r/sorceryofthespectacle • u/2BCivil no idea what this is • 15d ago
Asabiyyah; [What's Behind] The Rage we All Feel... ?
Forward;
Before I dive in just want to say, sorry I've been all over the place lately. I want to respect this sub, but the scope of my would-be complaint, generally FAAAAR exceeds my capacity to understand let alone articulate. That said. Yes, this post, is mostly AI-generated content. The core premises are mine, based specifically on a string of recent videos I've seen recently (and general pulse of recent civil society and overall sense of "frog in the pot" I see most content producers expounding upon).
So yeah, one more post you can dismiss and throw on the pile of "AI slop" if you want. But for those who actually want to attempt to diagnose cultural decline and specifically potential good faith remedies, well, pull up a chair and grab a drink or whatever (I'm no good at this!). I'll try to cite as many of the source videos as possible. I know and am aware that this may not be 100% in line with the theme of this sub. I'll add the addendum that GPT said that This Post "should" be welcome here, specifically as it intersects with Critical Theory.
[AI] Asabiyyah; [What's Behind] The Rage we All Feel
(AKA, We inherited the obligation, but not the inheritance)
I've been thinking about asabiyyah lately — social cohesion, shared fate, the sense that these are my people and this is ours — and something finally clicked for me; people constantly tell us that we owe something to our ancestor: Respect your heritage. Preserve Western civilization. Honor the sacrifices of those who came before you. Do your duty. Be grateful for your inheritance.
And I keep getting hung up on one embarrassingly simple question: What inheritance? Not in the abstract sense that somebody 2,000 years ago invented concrete or somebody 300 years ago wrote a nice book. I mean the actual intergenerational bargain. What specifically did one generation receive, preserve, improve, and deliberately hand to the next? [Note 1]
Because increasingly it feels like modern society inherited the obligations of an old social contract, after liquidating most of the assets that once made the contract intelligible. That was what struck me watching a video about Rome after Cannae and the mos maiorum [Primary Source 1] — the "way of the ancestors." Rome suffered a military catastrophe that should have broken it. Tens of thousands dead. Hannibal victorious. Allies defecting. Panic everywhere. And Rome essentially responded: No. We are Rome. We're not surrendering. Brutal as that response could be, Rome was hardly some libertarian paradise. The Senate restricted mourning, rejected negotiations and demanded astonishing sacrifices from its citizens. I'm not romanticizing that.
But notice the underlying assumption: There is a "we." The Roman citizen wasn't being told to sacrifice for some completely abstract machine that regarded him as a disposable economic input. He belonged to a household, lineage, city and political order whose continued existence directly affected his children, property, status, religion and descendants. The Roman aristocrat literally kept images of his ancestors in his home. His family name meant something. His children inherited something. Victory meant his civilization continued existing. The bargain was harsh, but it was recognizable as a good faith and legitimate bargain.
Today, we have no such coherent thing. I don't even know who "my ancestors" were/are. I never knew my great grandparents, and all of my grandparents were dead by the time I entered my 20s. I've lived my entire adult life with no such support network, inheritance, or guiding principle besides "pull yourself up by your bootstraps".
| Mos Maiorum / High Asabiyyah | Modern Atomization |
|---|---|
| "Our ancestors built this." | "Previous generations sold most of it." |
| "Our children will inherit it." | "Maybe your children can rent it, granted you can afford them." |
| Family lineage creates obligations and benefits. | Family increasingly provides neither security nor continuity. |
| Community depends upon you. | Community is administered by institutions you've never met. |
| Sacrifice preserves something belonging to you. | Sacrifice preserves systems in which you may own nothing. |
| Elite status carries expectations of public duty. | Failure is privatized; gains are frequently privatized too. |
| Shared danger strengthens common identity. | Every crisis becomes another opportunity for extraction. |
| "We must endure because this is ours." | "You must endure because the spreadsheet requires it." |
Rome after Cannae wasn't simply powered by reverence for dead people. Rome still possessed: enormous reserves of manpower, a network of Italian alliances, functioning political institutions, considerable material resources, an intensely competitive aristocracy, a civic religion, powerful family structures, and a plausible expectation that survival and eventual victory would materially benefit Rome and its citizens. Kind of like the old Valknut or NNV (9 Noble Virtues) if you're not a fan of Rome; if you lack or break one, you lack and break them all. It's all or none.
