Societies of Strangers: the Western and Islamic approaches (Parts 1 & 2)

You know, if you think about the totality of our history, human beings have not really lived in sprawling cosmopolitan communities for very long. It's only been relatively recently that we came up with nonfamilial, nontribal formulations to organize ourselves. The most natural organizing principle has always been the family and then extended family and then growing out from their tribes. And these sorts of configurations operate with more or less naturally developing sources of authority and order within families, within extended families, within tribes. But when you get bigger and you, you start having communities and societies being brought together with no familial or tribal interconnections, societies of strangers, essentially, then you have to codify the rules.

You have to implement sort of synthetic codes of order and conduct. And the sources of authority in that type of community or that type of society derive from those codes. Authority figures, leaders, and politicians, and so on don't attain their positions through the natural process of proving their usefulness and their value to the family or to the extended family or to the tribe, but through the, manufactured agreed upon system of order. They're functionaries, and their authority is, derived from the system. In other words, it's the system that matters because the system is the only thing, that makes a society of strangers even viable.

Everyone has to agree to abide by the system, and that includes both written and unwritten laws. So, basically, legally acceptable and unacceptable things and socially acceptable and unacceptable things. And all of this must be enforced very rigidly. If the legal matters tend towards lenience, then the social matters must be more coercive. If the official codes of conduct, the laws as it were, provide for greater liberty, then the social codes of conduct will demand greater conformity because a society of strangers is always gonna be on the verge of falling apart.

And the only thing that prevents that from happening is this system. So law enforcement, for example, has prisons. Social code enforcement has ostracization. It has banishment. It has canceling.

You ostracize and marginalize people whom you deem, to be too risky to the system of order, people who don't conform or who seem, less invested in maintaining the artificial organizing principles of the society because everyone has to agree to abide by the system, the official and unofficial system, the law of the land and the of the community. And anyone who does not do that has to be strictly punished because that punishment is basically a form of self defense by the community to preserve the existence of the society itself. But the fatal flaw in all of this is that the system's authority is unconvincing because it is unearned. Conformity with it is simultaneously arbitrary and mandatory. In other words, you have to adhere to it whether you believe it or not simply because it is necessary to adhere to it because of its function.

It has to be this way because it has to be this way, and this doesn't really inspire heartfelt conviction. So then you have to find a way to make it convincing, and that's where indoctrination comes in. This nation that you have built of random people, has to be invested with moral meaning so that the system of order and control can be understood as something that is preserving moral good. But you have to be very careful about what the indoctrination presents as the moral rationale. Because if, for example, your moral rationale is, say, freedom, then you have just created more problems for yourself.

You have complicated the task immeasurably of conformity enforcement. And if you are even more specific and say that the moral the the the the moral rationale is individual liberty, then you've made it even more difficult. So you can see some of the problems that the West has been carrying, particularly The United States for a very long time. I mean, it's very tricky to sort of balance the moral primacy of individual freedom against the existential social need for conformity. And the more you emphasize freedom, the more you have to sort of covertly enforce the restrictions on freedom, with the result being that, the indoctrination collides with people's lived reality, and this causes profound cognitive dissonance because the system that people are living in, bears little to no resemblance to the way it's packaged to them, the way the system is packaged to them.

I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but what Westerners are told is their liberty is actually their irrelevance. It's like being in a prison yard. You can do whatever you like in a prison yard, but no matter what you do in the prison yard, it has no liberatory element. You are confined, and you call that confinement freedom. So you constructed an artificial management system for this vast congregation of strangers and an artificial authority structure.

An authority structure and a management system that is necessary and is mandatory, but is inorganic. It's not a naturally occurring system based on ties of kinship. So you have to imbue it with legitimacy by painting it with a veneer of principle. This makes people feel that their mandatory conformity and adherence to the system is actually voluntary, and that it's a product of their own belief system. But you see, when you have placed freedom at the center of the moral rationale for your system, it can become conspicuous very quickly that the system does not actually allow freedom.

