The Summary of the Law is composed of two Great Commandments that both take the form “thou shalt:”

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Matthew 22:37-40

Notice then that in the Decalogue, there are only two commandments that are likewise prescriptive:

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. (Exodus 20:8) Honour thy father and thy mother … (Exodus 20:12)

These four prescriptives are related. Those of Exodus are corollary elaborations of those given by Jesus as the foundation of all law. Thus:

Love God, for he who is supreme deserves no less than your supreme loyalty; so, therefore: Keep holy and lively his Cult; preserve its doctrines and faithfully observe its observances, such as the sabbath, rituals, fasts and feasts, and so forth. Love your fellow as if he were a human being like you, or there’ll be hell to pay; so, therefore: Honor your parents; likewise ergo the things that they honor: keep and honor your kin, and your patrimony.

If you are not doing these things, you have no society . If you don’t agree about First Things, you’ll have a hell of a time reaching completely harmonious and pacific agreement about anything else, including how people ought to treat each other; and if you don’t agree about that, you won’t care about keeping a patrimonial tradition; so that you won’t have a perdurant culture, or therefore a robust and durable people. No cult, no culture; no culture, no nation.

These basic prescriptive commandments are then the fundamental ordinations undergirding any social order whatever. They are the *most* categorical commandments. Proscriptives of any sort must supervene upon them. One must after all do something or other in order then to do it defectively. One must do society in the first place in order then to have a shot at doing society well, or failing thereat. So the prescriptives subvene and logically precede the proscriptives.

If you are following these basic prescriptives, and so have a society, only then do you have even an opportunity to commit a crime against society: to bear false witness, covet, steal, and so forth. No society, no crime against society.

In the absence of society, lying, coveting, stealing, and the like are not crimes to begin with. They are, rather, prudent ways to survive in a Hobbesian war of all against all, that characterizes the maximum of the defect ↔ defect game phase. In defection, it is simply stupid to proceed other than by defecting at every turn.

Peoples that are falling into defection because they disagree about First Things or have lost or attenuated their familiar loyalties are ceasing to be social. They are what are called nowadays “low trust.” They are heading toward no trust.

As an agglomeration of people approaches the zero of society it is hard to know what to call them. They are not then much properly social, or political, but rather the antitheses of society and polity. In them, everyone is enemies with everyone else. They do not cohere coordinately; they are not groups.

Inimities?

Defect ↔ defect is robustly stable, for – except under conditions of pervasive cooperation wherein defections are severely penalized – defection is the lowest risk, least path. As the maximum of social entropy, it is the stablest thermodynamic equilibrium (death is of course stablest of all).

Pervasive defection is vulnerable to supersession by some greater degree of cooperation only in virtue of familiar relations, that are by Nature high trust and altruistic: profect ↔ profect. Families can be the seeds of a pervasive profection; are its foundation and last redoubt. Families have a shot at resisting invasion or perversion by an environment of defection, and at fostering profective communities that can grow.

Thus the crucial importance of honoring parents. Filial piety entails honoring siblings, and their spouses and children. It entails honoring all your kin. On that basis, only, can a generally profective society be built. Profection is an artifact of kinship. This then also demonstrates the crucial importance of the nation; which is to say, of a set of people bound to each other by blood; by shared genetic heritage. Within such a nation, profection can be superdurable, and such nations can be difficult to conquer.

Profective societies are however vulnerable to defection either by enemies or by psychopathologies. Defection is enormously profitable in a context of prevalent profection. To compensate for the risk posed by the hazard of that temptation, the penalty for defection in profective societies must be severe; it must be substantially greater than the profits available to defectors. So durable profection requires dire, ruthless, relentless law enforcement, and terrifyingly, famously lethal military capacity.

In profection, paying forward makes sense. Capital investment of any sort, deferral of gratification, savings, planning, study, science, history, scholarship, lawfulness, fair dealing, honesty, social welfare programs, charitable enterprises, disaster relief, insurance, forestry, industry, good husbandry, estates, trusts, endowments and inheritances, covenants and compacts, and all the other things that are needed for prosperity – these are all profective moves, and can pay off with good risk/return profiles only in profective societies. Ditto a fortiori for monogamous marriage and large, long term investment in children.

