On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to an older tweet about the replacement of “original” Romans during the Republic with other ethnicities over the course of the Empire:
Any time a nation allows slavery, de jure or de facto, the business owning class immediately tries to replace the working class with slaves.
If they succeed, the nation collapses and everyone dies. A nation cannot survive if it’s populated by slaves.
Why?
Because nations are what Kurt Vonnegut would call a “granfalloon” … his word for an association that only exists because people believe in it.
Now Vonnegut, who was a liberal and therefore wrong about everything important, meant to mock the concept of nations and tribes by coining this term. He believed them to be unnecessary throwbacks to humanity’s primitive past … a delusion he was able to sustain because he never had to try existing without one.
Granfalloons are indeed arbitrary — you could base them on anything — but humans cannot survive without them. Because humans are a pack animal.
If you drop your cat off somewhere in the woods at night, assuming he is a healthy and physically fit cat, he will likely survive, regardless of his unhappiness at the sudden deficiency of chin scratches and clean laundry to sleep on.
Try that experiment with your dog, and he’ll die.
Why? It’s not because cats are smarter than dogs. They’re about the same.
It’s because cats are not a pack animal. A cat doesn’t need other cats to survive. The basic unit required to execute all cat survival strategies is one cat.
Dog survival strategies work just fine, too, but they require multiple dogs. A lone dog will die because he cannot execute his survival strategies by himself.
And so it is with humans.
The great error of the classical liberal worldview is that, because history is full of tribes fighting wars over scarce resources, that it was the tribes, not the scarcity, that caused conflict.
So they decided they were going to get rids of tribes, and nations, and religions, all the granfalloons, and just glue everything together with economics. And there would somehow be world peace.
Kurt Vonnegut was a dreamer.
Unfortunately for all of us, he was not the only one.
So the experiment was carried out, and in every single place it was carried out, things got observably, obviously worse. Sometimes “gosh the boomers had it way easier than us” worse, and sometimes “what shall we do these corpses, Comrade Commissar” worse, but always worse.
Because economic incentives alone cannot hold a society together.
Economic incentives, without ethnic or cultural solidarity, get you nothing but massive robbery and fraud.
It’s why the Biden Administration let millions of third world savages into America. It’s why Proctor and Gamble sells you poison food, and why the American Heart Association takes their money to lie to you and say it’s healthy. It’s why every product you buy, from your Tesla to your laptop to your security camera system, tries to spy on you and control how you use the thing you paid for and theoretically own. It’s why you’ve never held the same job for more than three years, because they either laid you off or gave you two percent raises every year until you had to find a new company to pay you what you’re actually worth.
When there is no granfalloon, there is no incentive not to cheat. And no, fear of punishment doesn’t work. The police cannot arrest, try and convict everyone. And when there is no granfalloon, the enforcers themselves have no incentive to actually perform, instead of looking just busy enough to get paid, or taking bribes to look the other way.
An atomized group of individuals, unconnected by a granfalloon, have no morality, because morality isn’t something an individual has. It’s something a tribe has, because what the word “morality” actually means is the system of behavior that tribe members display towards each other.
A slave has no morality. He has no sense of responsibility, not only for the nation, not only for his masters, but even for his fellow slave. He is homo economicus, the man who responds purely to incentives of reward and punishment.
A slave has no granfalloon.
Kurt Vonnegut famously wrote “If you wish to examine a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon.” By which he meant that such associations are nothing but a puff of air, and therefore unimportant.
But having been surrounded by air all his life, in abundant supply, Kurt had forgotten that air is important.
You need it for breathing.
Try removing the skin of a SCUBA tank.