Because obviously, in reality, freedom would be lethal to maintaining a society of strangers. Conformity is the necessity here. There's a reason why the country that is, you know, most famous for being the freest country on Earth, The United States, also happens to have more laws on the books, more regulations than any other country in the world, more than any other country in history, as a matter of fact, and why it has the highest percentage of its population in prison more than any other country. So, yeah, it's conspicuous. The land that is obsessed with the sanctity of individual liberty binds its citizens with laws and regulations more than any other place on earth and jails more of its citizens than any other country.

But to maintain the illusion, you're given, freedom in what does not matter. You're given freedom in what does not touch the system of management and control. Freedom in trivial things. Freedom in whatever will distract you from your actual lack of freedom. Freedom to choose between, you know, 50 kinds of toothpaste, freedom to watch pornography, freedom to fornicate, freedom to commit adultery, freedom to be homosexual, freedom to get drunk, freedom to get high, on and on.

Freedom to do all of the things, that a more traditional familial tribal, social structure would not allow because that sort of a structure has an interest in you being a moral, mature, virtuous person, a serious person, a person who brings honor and nobility to your people. So freedom in the West is a euphemism for irrelevance. So you can be a man in lipstick and high heels because ultimately you don't matter. You can get high. You can be promiscuous.

You know? You can play video games for ten hours a day. You can binge watch entire seasons on Netflix in one sitting because you don't matter as a person. But you better get up when your alarm clock goes off when it's time to go to work. Wear your seat belt.

Follow the traffic laws on your way to work. Don't drive in the wrong lane and comply with all workplace rules once you get there. Don't say the wrong thing. Don't make the wrong joke, and don't take too long in the bathroom. Pay your bills on time.

Pay your taxes on time. Don't violate community guidelines, and pledge allegiance to the flag. You have freedom in trivialities, and even that for only a few hours a day. But it's enough to convince part of your mind that the system is protecting your freedom, the system that you have no choice but to comply with. And, again, that's because it's an artificial system.

So belief in it has to be manufactured. Now, in Islam, of course, we've also grown well beyond, familial and tribal structures, even though those structures are still, very present and influential in our societies. But the difference is our belief preceded our system of management and control. Our system developed from our beliefs. It's organic.

It's not artificial. It's all synchronized. The moral rationale for the system is what gave birth to the system, and the moral rationale isn't freedom and liberty, but submission to the creator. We believe in the laws. We believe in the objectives of the laws, and we understand them.

We don't need to be indoctrinated. We don't need to be fooled or distracted or misled into thinking that we are doing anything other than complying because we want to comply, because we believe in it. We comply even when the law of the land, doesn't impose it. We comply with the Islamic system of order, even when we're free not to. Our whole religion is self compliance with the sharia.

This is something a lot of westerners can't understand. I mean, would we like for the law of the land in Muslim countries to enforce the sharia? Sure. Most of us would. But whether they do it or not, we're gonna keep following it either way.

In the overwhelming majority of Muslim countries, alcohol is legal. Adultery isn't a crime. Hijab isn't mandatory. Nobody forces you to pray. But the majority of Muslims still adhere to the Islamic rulings on these things.

I mean, there's something revealing, you know, about those Western films, that take place in a post apocalyptic world, like a zombie apocalypse or nuclear holocaust or something like that, they always depict a lawless anarchic chaos of violence and, banditry, you know, brutality, a total breakdown of civilization. But in a Muslim version of a postapocalyptic world, we'd be the same as we are now. Our societies would still function the same way. We'd keep following the same rules that we do now. No civilizational breakdown.

And we know this because a lot of our countries are already suffering postapocalyptic conditions, thanks to the West. The destruction and the desperation that you yourselves imagine would cause your people to lose their minds. Millions of Muslims have already experienced and are experiencing today, and they are adhering to the same social management system, the same moral code that they were following before your bombs fell. Those types of movies, you know, those scenarios and things like the purge movies, it shows how much you actually distrust yourselves with freedom, that you think you can't behave properly if you had freedom. It terrifies you, but we'd be fine.

We have Muslims have an infinitely greater capacity for the responsible exercise of freedom than the West.