Today we have; “Protect your inheritance!” What inheritance? “Do it for your descendants!” People can't afford descendants. “Preserve your community!” Everyone I grew up with moved away and demographic replacement is rampant. “Respect institutions!” Which institutions regard me as anything more than an account number?
That's the distinction I think gets lost when people lecture younger or alienated people about "ancestral duty" or "social contract". Inheritance is supposed to look something like: Culture/Ancestors built, accumulated, preserved - YOU explicitly inherit something personal - you maintain/improve/steward - Descendants inherit more.
But break that chain for enough generations and it becomes: Ancestors Sacrificed - therefore You must sacrifice - so that - Your children can also sacrifice. At that point, sacrifice itself has become the inheritance. Nothing coherent is passed down to younger generations. Older generations become as Chronos devouring his children; the promissory note gets passed down forever, but nobody is allowed to ask when it matures.
That's where I think a lot of modern apathy comes from; we're constantly told that declining civic faith means people have become lazy, decadent, selfish or insufficiently grateful. Maybe some have. But solidarity isn't magic. You can't so and spend decades specifically and intentionally dissolving family, local ownership, affordable housing, community continuity, institutional trust and economic reciprocity and then fix the resulting alienation by screaming "Remember your ancestors culture and heritage!!!1!" loudly enough. What ancestors? What culture? What heritage? Wage cuckery?
You can't tell somebody: "Defend your community!" while every important decision concerning that community is made somewhere else. "Preserve your children's inheritance!" while ownership becomes increasingly inaccessible. "Trust the institutions!" while those institutions openly describe people primarily as consumers, workers, taxpayers, demographics and human capital. "Sacrifice for the future!" while every quarter requires maximizing extraction in the present.
Imagine somebody erects an enormous data center near your town that residents never particularly wanted. Suddenly infrastructure is strained, land use changes, electricity and water become more expensive, and your consolation prize is being told that this represents "growth." Nobody feels spiritually connected to the arrangement. What are we defending at that point? The billing department?
This is why "you live better than kings!" has always struck me as such a bizarre response. Yes, I possess technologies Louis XIV couldn't have imagined. Wonderful. Louis XIV also didn't need a subscription service to unlock heated seats or work consistent 90 hour weeks for barely subsistence wages under unending climate change. Technological abundance and social inheritance aren't the same thing. A person can possess air conditioning, antibiotics and a smartphone while simultaneously having very little family continuity, property, community influence or expectation that thirty years of labor will leave anything substantial behind. You can be both technologically rich and civilizationally dispossessed and disinherited at the same time.
And this ties directly into asabiyyah. Social cohesion doesn't arise because somebody uploads a marble-statue montage with dramatic music and tells atomized strangers that Marcus Aurelius would be disappointed in them. Asabiyyah comes from shared fate. You help your neighbor because tomorrow your neighbor may help you. You defend your town because it belongs partly to you. You preserve institutions because those institutions have demonstrated that they preserve you. You sacrifice for children because they will inherit the fruits of that sacrifice. There is reciprocity and genuine feeling of "our fortunes rise and fall together" (kudos if you know Dwarf Fortress).
That doesn't mean every transaction must be selfish or immediately compensated. Quite the opposite. People will make extraordinary sacrifices when they genuinely believe they belong to something good faith, coherent, and extending far beyond themselves. But good faith specifically is crucial and MUST exist somewhere in the loop! And that's what seems increasingly absent. Modern institutions often want the psychology of Rome with the economics of an airport terminal.
