Groups seek security in space and time

Because groups fear other groups, they tend to value self-determination, and are thus tribal and (to the extent possible) territorial. They want their place in the world and don’t want to be ruled by other groups. Given how minorities are consistently treated the world over, this desire is entirely reasonable and its legitimacy, at least, must be respected.

How a group behaves is largely dictated by its historic, current, and projected distribution. There is no Rawlsian veil here. We know where we are. As a general rule, no one wants to be a minority because you are at the mercy of the majoritarian mob who could come for you with torches at any time. Groups try to engineer their circumstances so they are not in a minority status. A university professor I knew once put it to me that the violent breakup of Yugoslavia took place entirely because each group said, “Why should I be a minority in your country when you could be a minority in mine?” Usually, through ethnic engineering, groups succeed in forming homeland states. The stakes are high, because if they don’t succeed, they are usually brutally subjugated. The fates of the Uighurs, Tibetans, Sri Lankan Tamils, Kurds, Assyrians, Biafrans, Ambazonians, and others are instructive.

The specific nature or ideology of the identity is almost irrelevant when compared to the distribution. Appealing, for example, to the Christian charity of America’s white evangelicals to be kind to migrants will fall on deaf ears if those migrants belong to a different group that is in any way demographically significant. This is true even if the migrants are also Christians. This is not because white evangelicals are hypocrites but because they are being collectively driven on by overwhelming, visceral, primordial tribal fear of them and what they might do, and there but for the grace of different demographic distributions go all of us, in one way or another. After all, when they were minorities, Christians were persecuted too. They haven’t forgotten. It’s on the wall of every church.

We know the identity specifics are of secondary importance because even within the same group, different configurations lead to radically different behavior. Jewish-Americans and Armenian-Americans are mostly pluralistic liberal democrats who believe in minority rights, wish to help refugees, and celebrate a diverse nation. Since they themselves are tiny and diffuse minorities, this is natural. Meanwhile, Israelis and Armenians are among the most ferociously territorially nationalistic peoples on earth. Since they are tiny concentrated minorities who fled persecution from all directions to their current homelands, and since they both face violent revisionist claims on their current homelands by demographically larger neighbors, they correctly see their state as the sole refuge available to them. Same people, different configuration. Neither of these responses, by the way, is necessarily wrong; they are natural and rational given the distribution of identity groups across the matrix. But the outcomes for them and their enemies can still be tragic.

The third axis is relevant here. An older concentrated power group will be loathe to welcome even a small number of newcomers who are younger and have higher birth rates because the perceived long-term threat to demographic control of territory. A migrant caravan headed towards the American border is a few thousand people seeking a better life, and they are approaching a nation of 330 million people with nothing but the best of intentions, but to the ethnonationalist American there is no appreciable difference between that caravan and an invading army. Both herald a loss of identitarian territorial control. The reaction will be similar, and it will be unpleasant. This is not racism per se—at least it doesn’t have to be—but rather a tribal reaction dictated by the distribution of groups in the matrix. Until the threat abates or is superseded by another, the phalanx is locked in place.

If a group ends up in a political configuration where they are a minority, they can either try to integrate or leave. But this decision isn’t entirely their own either. It’s dictated by demographic distribution too. In practice, leaving is only possible when a group is concentrated in a region, either successfully like the Eritreans, or semi-successfully like the Kosovar Albanians, or unsuccessfully like the Catalonians. By contrast, a diffuse minority population cannot achieve territorial self-determination, so it must try to work within the system to achieve equal rights. The Roma can’t really seek independence. Neither, at least not after the Great Migration, can African-Americans, even though after centuries of mistreatment such an effort would certainly garner broad sympathy. African-Americans have not anytime recently exceeded four in 10 in any state in the union. (At 37%, Mississippi currently has the highest percentage.) As a result, hypothetical Black America today has no viable geography, and so African-Americans have been compelled to seek political rights within the system, with, to put it mildly, mixed results.

