Can politics and religion actually be separated?

[causticus]

No, I don’t buy into the naive belief that religion and politics can be wholly separated into independent spheres that don’t talk to one another, much less rub shoulders. In theory? Maybe. But in practice? No. Anything humans do here in meat-world as a group activity will be tainted with politics. Every large or popular religion that has ever come to be has been tainted with politics, in varying degrees.

To understand how this happens, let’s use a microcosmic example. One day, your cozy little religious or spiritual circle might be perfectly-apolitical and impervious the more noxious of cultural influences ebbing and flowing around you in the surrounding sociopolitical space, but the next day those 501c3 papers come back in the mail with that stamp of approval, and now your cozy little hangout group has grown up and become a corporation! What was once a formal and organic gathering is now a virtual “person” in the eyes of the state.

Your group has effectively become an appendage of the state; which means the sort of people who are adept at playing ball with the state (those pesky scribes and lawyers) might eventually find themselves in key leadership positions in your growing spiritual organization. Thus, politics. In due time, the people who are elite-level skilled at the Letter will probably displace those who are all about the Spirit (here we might begin to understand why the Ancient Druids refused to write anything down, but I digress). The new leaders doing all the boring paperwork and bean-counting needed to keep the organization afloat are effectively compliance officers. They serve as diplomats between your organization and the government. If there’s one thing compliance officers are good at, it’s complying. Their own beliefs are likely going to be in harmony with whatever the prevailing “state religion” (official or unofficial) happens to be. Now we can see clearly why in the US almost the entirety of Mainline Protestant Christianity has been converged into State Progressivism. Thus, politics. How many of these churches now fly rainbow flags? And speak of a Jesus that was little more than a Jewish community organizer who preached peace, love, and “the current thing”?

Maybe those pesky old Druids were onto something? Moving forward, I think the “Lite Org” concept might be an effective way of mitigating the current infestation of politics into every endeavor imaginable. A Lite Org simply means an unofficial organization. From a legal standpoint, it’s no different than a bunch of friends hanging out in a backyard and having a BBQ. Online, a Lite Org might be something as simple as a web forum or Discord server. It might be super-organized and serious on the social level, or it might just be a laid-back information hub for whatever the topic of shared interest happens to be; but either way it simply does not exist in any corporate form. No bylaws, no board of directors, and no official protocols for admitting new members or expelling undesirable ones; all invisible to lawyers, scribes, and bureaucrats. Still though, politics can and will creep in, but probably not in a way that’s at all useful at to the state and its many tentacles.

Comments

[causticus]

Thanks! Yeah, guilds don't necessarily have to be corporate entities, especially when it's small enough where everyone recognizes one another by face. And unofficial bylaws and rules of admission and member conduct are very doable. Good example: the standard rules for JMG's comment sections; everyone who participates in good faith respects the rules, yet none of it is legally-binding. Having a "monarch" (in the Moldbugian sense) unilaterally interpret and enforce those rules helps a lot too, IMHO. Most well-functioning web forums, chats, and comment sections are "monarchies" in one way or another.

[jprussell]

Yeah, more good points. In reading your response, it occurred to me that the key difference between "official" and "unofficial" rules is what enforcement mechanisms are used, and whether those enforcement mechanisms are reserved by the state. One of the advantages of the examples you gave is that the only enforcement mechanism really needed is to be able to exclude someone from participating, which small enough voluntary gatherings ought to be able to handle, whether online or otherwise.

[causticus]

Good way of putting it. Basically a contractual vs. gentleman's agreement.

To get a little philosophical here: IMO, "official business" like contracts exist to create trust where it previously doesn't exist or where there's no reason for it to exist without state-enforceable formality. It enables strangers to do business with one another with a solid guarantee that fraud and/or physical violence won't be a part of the transaction. In your own Heathen terms we might frame this as contracts being a necessity for allowing nonviolent/nonpredatory "frith-less" relations to exist; such enables economic prosperity and internal security to be possible in a complex society. The State becomes a necessarily evil when society scales up to the level that people must engage in constant "frith-less" interactions as a matter of day-to-day society. When society is scaled-down to a level small enough where one's own daily interactions are all "face-to-face", i.e. only really among with family members, friends, and oath-bound local community members (via guilds and/or patron-client hierarchical arrangements), then we can say this is a wholly organic social order and that informal agreements are sufficient for things to run smoothly. We can say, where frith is lacking, lawyers and bean-counters prevail. A wholly "inorganic" social order like this is one where low-trust is king.

Sorry for the rambly tangent.

[jprussell]

I think this is right, but I would maybe flip it around. I see it more that law as a literal collection of written rules, contracts and their enforcement, and all the other formalized ways of managing productive relations grew out of a desire to capture frith in a bottle. There was a recognition that Law/Order/Frith was an intangible good, and folks (perhaps naively) assumed that they could scale it up simply by making it tangible (legible, even :)). What I suspect we agree on is that these interactions, even at their most formal and state-enforced only truly "work" when the Law/Order/Frith is there anyway, and arguably in direct proportion to how unnecessary the formal enforcement truly is.

One thing that comes to mind reading your reply is that both libertarians like Nick Szabo and his detractors grasp a piece of this truth, but I think most still miss the mark. Szabo argues that you don't need state enforcement if you have a system of property and contract law that works (perhaps unsurprisingly, he is both a lawyer and a cybersecurity sysadmin), while his detractors argue that property and contract law only work because of state enforcement. I think Szabo is recognizing that if the parties to a contract agree that a contract is a thing that matters and disputes about it can be settled in court, you have a way of generating the kind of "artificial trust" you talk about, which is pretty much true in practice. The vast majority of contracts between strangers in more-or-less functioning countries "just work," and it's not all that much because either party is afraid of cops with guns kicking down his door. On the other hand, we only got to that place through a long history of contracts, courts, and all the rest developing in an ecosystem of entities with the recognized authority to be listened to by everyone involved ("yes, I'll compensate the other guy $X dollars since I delivered on the letter but not spirit of our agreement, as decided by a judge" or whatever). Trying to bootstrap that authority is not as simple as "here's a dude in a robe who will listen to both sides and tell you what to do" - both sides have to believe that the dude in a robe is worth listening to for some reason, and "because it produces socially optimal outcomes on average if we all just agree to it" isn't a great starting place, even if in the end it's more-or-less true.

Hmm, now I'm getting rambly in response. I might summarize by saying I don't think such contractually/legally/state-mediated interactions are "trustless" or "frithless" so much as they are grounded in meta-trust/frith - I may not trust you, but I trust that you wouldn't sign a contract unless you were reasonably confident you could deliver on it or I could seek and find adequate restitution if you didn't. As you say, smaller groups can rely on actual interpersonal trust/frith and/or immediate-enough enforcement to be readily believed, and so are likely a big part o the answer as we go into a world where fewer and fewer of the scaled up "good enough" substitutes cease to actually be good enough.

Cheers,
Jeff

[causticus]

Sounds about right on all counts! I think your formulation here makes a lot of sense.

Law does serve as a sort of abstracted frith, so as long as everyone participating believes "the law" to be operating in good faith. I'm not sure how much longer this good faith is going to last though. As you might agree, here in the US a sizable portion of the population has lost at least some amount of faith in the legal system. Anymore faith lost and that's when things start getting "interesting" in the Chinese sense of the word.