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See the Arab world for how this pans out when you take it to the logical conclusion. As an American you have the luxury of professing this belief because the entire world around you is made possible by trusting strangers and you, too, benefit from this enormously. You're not actually going to go live innawoods with your cousins and live off the fatta the land.
That trust is a superweapon is exactly why those who can effectively cooperate with more people are more prosperous than those who are stuck with kinship networks. De Beers revenue is $6B. Walmart revenue is $650B.
Or the Chinese guanxi networks. Reliable contract laws, courts, and economic trust of strangers is main engine of Western dominance of the world. Its so baked into Anglo culture that we hardly notice it, like a fish in water. Operate somewhere where this isn't the rule and you notice immediately when its gone.
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Just by the by, can you explain why you typed this in this way?
I've seen it on the Internet before, and it looks like it must be a reference to something, but I can't think of what.
My exposure was the 4Chan post "GRAB SKS, GO INNAWOODS" as a response to the scenario of SHTF.
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It’s just a bad accent.
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(Not OP)
innawoods = 4chan (?) slang for rural living away from big city degeneracy
living off the fatta the land = the dream of George and Lenny in Of Mice and Men
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Gravity theory of trade actually explains our trading flows a bit more than strict comparative advantage. That is, you do trade with Californians more than ever one else, and then Americans more than everyone else, and so on and so forth.
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Because it's Friday night... I think you should trust your closest relatives, not actually breed with them.
But yeah, in all seriousness, I think that living in a high trust society is fucking awesome and I lament its loss. I tend to err on the side of more trust, rather than less. But trusting strangers the same amount as relatives is pathological pro-outgroup bias.
One implies the other. Cousin marriage is a driver of low social trust- that’s the upfront reason it’s so destructive(the genetic issues usually take multiple generations to manifest). And low social trust drives towards marrying in the circle, which eventually means cousins.
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Living in a high trust society is awesome precisely because you can trust people who aren't related to you by blood.
Who's at the top of trust rankings? It's not the Arab world. The highest ranked Arab country is Morocco at 17% of people saying that people can generally be trusted. The US is at 37% and the top spot is Denmark at 74% (inb4 Denmark is an Arab country).
Structuring society around kinship networks is a coping mechanism to deal with the fact that your countrymen are bastards and is correlated with living in an impoverished country. It's certainly not how you get and stay rich.
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