And this is where the difference between lineage-based and non-lineage-based identities becomes manifest. Because gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation are largely fixed in any population across time and space, they are by definition diffuse. As far as we can tell, even with extreme social engineering, the male-female ratio in every human society is always somewhere in the ballpark of 1:1, and somewhere between 5-10% of the population is LGBTQ+. The public behavior and visibility and freedom of these identity groups can be controlled, but the numbers are consistent pretty much everywhere. Even if a zealot deported all gays, very quickly there would be a new crop born into the next generation. But lineage-based identities can be engineered; so if a society deports all its Jews, they’re gone for good. Balkan ethnic groups can Balkanize, but Balkan men and women cannot. Thus, despite systematic discrimination and sometimes shocking denials of basic rights, there has never to my knowledge, anywhere in the world, been a women’s separatist movement. Nor has anyone proposed a territorially independent LGBTQ+ republic. (By the way, autonomy won’t cut it here, which is why college safe spaces don’t solve America’s race and gender problems. Real safe spaces have flags and border controls and, optimally, seats in the United Nations General Assembly.) Lineage-based identities can, and do, partial across the land. Non-lineage-based ones have to learn to live together.

Misalignments between power and demography are destabilizing

The most insidious ethnic security dilemmas often take root when there is a misalignment between wealth/political power and demographic power. This is what Amy Chua calls the “market-dominant minority.” If a minority runs the commanding heights of the economy, as ethnic Chinese have in much of Southeast Asia, and especially if they also control the state, as under Baathist Iraq and Syria, or Apartheid South Africa, or pre-revolutionary Rwanda, each group will see the other as a threat. The minority group may have power and wealth, but they’re heavily outnumbered and they know that if the majority gets political rights, the minority stands to lose everything. These dynamics are extremely difficult to solve. So far in South Africa it has worked out well enough, but this is a singular exception. From Vietnam to Iraq to Rwanda to Algeria, it usually doesn’t end well for the minority group. And even success is conditional; one populist electoral cycle could end the minority group’s safety at any time. If you wonder why Bashar al-Assad instantly chose to level whole cities rather than negotiate with his own people, this is why. His decision was made for him by Syria’s demography.

The minority group is damned if they do, damned if they don’t. If they’re less successful on average, they will face stereotypes and discrimination, and be confined to the margins. But if they fight through this discrimination and succeed to a disproportionate or even equivalent degree, their lot can be even worse, because they become targets. Jews in Europe never threatened to impose a minority regime anywhere, but because they were often economically successful, they were targeted by the majority everywhere they went and consistently subject to deranged populist conspiracy theories that begat hate crimes, pogroms, expulsions, and the Holocaust. Today, the continent has been largely emptied of them.

Of course, if the misalignment goes in the other direction, and the largest group by numbers also has disproportionate economic and political power, this group can—and almost inevitably will—bulldoze all minority groups so effortlessly that it won’t even realize what it is doing. This is why so many American whites fail to see that racial inequality is even an issue in the United States. The country’s structures have disadvantaged people of color so long that American whites don’t even realize the inequalities are there.

At least until now. When the marginalized minority group protests its marginalization, the power group says, “Why are you complaining? Work harder like we do.” But when the marginalized minority group acquires sufficient demographic heft to force its protests to be heard, the power group views them no longer as a nuisance, but as a threat. And they form the phalanx.

Misalignments between people and borders are destabilizing

There’s another kind of misalignment, a horizontal mismatch of territorial borders and people. This causes destabilization in two ways. First, it tends to be the justification for cross-border invasion (think Hitler’s seizure of the Sudetenland in the name of the Germans who lived there, or the “Greater Serbia” project, or the ongoing Nagorno-Karabkh dispute).

But second, even if the borders are agreed upon, the nature of the society is not. In diverse societies, the rivalries within the polity are often so intense that factions within it will feel greater kinship with foreigners of the same or similar identity group than they do with their own countrymen of different backgrounds. In the Syrian war, the Alawites running the minority government turned to their fellow Shi’a from Lebanon and Iran to help fight the majoritarian uprising, and later their historic ally Russia. The mostly Sunni rebels called in backup in the form of cross border sanctuary, financing, fighters and materiel from various Sunnis in Turkey, the Gulf, and even—in the case of Daesh—disaffected Sunnis in Western countries. Meanwhile, Syrian Kurds sought alliances with Iraqi and Turkish Kurds, and with the United States as well. Diverse countries become proxy wars for homogenous ones.

This is normal. It’s happening in America too. American whites now seem to increasingly prefer white Russians to Americans of color. “Russia is our friend” is not something you would have expected to ever hear from the party of Reagan and Goldwater and Nixon and McCarthy. But here we are.





Misalignments between identity layers are destabilizing

The phalanx doesn’t just respond to threats within its own identity layer—ethnic group vs. ethnic group, holy warrior vs. holy warrior, etc.—but against any threat from any layer in the matrix. It will constantly reorient itself against the biggest threat it sees. And some of the nastiest conflicts transpire when groups are operating on different identity prisms and so don’t just hate each other, but don’t understand each other either.

