6 Tweets 5 reads Dec 07, 2022
Let's generalize this.
Once you have a group with individuals who can do deals with each other, there's a natural tendency for smaller groups to form within it and start running rent seeking conspiracies.
The most famous is the Mafia where the larger group was Americans...
... and the smaller group was some particular group, usually Italian Americans.
It turns out that to defeat The Mafia, two things were needed:
(1) targeted laws (RICO)
(2) dissolution of italian neighborhoods
Why do you need to get rid of the Italian neighborhoods and homogenize Italian Americans into just White Americans?
Because common identity = loyalty, without the loyalty generator they all start selling each other out.
In these small communities, individual benefit is probably quite tightly tied to that of the whole. That made the whole very hard to attack and thus able to extract rents (and impossible to extract much rent *from*)
So, there's a very weird set of dynamics where freedom and diversity and atomization both make society better for everyone, but also hand a big advantage to any group that can carve out an identity for itself and define a subgroup, subgroup loyalty, etc and then extract rent
When you look at the Woke movement, you're looking at a 21st century version of the Italian mob. They can shake down companies, universities, governments, etc.

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