something new with the memetics of church 3. A successor, not an heir.

In my pointof view, Church Four is clearly a successor organization in the same 'space'. But from a Ship of Thesian way, #3 is more like 4 than 1 or 2. In both 3 and 4, the memetic and genetic transmission are dead ended. But the difference is the thenetic continuity of 3, which is irrelevant and a distraction from the idea that it's the 'same' church.

Ship of Thesus To answer the question, it's the same ship at the end if the form and function are the same. Replacing a plank with a like plank is genetic (via the 'blueprints'), retaining purpose and aesthetics are memetic. But if the ship is a car at the other end, it's not the same ship, even if it had thenetic transition. Thenetic continuity alone cannot guarantee identity. Thenetic continuity does not determine identity. It can only disguise the loss of it.

The Family The platonic family is biological: parents raising their own children in a shared home. But adoption shows that concept is not confined to genes. A family can be created through transmission of life, but also through transmission of meaning in shared context (family). The bond is thenetic and memetic in place of genetic

But there are limits to this. If a child moves into the house after you have already moved out, that child is not your sibling. Even if you once slept in the same room, the relation is absent. And if two children overlap in the house for a brief season, the degree to which they become family is not measured by the length of the overlap but by the memetic exchange within it. Family is not the structure of occupancy alone. It is the lived transmission that occurs while the structure is shared.

Finally, consider my own experience as father sending his children to the same church and school of my youth. I have many feelings seeing brand new people and families who have in the intervening 30 years carried on, changed or added to the familiar traditions, ideas, identity, and physical space. There are also other families still there or returned (I have old classmates with kids here too) and/or people who are transitionary (a constant chain on relation). The latter is thenetic. But the thenetics only matter if they are transitioning the memes and social graph. If there was a wholesale rip and replace, it would be more obvious and jarring that it was a 'new' community. But so would it be if 'brick by brick' it had fundamentally changed.

TLDR; I appreciate the recent meme that a country is not just an economic zone, because it generally resonates with how I feel about both my side and the other. But I think it risks over-transactionalizing the people on the other side. My main beef is that a country is not a thenetic structure, to be filled with whatever people and ideas fit in.

Thenetics describes the continuity of an institution’s role-structure across time. An institution remains identifiable only when this structural continuity is joined by an appropriate degree of genetic or memetic transmission. Thenetic continuity alone is insufficient to preserve identity.

To my mind there's a conspicuous absence of a fifth church:

  • Church Five is a multi-generational congregation, with limited influence from newcomers. Perhaps it's in a remote place where the population doesn't change all that much. However over time the subsequent generations find themselves drawn to other beliefs and practices. So much so that after some number of generations there is little in it that would be recognizable to prior generations.

Is my hypothetical Church Five more like a Church Three or more like a Church Two? Is it identifiably the "same" church? It seems like a theory that permits continuity to be established by either genetics or memes would be constrained to say Church Five is the "same" church in the relevant sense.

right, I am not suggesting that the only true institution is one that resists change or evolution. And perhaps my OP misstated this. Genetic and memetic evolution will occur in most (every?) institution, and attempts to resist that are varying levels of tension in the system. I am trying to combine both an analytical frame and a point of view in the frame, which I think is muddying it.

I think there is a natural, healthy debate about what Church Five is, and this is the natural order of an institution or nation. The fact that the US has conservatives and liberals, and an internal debate about what do we progress and what do we conserve, and which parts are core to our identity is a reasonable debate. When a faith or organization says, which parts of our doctrine are non-negotiable, and which parts are developments, the same.

Whether memetic evolution, changes the nature of an institution or not, I think is an open question. What I am suggesting is that when memetic evolution occurs primarily through genetic replacement, something somewhat different is happening (this is akin to the concept of skinsuiting), and conflating the two or trivializing the difference is usually done by pointing to thenetic continuity.

My point of view is that thenetic continuity is less important than it is often made out to be when debating core identity.

I guess it's not clear to me why the memetic change being driven by genetic change is different from the general memetic change. To concretize a bit, I imagine a church founded by, say, Catholics. Consider two evolutions. In one case the descendants of the original founders (for whatever reason) convert to Mormonism and convert the theology of the church the same. In the second case the descendants of the original founders gradually move away or stop attending, but newcomers move in and gradually convert the church toward a Mormon theology. It seems to me that the church is no longer the same church in either case, whether the members are descended from the founders or not.

I also think the degree to which continuity is thenetic varies by institution. Consider, for example, an institution like "The Supreme Court of the United States." Or "The United States Congress." To the extent these institutions are continuous through time I think it is in primarily a thenetic way. In their form or structure.

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