Read this article.

There has been a lot of chortling and snickering about Indians in the right-wing sphere with their concept of Izzat—basically, ultra-concentrated shame culture, something like the Chinese concept of face (as in “saving face”). You don’t have to love Indians to see that this institution, however bizarre it seems to us, is completely short-circuiting the West’s firmware. We have no defenses against it.

Izzat has been cast as “foreign” to white societies, but it’s not. We had something very much like this before the WEIRD personality developed only a few centuries ago. Whites are not individualist guilt-culturites who love freedom and space and small families. That is not who we are, certainly not primordially—that is a recent innovation. Those in the radical right (and it’s most of us) who think that this is “white culture” are doomed to fail. It is not white culture. It was a luxury that we can no longer afford.

WEIRD culture is a great example of the Lindy effect. You know the one—where a thing is judged as valid by how long it’s been around. And in the grand sweep of (pre-)history, WEIRD is very new. And like all new things, especially revolutionary new things, it is thin, superficial, and not long for this world.

WEIRD is going away because WEIRD has now completed its natural trajectory—dissolving the pre-political social capital upon which high-trust societies stand. This is all to say that high-trust societies are fragile and not something we should fetishize or even strive for. High trust is anti-reality. Tribalism is the default: a world of low trust, and societies built around social technologies to navigate that low trust.

Anyone who advocates a return to WEIRD—saying “this is who we are”—is essentially advocating suicide.

The radical right is closer to putting its finger on the problem than any other movement today. But it’s still not quite there.

We are getting close.

The future is TRIBAL.