From Philosophical Research
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[cr. 2025-08-21T23:19:43Z]
imagine you're a wolf.
on one day you live in a world of open space, abundant prey, and a handful of big and small relatives at your side to protect you. things could hardly be better. even if you were on your own you could probably survive.
then there grow to be a whole lot of wolves in the world. there are so many wolves you almost can't go anywhere without tripping over a wolf.
everything changes. wolves have somehow gotten just smart enough to fence and own entire animal herds. there is no such thing as wandering out into open space away from problem wolves. wherever you go there is going to be a wolf, and whether you get along with that wolf or end up in fierce combat determines whether you get to access the prey inside that wolf's territory. social relationships between wolves become everything. the world is no longer about the ability of each wolf to take down prey, but specifically about how well each wolf fares in combat or conflict resolution with other wolves. any wolf that existing wolves hate for arbitrary reasons will become ill-adapted to existing in this world, perhaps at no fault of its own.
wolves can be very cruel animals at times. whenever there happens to be a wolf that does not want to yield to others, it only has to treat them in a threatening manner in every conflict, and it is untouchable. this is not an inherent biological imperative of wolves, and wolves do not inherently respect this kind of behavior. some wolves that have become unaccountable and "rule" a pack eventually find themselves killed dead by the other members of the pack. it is less accurate to say that wolves are "dominating" animals than simply that they are truly "wild" — there are no particular structures that actually enforce specific behavior on individual wolves, and thus individuals do whatever they want even if it brings devastating consequences to others or to them. the whole population of wolves is composed of wolves, none of which have any concept of creating a better population or enforcing different behavior on individuals, so nobody can necessarily stop them. _there is no wolf democracy._
even if there is no such thing as "wolf democracy", the system will still operate as well as it ever operated. wolves will be born. if they fit into the pack of wolves they were born into, they will simply guard their herd from everyone else. if they do not fit well into their original pack, they will be pushed off to another territory. if the wolves on that territory do not deem them worthy they will bounce from territory to territory, potentially having to get into bloody battles with the wolves of various territories if nobody wants to willingly allow them in. the limited number of territories inherently creates an imperative for wolves to have to be one group or another group, and to _defend_ being one group or another group. if these groups had culture, they would push the wolves to adopt specific identities and lean into particular identities while rejecting other identities. this would happen purely as a matter of keeping groups coherent, because of the way it is impossible to not be alive and belong to a specific identifiable group, and because intentionally maintaining a coherent group is one way to keep wolves from leaving groups and getting into violent conflicts that could be costly to an individual or social unit.
this is a basic working model for the connection between culture and capitalism. capitalism is the state of human beings increasingly occupying every inch of the world. the enclosures that this high population density creates make culture mandatory. culture acts to potentially diminish conflicts between enclosed populations by drawing individuals closer together, but it also paradoxically encourages violence by disallowing different enclosures merging together and insisting that they remain separate, in such state that they will almost inevitably grow paranoid about each other and fight each other. cultures are a unity of opposites. at the scale of an earth full of millions of people or more, the plurality of countable cultures in the form of physical populations of people takes the form of one big smashed-together jigsaw of bordered entities where one entity can expand itself only when another entity is pushed back. this is the general shape of nation-states, and also the general shape of corporations. every kind of nationality people form, from "Chinese" to "Western" to "Catholic" to "Labor Party" and "Tory Party", is formed out of the need for people to make friends specifically to protect them from the utter horror of there being other groups of friends.
this is why, as Marxism has investigated different countries, both nationalities and corporations have sometimes posed such difficulty. to free themselves from empire, people must work and build workplaces. but to operate within workplaces at all, people have to perfectly fit into the requirements of operating workplaces, which are all built around the imperative for each workplace to passively fight off other workplaces and keep them out. with there being as many workplaces as there are, it is quite easy to manage to chain only a few together into a movement while still effectively ending up with two or several fiercely competing countable cultures of people which will amount to capitalism and unravel the entire effort to defeat it. in a similar but different way, for people to be united they must work together and build particular nation-states, but again .
culture is not merely spoken or written "ideology" that tells people not to resist. it is the imperative to operate as part of an actual physical, countable group of people, which obviously cannot be handwaved away unless perhaps millions of people are ready to stop being Indian in order to specifically decide to be British, or stop being Chinese in order to specifically start being United-States. it should be evident why this is disagreeable. as long as capitalism exists and as long as capitalism continues to divide the world into countable cultures, there is no option for not maintaining culture which is not surrendering to exploitation and being incorporated and absorbed directly into another specific culture.
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=> 1740442769 v5.1r/ It is tomorrow morning. Capitalism is gone. ; communist-trump
; scrap I started scrawling this on
=> 1708471689 v4.3/ We _do_ have human rights, but how _can_ we? ; v4r/ 5001 how-can
;
:: cr. 2025-08-21T23:19:43Z
; 1755818383
:: t. wolves
:: t. v5-1_2001_wolves
; v5.1 scraps/ a world with way too many wolves
