View source for Research:Molecular Democracy/5.1r/3850 Reject-ES-Attitude

<h1>Reject the Existentialist-Structuralist attitude</h1>

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<div style="white-space: pre-wrap; font-family: inherit; background: inherit; border: none;">[... note: a large portion of this chapter has been omitted because the topic is sensitive and I want it to be really good before I post it.]
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<h2 style="margin: 0 0 0.9em 0; padding-top: 0;">anti-essentialism versus the "White attitude"</h2>
<div style="white-space: pre-wrap; font-family: inherit; background: inherit; border: none;">the "White attitude" could just as easily be the South Korean attitude, the Chinese attitude, the Japanese attitude, the Ukranian attitude, or the Mexican attitude.
yet, if we did some simple synonym substitution and produced the statement "we need to get the South Korean attitude out of the United States", or "the United States needs to reject the Japanese attitude", these statements would not sound very agreeable. what about "Black people need to reject the Japanese attitude" or "Latinos will find freedom and mental peace if they push the South Korean attitude far away from them and have nothing to do with it"? those are hardly any better.

the first question these statements should make us ask is, what does it even mean for something to be _abstractly_ Japanese or South Korean if it does not physically belong to a particular country or even a particular immigrant subpopulation? is not every material thing that comes out of Japan or South Korea defined as Japanese or South Korean _by virtue of coming from that population_, rather than there being any reverse relationship? even if many Japanese TV shows have certain thematic commonalities, the sum of those commonalities does not actually _make_ them Japanese, while any TV show that is produced in Japan is by definition Japanese.

similarly, if a unique White subpopulation exists in the United States, then that population cannot by definition produce anything that is not "White-regional". any product, practice, or attitude produced by the White subpopulation should by definition be a form of "Whiteness". if various different attitudes arise inside that subpopulation about the treatment of other populations, these attitudes all have causes other than being "White", and none of these attitudes is more inherently "White". this must be the case, or else White people would be completely incapable of having more than one kind of attitude; all White people belonging to the same overall subpopulation would have the same political ideology and opinions.

yet, a great many countries show this kind of differentiation, where any particular ethnic population fails to have a particular designated "attitude", and instead every ethnicity or nationality has many different competing ideologies and attitudes existing in plurality. White United States people can be Liberal capitalist imperialists. White people can be Communists. White people can be Anarchists. White people can be Existentialists. White people can be wiccan postcolonial theorists trying to convince themselves they are not also Existentialists. Chinese people can be Liberals. Chinese people can be Communists. Chinese people can be Deng Xiaoping followers. Chinese people can be Existentialists. a person's population does not determine what attitude that person will actually have, nor can any particular attitude be named the only legitimate attitude of the population. if that were true, China and Taiwan would probably not have remained separate populations as long as they have, because one of these regions' sets of attitudes would have emerged as the single official Chinese attitude, and if attitudes actually dictated the definition of a population, might also have named itself the single official China. it is fortunate for anyone who might like to keep the conflict between China and Taiwan going that nationalities are in fact not defined by or made of attitudes.

anti-essentialism definition and context

the most likely objection Existentialists will have at this point is that "attitudes" are not meant to refer to large-scale nationalities. if there is a problem Chinese attitude, that would actually refer to the majority subpopulation as it is in the process of oppressing minority ethnicities. problem "attitudes" specifically refer not to whole populations but to subpopulations. however, the above example using entire populations is meant to serve as a simpler analogy — what is true of the interactions between large-scale country populations can also be true of the interactions between subpopulations inside a country. no matter whether we are trying to speak of the United States White-subpopulation attitude or the Han-Chinese-subpopulation attitude, it is still the case that anti-essentialism applies to subpopulations. no subpopulation has an official legitimate attitude by virtue of being an ethnicity. every subpopulation potentially has a plurality of many different attitudes.

if subpopulations are smaller than national populations, how could we characterize the possible space of attitudes they could have? national populations are easy to describe as being composed of classes, and of different opinions about those classes — it is easy to describe members of a national population as having a Liberal capitalist imperialist attitude or a Communist attitude. but subpopulations inherently exist on a different scale. when one subpopulation is oppressing another but not every single one of its members supports that, what kinds of attitudes do these two inner groups of people actually have?

to understand these new small-scale "attitudes", we need to understand the small-scale class society processes of Careerism and chunk competition. (this is covered in part 2.) Careerism is the competition between employable individuals to gain more leverage as to which social links or locations they will occupy within the whole of society, while actively pushing out from society all individuals not as qualified to do their task. chunk competition is the passive growth of structures, institutions, or households until they are stopped by other passively-growing structures extending into the same space. when Careerism and chunk competition combine, they can produce ugly situations where all the individuals in one ethnic subpopulation push out all other ethnic subpopulations as "unemployable" or "undesirable" in order to take up all the available space, created industry, and anything else in the area. this same process can also occur over much larger regions as members of localized sections of the majority subpopulation push each other out of their own region to new regions where they then proceed to push other ethnicities out.

from this perspective, the two major attitudes available to majority subpopulations are right-Existentialism and Molecular Marxism.

an Existentialist leaning rightward might say that Careerism is justified because it gives individuals freedom and allows them to interact outward with reality in the way that makes them the happiest and most fulfilled. if people want to go off and live in a remote corner of the country that only White people happen to live in and struggle to be the best they can at something in order to keep other ethnicities or "bureaucratic city people" from moving to their region, that's fine; individuals should not have to form social links they do not feel like forming or perform outward interactions with the world that do not suit who they are. if minority ethnicities move out of a region of prejudiced Existentialists to form their own community elsewhere consisting of only people like them, that's great; if individuals are in an oppressive environment they should always be allowed to detach from that environment and seek authenticity wherever they may find it.

a Molecular Marxist would find Careerism appalling for its ability to generate excuses to create insular subpopulations that wilfully kill other subpopulations or leave them to die. all Existentialist rhetoric about "freedom" is meaningless if Freedom is the liberty to rank other individuals by most and least valuable to feed. yet, in a world of freely-floating competing civilizational chunks, the ability to freely associate into towns and allocate humanity's experts or producers together into strictly-compatible "clusters of friends" that also function economically can easily turn into just that. how could we possibly solve this problem? would we somehow try to start assigning people places to live, or assigning settlements racial quotas? the answers to this problem are by no means trivial or simple answers that easily emerge in such direct response to the questions. there is no easy shortcut through a small-scale class analysis. nonetheless, there are already a few things we can say. people flowing around in a Careerist fog cloud does not bring happiness. people of different ethnicities should be able to coexist as part of the same population without worrying about which other ethnicity will claim all the slots and push them out, or begin rhetoric that they do not even need to be alive. on the level of basic needs, individuals find slots in populations through outgoing connections of industry reaching incoming connections of customers belonging to other industries in other spatial areas. we can be confident that people will at least have food and housing, if not necessarily completely-guaranteed safety in a world of mutually-hostile subpopulations, if we simply solve some graph theory problems. the first step to solving other needs is to seriously address the concept that individuals in fact belong to populations, and we must discuss the overall structure of how subpopulations including ethnic populations and localized city or town populations will be connected through democratic processes and economic formations into a nation. we cannot realistically expect that there will _not_ be racism if we do not create an actual material method for the absence of racism to exist.
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