Coordination of large groups depends upon profection. Indeed, contracts as such rely upon profection, and on the preponderant enforcement of contracts by profective governors. So, then, does military effectiveness. The phalanx is an exercise of brotherhood, and of fealty. So likewise is the ship’s company, the chivalric order, the platoon, the army.

Writing is profective. Buildings are profective. Roads and walls are profective. These all are gifts to the people of the future, and wagers upon their virtues.

Hierarchy is profective, for authority is profectively granted to the noble by the base, and the relation thus engendered is of loyalty: of mutual trust. Defection tends to egality, and to a flattening of the social order; thus, to desuetude of loyalties.

Profection then typifies the familiar society, that is prevalently charitable and magnanimous. The Second Great Commandment – the Golden Rule – is a succinct, precise, and complete definition of the profective attitude.

Profection is a far from equilibrium strange attractor. It is highly ordered, and ordering. It progenerates civilization, and the compounding thereof in a virtuous feedback circuit. It is a local maximum of social order.

In defection, on the other hand, paying forward in any way is madness. In defection, it makes no sense to do favors, to accumulate assets, to build fences, to terrace and irrigate fields, to maintain forests, or to keep waters clean. In defection, there is no way to rely upon any future other than defection, or therefore to wager upon or invest in it.

The Marxist analysis of society as in every aspect a struggle for power makes sense only on the presupposition that society is fundamentally and incorrigibly defective. In defection, the struggle for power is all that remains. Defection is all that the defective mind can see. So the Marxian mind sees all profective moves as veiled defections. Only defective minds – minds themselves immured in the strategy of defection – could find this account of human life convincing.

This is why Social Justice Warriors always project, and why they then always lie. The egalitarian abhorrence of any concentrations of virtue, and the egalitarian attacks upon excellence or beauty of any sort, and the egalitarian promotion of ugliness, perversion and “transgression,” are defensive moves of defective minds against anticipated defection by those whom they can well see are more virtuous, ergo – so long as profection prevails – more successful and powerful. Defectors think everyone is a defector more or less like them, and thus incipiently dangerous; or else stupid chumps, deluded marks, fitting victims who deserve their comeuppances, ostracisms, persecutions. Seeing excellence, they see threats. So are they ever afraid, and angry, and convinced that they are themselves the persecuted.

Defection : profection :: r : K :: high time preference : low time preference.

There is coevolution of genes with culture. Defection selects for defection, and breeds defectors; profection selects for profection, and breeds profectors.

Defection is at war with profection, because it doesn’t iterate well in competition with profection. In prevalently profective societies, crime doesn’t pay. Tit for Tat makes defection zero sum, whereas it makes profection positive sum. So defection tries to undermine profective society. The more defective society becomes, the fewer the risks and costs of defection.

So defection takes particular aim at the family, which is the seed of the profective society, and wherein the profective strategy has the highest payoff; and at the patrimonial cult, that consecrates profective familiar relations, explains and teaches the familiar values.

In a profective society, defection arises from some psychopathology respecting either the family or the cult – one sort of psychopathology being highly correlated with the other.

Defectors are generally miserable.

Defection is the preferred strategy of those who cannot (tell how they might) gain much by profection, as compared with their adversaries. It is preferred by those who are, in a word, relatively speaking, losers: weak, or dim, or emotionally bent.

Profection is always under threat from defectors who imagine it threatens them, when in fact it is the host of their parasitism. As ordered animal bodies need immune systems, so maintenance and defence of profection therefore requires strict, stern, swift enforcement of moral and legal rules, and of borders, language, and culture. Sovereigns then must rule with an iron hand (howsoever velvety its glove) if they are long to reign. For the profective society, relaxation of rule or lassitude either moral or energetic on the part of the sovereign is death by a thousand cuts. It is suicide; policide. Politicians who fail to enforce Tit for Tat are themselves criminals; defectors; traitors to the patrimonial cult. They have lost the Mandate of Heaven, because they have either rejected Heaven outright, or else fallen short in their duty of strict observance of its rites.

When the captain cannot himself keep his head, the phalanx crumbles. Then, it is every man for himself, in no man’s land; and woe betide the women and children.

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Hat tip: this post is the record and elaboration of a terrific brainstorm prompted by my participation in the comment thread of a post at Zippy’s site, and in particular by this comment by Zippy.