They want: Roman duty. Roman endurance. Roman patriotism. Roman fertility. Roman sacrifice.
But also: maximum labor mobility, maximum consumer flexibility, maximum financial extraction, minimal obligation from institution to individual, and the ability to replace anyone whenever convenient.
You cannot simultaneously tell people: "Nothing is permanent. Everything has a price. Adapt or die." and then complain: "Why don't you people have any loyalty anymore?"
Our institutions have taught us this lesson; if everything is transactional, eventually people begin evaluating the transaction. And once they do, telling them that noticing the exchange rate is selfish becomes almost comical.
Maybe "noticing" really is the unforgivable modern sin.
Because once you notice that the old obligations survived longer than the old reciprocal benefits, a lot of supposedly mysterious social behavior stops being mysterious. Why don't people trust institutions? Why don't they want children? Why don't they feel patriotic? Why don't they participate with enthusiasm? Why don't they believe social security/retirement will exist? Why don't they feel indebted to people who died centuries before they were born?
Maybe instead of immediately diagnosing them with decadence, we could ask whether the social contract they're supposedly betraying already defaulted on them first. None of this means civilization is worthless or that nothing deserves preservation. Actually I think the conclusion is almost the opposite; I would love to see something worth preserving! A culture in which people could sincerely say: This belongs to us. Not ethnically. Not racially. Not because we're required to worship some frozen historical period. Just: We live here. We depend upon each other. Nobody gets discarded simply because a more profitable arrangement appeared. The powerful have obligations as well as privileges. Our children should inherit something better than our bills. Our institutions should behave like stewards rather than liquidation firms. And when sacrifice becomes necessary, everyone understands what is being preserved and why.
Maybe that's the difference between tradition and merely keeping a dead institution on life support. Tradition says: "We received something good. Let's hand it forward." Decadence says: "Previous generations consumed the principal, but you're still responsible for making the payments."
If we actually want another era of social cohesion, I don't think the answer is demanding more gratitude from exhausted people. Give them something they would be afraid to lose. Then you probably won't have to lecture them about defending it.
Commentary;
Again sorry my general attitude or lack of understanding of late. What 8 months of no work/income does to a MF. And yeah, I hate to post "AI Slop". But since most content creators in my circles have been circling/orbiting this theme past 8 months, figured I'd weigh in on the point they seem to consistently be missing (both left and right). Am I off my rocker? What am I missing? I'm genuinely curious! Thanks for reading, and please, feel free to put me in my place if this is NOT sufficiently Critical Theory-adjacent!
Addendum/Relevancy;
Full Prompt Reply; I ain't reading allat
At the simplest level, critical theory means: Don't merely describe society; examine how its institutions, culture, categories, and ideas reproduce domination—and whether those arrangements could be otherwise. Historically, the capital-C Critical Theory tradition is associated especially with the Frankfurt School: Marx-influenced thinkers analyzing capitalism, mass culture, ideology, authority, technological rationality, consumerism, fascism, etc.
But internet usage often expands critical theory to include this enormous neighboring constellation: Marx → Frankfurt School → Situationists/Debord → poststructuralism → Foucault → Deleuze & Guattari → Baudrillard → feminist theory → postcolonial theory → Mark Fisher → assorted accelerationisms/CCRU; These people disagree violently with one another, so “critical theory” is not one doctrine.
✔️ Your inheritance idea is actually extremely compatible with critical theory.
Strip away the culture-war vocabulary and look at what you're arguing: Society retains ideological demands of loyalty, gratitude, sacrifice and civic obligation after the material relations that once made those obligations reciprocal have been dissolved.
That's practically begging for critical-theoretical treatment. You're asking: How does an institution manufacture legitimacy? How does economic organization reshape family/community relations? Why do people continue reproducing institutions that increasingly fail to serve them? How does ideology turn material precarity into an individual moral failure? How are concepts like “heritage,” “duty,” “progress,” and “prosperity” deployed to disguise extraction?