The most obvious example of this the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, where neither side’s hardliners actually acknowledge that the other side even exists. For their part, Palestinians specifically and Muslims generally often find it difficult to understand how Judaism functions as both a tribe and a religion, and consider its insularity a show of intolerance and arrogance. Jews, meanwhile, often find it difficult to understand why Islam keeps spreading and proselytizing, which from a Jewish perspective is also a show of intolerance and arrogance. The two groups aren’t operating on the same identity layer, and thus misidentify who they are dealing with.

Palestinians thus view their conflict with Israel as a religious war against a racist imperial settler colonial project foisted on them by dastardly Europeans. Israelis see themselves as a tiny, persecuted homeland tribe, no different than Armenians or Estonians, who came to their homeland in spite of the worst efforts those same dastardly Europeans, and who just wish to live in their little corner of the world and not be menaced by the vast, expanding, hostile blob of which the Palestinians are just the tip of the spear, indistinguishable from the rest. Thus, conflict.

(As an aside, Judaism also doesn’t quite fit into America’s racial dynamics, or, indeed, almost anyone else’s identitarian dynamics. It is so ancient that as an identity, it is conceptually misaligned with most of the layers of the matrix, which I suspect is one reason why Judaism so consistently bothers identitarians everywhere.)

The mis-labeling in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is highly typical, especially when territory and citizenship are at stake. Myanmar considers the Rohingya to be Bengalis. The Rohingya do not. Armenians consider Azeris to be Turks. Azeris do not. Serbs consider Kosovar Albanians to be Turks. Kosovar Albanians do not. Russians consider Ukrainians to just be Russians who were tempted by fascism for some reason. Ukrainians feel otherwise. Nobody considers Macedonians to actually be Macedonians. Etc.

Changes in the matrix are destabilizing

Just like a chemistry set, altering the composition of a solution will change its nature. Almost any noticeable change in demography will cause relative power loss for somebody and will be met with resistance from that somebody.

Consider the United States again. America is the world’s oldest democracy and calls itself multiethnic. Frankly, we should be able to handle this stuff if anyone can. But in fact, we were historically not really a multiethnic democracy at all. Until recently, whites have had an unassailable demographic hammerlock on the national political machinery. Now, that is changing, and fast. Whites are voting decisively for one political party, but that party has lost the popular vote in 6 of the last 7 presidential elections. As a result, whites are starting to behave like threatened minority or plurality power groups like the Syrian Alawites or Great Lakes Tutsis or Lebanese Maronites. Losing control of demography, they are abandoning democracy and imposing illiberal structures to maintain their power. And ethnic politics breed big men. The tribe’s standard-bearer can have unlimited scandals and be manifestly unfit for leadership and his constituency will never waver as long as he represents them against their domestic foes. Moreover, supporting the standard-bearer will become a mark of tribal loyalty, so as the tribe forms the phalanx, they will become even more intransigent and difficult to peel off. This dynamic is an almost inevitable outcome of the change in distribution along the third axis to the relative detriment of a loss-averse tribe of humans. The Serbs did the same thing with Milosevic, the Croats with Tudjman, the Turks with the Young Turks. There is nothing unusual or uniquely odious about American white people here. This is a human thing. It is largely out of our control, and individual goodwill makes basically no difference at the collective level. Demographic change is driving this thing as surely as a chemical reaction.



Unfortunately, no one can see the identity matrix for yourself. You have to be told what it is.

And this is why I maintain tremendous empathy for groups, even when their behavior is appalling. They are acting out of identitarian self-defense at the collective level. Their behavior is so dictated by their demographic configuration in the identity matrix that it is honestly difficult for me to hold them wholly responsible for it.

In the identity matrix, most groups instinctively understand their surroundings but only from their own vantage point. No one realizes the threat they pose to others; they only see the threats from the other groups. They don’t see how their own phalanx menaces. They see the phalanx formed by the other group, and decry “identity politics.” This is how the ethnic security dilemma works; each group is fearful, doesn’t understand why the other group is fearful, and so assumes the worst.

American factions, for instance, remain consistently oblivious to how terrifying the lay of the land looks to other groups. Educating them will not help, because their fear comes from numbers, not words, and if they feel the threat of the numbers of the other, even if the intent of the other is in principle benign, they will form the phalanx, and the conversation is over.

There are few more perfect examples of this dynamic than the following incredibly un-self-aware tweet by Tucker Carlson—Tucker Carlson!—in the aftermath of various acts of pre-election violence: