#3 - Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem - Nostalgia and Naivety in Honor Culture

Hey everybody, this is Darryl Cooper and you're listening to the Martyrmade podcast. You're about to hear episode 3 of Fear and Loathing in New Jerusalem, a six part series on the early history of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If you enjoy this series, please do consider subscribing to my sub-stack page where I post supplemental writings and exclusive podcast episodes available only to subscribers for just $5 a month or $50 a year. Can be found at martyrmade.substack.com and to all of you who are already contributing, I really appreciate you allowing me to do this. So I hope you guys enjoy this show. Here we go. I can content to die for my beliefs, so cut off my head and make me a martyr. The people will always remember it. No. They must get. But it's a reference to something that transcends all things. And the first two episodes of Fear and Loathing in New Jerusalem, I started to talk about some of the cultural differences between the main groups in play. The Zionist Arabs and the European Imperial powers. And I touched on how these cultural differences presented the Zionists in the Arabs with their own unique advantages and obstacles as they tried to construct national identities for themselves and the years immediately following the First World War. We also began to get into how there's this sort of mutual incomprehension between the various parties and that that mutual incomprehension really contributed to the direction that events ended up taking. Now originally I had just cut out a ton of material and commentary on some of the cultural issues it played. But recently I was listening to another podcast that made me decide that I just had to address some of these issues. It was a BBC podcast, a really great series they've been doing for the last year or so. On the effects of the First World War on several countries from around the world, not just Germany and France and the usual suspects, but other off the beaten path countries, like Tanzania, they did one in India and the episode that I was listening to at the time that led me to do this was on Jordan. So what the BBC is doing is they're actually going around to each of these countries. This one took place in the capital of Jordan, Aman. And they were inviting people from the community to attend a lecture and a panel of several experts on the wars of facts on the region and so forth. They would have a discussion, a little debate, some readings of poetry and essays, they're great. So the panel portion was really good, but it was an interaction that occurred during the audience Q&A portion that got my attention. Now the panel featured several British and Arab scholars who outlined the origins of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, did some readings, like I said, and debated a few things about the conduct of the war in the immediate aftermath. And the second half, the floor was opened up for audience questions. And when that happened, many of the questions at the largely Arab audience, mostly Jordanians and Palestinians, many of the questions that they wanted to ask the British scholars had to do with the double dealing and broken promises made to the Arabs by the British Empire during the war. The presenter, she did a good job, but it was interesting because I would have expected her to be more prepared for the line of questioning that she faced. But she squarmed a little bit when one of the audience members complained at the end of his question that it seemed like the Arabs had been used by the British. Now before this, one of the panelists, a British scholar, during the discussion portion in the first half of the presentation, had kind of given answers that had established him as the guy on the panel who tended to exonerate or excuse the decisions that the British made during the war. And so after the audience member asked that question, the presenter very quickly redirected that question over to this panelist. And the panelist specific answer kind of meandered a little bit before finally arriving at the money line and it's a line often repeated by Zionists and Western commentators today. Certainly, he said the British used the Arabs a bit, just as everyone was using everyone else back then, although, you know, some people happen to be better at that game than others. That's paraphrasing. But that's what he said. Now I couldn't see the audience members face when his concerns over honesty and fairness were just waived off by this panelist as some kind of childish naive, silly question, not worth asking. But I've seen the look often enough in situations like this that I feel comfortable imagining what it looked like. You know, I'm going to use this term again, the mutual incomprehension of the audience member and the panelist in this case. It's a perfect example, a perfect illustration of the cultural golf that existed back then that helped create the Middle Eastern mouse trap 100 years ago. And that continues to bar so many Westerners from understanding the Arab world today. I need to unpack that a little bit. And to do that, I have to back up just a little bit. This is going to be a recap for everybody who's heard the first two episodes of Fear and Loathing. But I want to give a very brief summary of the events to which the two men were referring. During the insane and uncertain middle years of the First World War, we're talking 1915, 1617 in there. The British end up bearing a disproportionate amount of responsibility for holding together the on-tongued powers against the Germans. Or against the central powers of Germany, Austria, Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. But primarily Germany and the Western Front are the concern here. It's turned into a brutal war of attrition where the whole goal is to last one day longer, to keep your social system, your economic output, keep it all together one day longer than the enemy. Now, the French bore the brunt of the physical and human cost of the Western War. But the British were financing the whole thing. And many of their allies are on the brink of mutiny or revolution. Russia's falling apart, France's on the brink of mutiny in their army, Britain's doing everything that they have to do to hold this thing together. Now, down south, the Ottoman Empire is putting pressure on British Egypt and Suez Canal. They're putting pressure to the north on southern Russia and southern Europe. And so in 1916, the British induced the Hashemite clan, an Arab clan called the Hashemites, who live on the west coast of what is modern day Saudi Arabia today. They basically control the strip of the Arabian Peninsula called the hijaz that includes the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina. They induced the Hashemite clan to rise up and rebellion against the Ottoman Empire. The idea was that this would force the Ottoman Empire to direct its energies inward and relieve some of the pressure on the Suez Canal and southern Europe. So the Hashemites agreed to do this, but they are taking on a humongous risk here. If the war somehow ends in an armistice that leaves the Ottoman Empire with any power at all over Arab lands, the Hashemites are in huge trouble, probably not even facing defeat. They're probably facing extermination. And so the British guaranteed that in exchange for the Hashemites partnership, the Arabs would establish independent nation states under Hashemite rule once the war was over. The British guaranteed that they would see to it. But while these promises are being made to the Arabs, the British are making contradictory promises regarding the same stretches of Arab territory to all sorts of people. And it's a crazy war of attrition. The British are doing and saying whatever they have to do to keep things together. They're telling Italy, join us and you'll get this territory after the war is over. They're telling the Arabs you'll get that territory. They're doing whatever they have to do. You've got the infamous Pico agreement promising the French that they're going to be granted possession of Syria, Lebanon, some of the surrounding territories there. The Pico agreement also stipulated that the British would maintain control of Mesopotamia and Palestine. That's most of the territory that the Arabs are concerned with right there. And then they issue the Balfour Declaration making promises to the Zionists regarding the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine. So all sorts of contradictory promises. When the war's over, the peace is being negotiated at the Paris Peace Conference, the Arab military leader, Amir Faisal bin Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi will just call him Amir Faisal or just Faisal in this talk. He heads up to the Paris Peace Conference to try to navigate the various conferences and bureaucracies of the Yantam powers to make the case for the primacy of the promises that were made to the Arabs. But when all's said and done, the French and the Zionists get what they had been promised and the Arabs were left out in the cold. They didn't get much of anything that they'd been promised. So this is a very, very, very high-level brief summary of what the audience member was referring to when he said that the Arabs were used. And it's a summary of what the panelist was referring to when he said that the Arabs just played the great game less well than everybody else. So again, that's a very high-level summary of the shenanigans surrounding the regional of the Levant during and immediately after the First World War, and to begin to sketch out that mutual incomprehension that I said so perfectly illustrated, that was so perfectly illustrated in the way that the Arab audience member in the panel spoke past each other in their exchange, I want to bring you back to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Now this is the first of a series of conferences to decide how the central powers are going to be dealt with and how the spoils of the First World War are going to be divided. But it's also got something else going on. Remember, three empires had just been shattered in the war. The Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire are gone. They're destroyed. And so the Paris Peace Conference has got a bunch of national groups showing up who are now no longer under the domination of these empires coming to the Paris Peace Conference to make their case for internationally recognized independence of their people. They want nation states of their own. And so Faisal comes up to present the Arab case and also to meet independently with the British, the French, and the Zionists regarding their competing claims over his people's land. Just before the conference begins in January 1919, Faisal meets with haim-wise men, the leader of the international Zionist movement at this time, to discuss the Balfour Declaration and the wishes of the Zionists to immigrate and settle in Palestine. I covered this in episode two, "A Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem." But again, I had to cut it shorter than I wanted to. And I left out something very interesting. So I'm going to expand on it here, a very interesting aspect of their exchange, I guess. The outcome of the meeting is well known. A Mirfaisal agreed in general terms that the Jews would be allowed to immigrate and settle in Palestine to be full in equal citizens in the new Syrian kingdom that he was establishing. So this agreement that the Jews were going to immigrate becomes citizens of this new Syrian kingdom of Faisals. It was typed out and signed by the two parties. But something I found very interesting was a note that Faisal left at the end of the agreement, sort of an addendum. Now the whole agreement itself was typed out and signed