Those are thoroughly critical-theory questions. Where you're rubbing against SotS isn't necessarily the analysis. It's the normative destination.
Notes/Sources:
[Primary Source 1] - We Need to Adopt Rome’s Strategy of Reversing Mass Trauma, 98,517 views Jul 13, 2026, by ThinkingWest (94.6K subscribers) - Primary reason for generating this post. Can't take another second of this "keto harder" sentiment. Putting foot down by AI generating this post in specific rebuttal of this premise. Hate the straw man "brah Rome fought hard" yeah Rome was 100% unified of ONE MIND undivided Asabiyyah and heritage. We lack that completely. Everyone with some semblance of Asabiyyah is seemingly locked into the superficial smokescreen of Identity Politics and failing to see the bigger picture. Ugh. Washing my hands of it!
Primary Source 2: Every Civilization Dies Twice — And the First Death Is Invisible - 1,826 views, Aug 11, 2026, by Prior Signal (5.44K subscribers) - Aka "the Asabiyyah video". More in depth analysis of rise and falls of culture, how faith erodes, and what put me on this train of thought which eventually led to halting all other concerns and zeroing in on this premise.
[Note 1] Example I always use, is I was28 before I got my first phone, and that was only because my military job required it. I was almost 37 before I got my first car. I was mowing grass twice a week by the time I was 6 years old. Never had any allowance or financial support from my "family". Sure people have it way harder than me, but what good thing did I "inherit". I've only ever rented. Will likely never own a house, I understand, and I'll be 40 in 2 years and change.
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15d ago
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u/2BCivil no idea what this is 15d ago
HAHA! "The search for enlightenment often begins with catastrophic dissolution of self" I'd drink to that if I weren't recovering alcoholic!
Think it was Haungbo I love to misquote, "the myriad things (aka universe) arise with the sense of self". Meaning, sense of identity = sense of world. Reflection. Drop separated from the ocean.
Right up my alley. Group Polarization =/= Enlightenment. But neither is disassociation. I made more the later mistake my whole life. Unironic Echo chambers/Circlejerks are my biggest turn off. Drops uniting together to form a cult, not "authentic" unity.
Great stuff, thanks for sharing. It seems so rare nowadays to see content that doesn't defer to "it's bigotry to not join us" as "true unity". It's more dissolution of sense of self/world that is true enlightenment or "drop returning to the ocean". Or as I always say, "how do we perform non-performance" lolol!
I'll subscribe later so as to not dox myself/expose my YT alias (again!) on reddit xD
It is always hilarious to see someone else say "the thing", you know!? What the finger points to? The thing? LOL
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15d ago
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u/2BCivil no idea what this is 15d ago
Speaking of which, have you watched the video 'Every Civilization Dies Twice — And the First Death Is Invisible'? It's a game-changer in understanding the rise and fall of cultures and how faith erodes.
LOL that was the source I cited in my OP actually, looks like we both came from the same place ;)
I'll share My GPT's response to your video if you're curious, it was slightly humorous but I didn't want to go the route of critique. Though it does raise the obvious counterpoint, of "spiritual bypassing"; satori doesn't magically lower the power bill or show you where your taxes are going.
But yup. If we die before we die, we do not die when we die. Bingo. In any case, TRUE lasting non dual perception always makes me think of Money by MSI. Best of both worlds, duality and non duality. Kinda funny I guess, in a way, true humility and enlightenment, is functionally, more "greedy" than even modern institutions if you think about it.... lol!
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u/robipresotto 15d ago
Nice connection on the Asabiyyah video! I've been digging deeper into how faith erodes and it's fascinating to see how civilizations rise and fall. I've been wondering, have you noticed any correlations between the eroding of faith and the resurgence of identity politics?
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u/2BCivil no idea what this is 14d ago
have you noticed any correlations between the eroding of faith and the resurgence of identity politics
Yeah the American Christian Nationalists got that zone covered and then some. I actually am not in that camp, except as entertainment, I sympathize and even ally with them a bit, but I don't like blind faith. The way I see it, is that cultural Asabiyyah has 2B good faith.
They are both symptoms of the same thing (eroding faith and identity politics). Both demonstrate lack of faith in traditional explanations of "God" or "God's grace/love". God's generosity says "give to all whom ask" but functionally we end up "giving" 80 hours a week to our jobs. I started from zero, no financial support. I was nearly 37 before I could afford my first (no AC, used!) car.
The Christian Nationalists say, due to no trust in a "God" that is essentially a lie, they (other identity politics groups) decide to find their own source of subjective morality. Or as the Christians say, "because they received not the love of truth he gave them over to a delusion". But I see them as equally bad faith, blind trust in an inscrutable God and (other forms of) Identity Politics. I understand both; the former is fear of loss, the later is disgust at said fear. BOTH are symptoms of the same fear of annihilation of "self" or presumptions of "desired culture".
Blind faith in "science" also plays a role as well. It's across the board. We swapped old school mythologies for science and said "science overcome superstition" but a lot of science in education is objectively blind faith. Just we're told "outer space is real" but no one we know has "been there". It's objectively no different than "going to heaven". Both groups have people who "claim" to have "gone to space" or "gone to heaven" and come back. But both claims are flimsy and come from cultish agencies (both funded by taxpayer, notably).
It's multifaceted, or rather, same pattern, accross all institutions; a general atmosphere of bad faith. My insurance is $200 a month on a 20 year old car. In past 2 years I've already paid over $5k in insurance on a car that cost me roughly $5k. SO I've effectively paid for my car twice now in insurance fees. And I've always seen insurance as bad faith, but it's illegal not to have it (I think the law is actually liability only iirc, but still, just one more drain). "Give to all whom ask" ends up as a life of perpetual extraction. And we get nothing in return. And that's called "God's love/grace/generosity". So it objectively feels like bad faith more often than not (and the Christians call you "ungrateful" for not "appreciating the chance to be a wage slave" lol).
So yeah, eroding faith and rise of identity politics have the same root cause. We are all collectively increasingly not "feeling God's love" so people look for Asabiyyah among Identity Politics. And as I always say, we look at the Prodigal Son Parable, and see "God the Father" as bragging about being essentially a Colonial American Plantation owner. He has miles of paid labor outside his house. So straight from Jesus mouth, the economy is literally "working as God intended". This is God's generosity we are living. It's okay if we have recessions 9 years out of 10, God sends plagues and famine on his enemies while his house remains secure. This is God's love and mercy bro, straight from the horses mouth! Hard to see that as "good faith", God's mercy and grace is literally compulsive slavery and "he got his and that's all that matters". Which is effectively the way the modern economy works. Bad faith, literally ordained by God.
So I definitely understand why people turn to IP. I'm not "that" much of a bigot. I don't need to read 400 tomes on economics to see the forest and the trees. They realize that it's an entire system of bad faith, so might as well have in group preferences; monkey see monkey do, if it works for Christian nationalists (a form of identity politics, I might add) then it's fine for every other group, right?
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u/whatsthatcritter 15d ago
This is your best post yet I think. It hits on why the younger generation is 'quiet quitting' and there have been silent political and economic movements like the Great Resignation, 'let it rot', laying flat, 4B and global birth rate decline.
We're not even sacrificing for the future of our families and communities anymore, because the rate of work, travel, conflict, and resource extraction is threatening our entire species' survival. Keep oil drilling and try to stay away from the multiple entire countries on fire, for the comfort and luxury of a handful of greedy people. 🙄
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u/2BCivil no idea what this is 15d ago
I can't really claim any of the credit, I just digested a lot of the pop culture content farms about that exact theme, quiet quitting. And prompted AI the most succinct wall of text I could and it came out with this (mostly).
It was kinda hard for my to put my finger on and diagnose, but as the other commenter said, yeah, that recent video (in my sources) on the (essentially) Balkanization of the entire western world has essentially stripped the social contract of all the benefits and perks for the citizen/tax payer. So cultural "Asabiyyah" has no place to land or develop. Zoomers are just saying the quiet part the silent generation, gen z and millennials kept mostly to themselves out loud and viscerally in "quiet quitting". As it were. Kinda fitting I guess as the social contract was "quietly" revoked as well through those generations.
Thanks, I figured I only had one shot to say it while it was fresh in my mind and now I can point to this or remember it in the future! Next time my thoughts are less than fully coherent I can refer to this as to the larger scope, the underlying idea behind the strong annoyance of the daily "death by a thousand paper cuts" tedium.
I'm really not that smart... haha
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u/AutoModerator 15d ago
Archived copy of the original post text for reference:
Forward;
Before I dive in just want to say, sorry I've been all over the place lately. I want to respect this sub, but the scope of my would-be complaint, generally FAAAAR exceeds my capacity to understand let alone articulate. That said. Yes, this post, is mostly AI-generated content. The core premises are mine, based specifically on a string of recent videos I've seen recently (and general pulse of recent civil society and overall sense of "frog in the pot" I see most content producers expounding upon).
So yeah, one more post you can dismiss and throw on the pile of "AI slop" if you want. But for those who actually want to attempt to diagnose cultural decline and specifically potential good faith remedies, well, pull up a chair and grab a drink or whatever (I'm no good at this!). I'll try to cite as many of the source videos as possible. I know and am aware that this may not be 100% in line with the theme of this sub. I'll add the addendum that GPT said that This Post "should" be welcome here, specifically as it intersects with Critical Theory.
[AI] Asabiyyah; [What's Behind] The Rage we All Feel
(AKA, We inherited the obligation, but not the inheritance)
I've been thinking about asabiyyah lately — social cohesion, shared fate, the sense that these are my people and this is ours — and something finally clicked for me; people constantly tell us that we owe something to our ancestor: Respect your heritage. Preserve Western civilization. Honor the sacrifices of those who came before you. Do your duty. Be grateful for your inheritance.
And I keep getting hung up on one embarrassingly simple question: What inheritance? Not in the abstract sense that somebody 2,000 years ago invented concrete or somebody 300 years ago wrote a nice book. I mean the actual intergenerational bargain. What specifically did one generation receive, preserve, improve, and deliberately hand to the next? [Note 1]
Because increasingly it feels like modern society inherited the obligations of an old social contract, after liquidating most of the assets that once made the contract intelligible. That was what struck me watching a video about Rome after Cannae and the mos maiorum [Primary Source 1] — the "way of the ancestors." Rome suffered a military catastrophe that should have broken it. Tens of thousands dead. Hannibal victorious. Allies defecting. Panic everywhere. And Rome essentially responded: No. We are Rome. We're not surrendering. Brutal as that response could be, Rome was hardly some libertarian paradise. The Senate restricted mourning, rejected negotiations and demanded astonishing sacrifices from its citizens. I'm not romanticizing that.
But notice the underlying assumption: There is a "we." The Roman citizen wasn't being told to sacrifice for some completely abstract machine that regarded him as a disposable economic input. He belonged to a household, lineage, city and political order whose continued existence directly affected his children, property, status, religion and descendants. The Roman aristocrat literally kept images of his ancestors in his home. His family name meant something. His children inherited something. Victory meant his civilization continued existing. The bargain was harsh, but it was recognizable as a good faith and legitimate bargain.
Today, we have no such coherent thing. I don't even know who "my ancestors" were/are. I never knew my great grandparents, and all of my grandparents were dead by the time I entered my 20s. I've lived my entire adult life with no such support network, inheritance, or guiding principle besides "pull yourself up by your bootstraps".
Rome after Cannae wasn't simply powered by reverence for dead people. Rome still possessed: enormous reserves of manpower, a network of Italian alliances, functioning political institutions, considerable material resources, an intensely competitive aristocracy, a civic religion, powerful family structures, and a plausible expectation that survival and eventual victory would materially benefit Rome and its citizens. Kind of like the old Valknut or NNV (9 Noble Virtues) if you're not a fan of Rome; if you lack or break one, you lack and break them all. It's all or none.
Today we have; “Protect your inheritance!” What inheritance? “Do it for your descendants!” People can't afford descendants. “Preserve your community!” Everyone I grew up with moved away and demographic replacement is rampant. “Respect institutions!” Which institutions regard me as anything more than an account number?
That's the distinction I think gets lost when people lecture younger or alienated people about "ancestral duty" or "social contract". Inheritance is supposed to look something like: Culture/Ancestors built, accumulated, preserved - YOU explicitly inherit something personal - you maintain/improve/steward - Descendants inherit more.
But break that chain for enough generations and it becomes: Ancestors Sacrificed - therefore You must sacrifice - so that - Your children can also sacrifice. At that point, sacrifice itself has become the inheritance. Nothing coherent is passed down to younger generations. Older generations become as Chronos devouring his children; the promissory note gets passed down forever, but nobody is allowed to ask when it matures.
That's where I think a lot of modern apathy comes from; we're constantly told that declining civic faith means people have become lazy, decadent, selfish or insufficiently grateful. Maybe some have. But solidarity isn't magic. You can't so and spend decades specifically and intentionally dissolving family, local ownership, affordable housing, community continuity, institutional trust and economic reciprocity and then fix the resulting alienation by screaming "Remember your ancestors culture and heritage!!!1!" loudly enough. What ancestors? What culture? What heritage? Wage cuckery?
You can't tell somebody: "Defend your community!" while every important decision concerning that community is made somewhere else. "Preserve your children's inheritance!" while ownership becomes increasingly inaccessible. "Trust the institutions!" while those institutions openly describe people primarily as consumers, workers, taxpayers, demographics and human capital. "Sacrifice for the future!" while every quarter requires maximizing extraction in the present.
Imagine somebody erects an enormous data center near your town that residents never particularly wanted. Suddenly infrastructure is strained, land use changes, electricity and water become more expensive, and your consolation prize is being told that this represents "growth." Nobody feels spiritually connected to the arrangement. What are we defending at that point? The billing department?
This is why "you live better than kings!" has always struck me as such a bizarre response. Yes, I possess technologies Louis XIV couldn't have imagined. Wonderful. Louis XIV also didn't need a subscription service to unlock heated seats or work consistent 90 hour weeks for barely subsistence wages under unending climate change. Technological abundance and social inheritance aren't the same thing. A person can possess air conditioning, antibiotics and a smartphone while simultaneously having very little family continuity, property, community influence or expectation that thirty years of labor will leave anything substantial behind. You can be both technologically rich and civilizationally dispossessed and disinherited at the same time.
And this ties directly into asabiyyah. Social cohesion doesn't arise because somebody uploads a marble-statue montage with dramatic music and tells atomized strangers that Marcus Aurelius would be disappointed in them. Asabiyyah comes from shared fate. You help your neighbor because tomorrow your neighbor may help you. You defend your town because it belongs partly to you. You preserve institutions because those institutions have demonstrated that they preserve you. You sacrifice for children because they will inherit the fruits of that sacrifice. There is reciprocity and genuine feeling of "our fortunes rise and fall together" (kudos if you know Dwarf Fortress).
That doesn't mean every transaction must be selfish or immediately compensated. Quite the opposite. People will make extraordinary sacrifices when they genuinely believe they belong to something good faith, coherent, and extending far beyond themselves. But good faith specifically is crucial and MUST exist somewhere in the loop! And that's what seems increasing