by the various parties. But this note that Faisal put on was handwritten by Faisal himself and signed by him. And a handwritten note read, quote, "But if the slightest modification or departure were to be made, I shall not then be bound by a single word of the present agreement, which shall be deemed void, and of no account of validity, and I shall not be answerable in any way whatsoever." End quote. And this right here, that little note, this is where I want to begin. I'm going to bring in a lot of examples and materials in this talk, but honestly that note, I could give this entire talk just by doing an exegesis on this little note. It tells you so much. We're going to talk a lot about the term "honor culture." But the wording of this note that Faisal writes in his own hand, it tells you so much about the people and about Faisal himself. This note doesn't just say that the Zionist requests will be refused if Arab independence somehow blocked. That's obvious enough, right? You make an agreement with someone and they don't hold up their end of the bargain, they're not going to get anything from you. That's the whole point of an agreement. That's not really what Faisal was doing here. His purpose in writing that note was much more personal. The important part of that note is the last line. If the agreement's breached, I shall not be answerable in any way whatsoever. Faisal wanted to establish in no uncertain terms that if the agreement was breached, his honor was not to be questioned. Now this was something that was puzzling to many observers at the time, most of whom completely missed the significance of it. The people who didn't miss it were men like T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. You know, he'd spent years with the Arabs and with Faisal himself. He knew exactly what was going on. But try to imagine how ridiculous and anachronistic something like this would be today in the modern developed world. If you sign a contract with someone who's going to build you a house, and it has clauses in it to free you of financial obligation and so forth, if he doesn't build your house, you understand all that, that we get. But it would just be kind of cartoonish or something. If the builder were then to go through the trouble of adding all these extra clauses to lay out explicitly that if you didn't pay him and therefore he failed to build your house, then his refusal to meet his end of the agreement, that would not be a mark against his personal honor. I mean, we would say, dude, what are you talking about? Who cares? I don't pay you. What are you talking about? Honor, this is like a donkey hoat day type thing. We wouldn't even know what to do with that. Most of the British and Zionist observers didn't know what to do with it. They thought it was just some silly formality done for show by this pompous desert of mere. But to Faisal, this was not a formality. Arguably, to Faisal, this was the most important part of the agreement. And to understand why you first have to understand that the very idea of typing out and signing a contract was almost completely foreign to someone like Faisal. Whereas the British and the Zionists were kind of amused by Faisal's primitive obsession with personal honor, he considered it even more primitive that these men required records and contracts at all that these men weren't able to just make agreements based on their word and their reputations. Now, when the BBC panelist says that the Arabs played the political game with less skilled in the Europeans, he's either missing or ignoring a very fundamental point, which is that the Arab leadership simply thought it was inconceivable that people would just lie, just outright lie to their allies to get what they wanted. And sure, you could say this is naivety and that it qualifies as playing the political game poorly, but I don't think that's what most people mean when they say something like that. Most people mean that they were outmaneuvered. You know, the panelist doesn't seem to get it. He says that everyone was using everyone else, but the Arabs really weren't using anyone. They weren't playing that game. They were using the British in the same way that you use a contractor that you pay to build your house. You know, there was an exchange going on, but they weren't playing the game where you try to slip phrases into the contract so that maybe you can pull one over on them and avoid paying the builder when it's all finished. This kind of thing was so dishonorable that they could hardly comprehend it. And it was just almost impossible for them to conceive that others. Their allies, especially, were playing that kind of a game on them. In the first episode, toward the end, I quoted a passage from T.E. Lawrence and I'll quote that same passage very quickly again here. He said that, quote, "Arab's believe in persons, not in institutions. They saw in me a free agent of the British government and demanded for me an endorsement of its written promises. So I had to join in the conspiracy. And for what my word was worth assured these men of their reward. In our two years partnership under fire, they grew accustomed to believing in me and to think my government like myself sincere. In this hope, they performed some fine things, but of course, instead of being proud of what we did together, I was bitterly ashamed." Fiesel knew Lawrence personally. He knew him to be an honorable man. So if Lawrence was a representative of the British government, then the promises of the government had to be true. They could be trusted. If Lawrence said they were good, then they were good. And now I can already hear you out there, right? You're saying, okay, okay, okay, hold on a second. Sure, they talk a lot about honor. So what? So to the British, so to the French, I'm sure. What are you telling me? The Arabs don't lie. They can't lie. Please, give me a break. But hold on. Okay, because I'm not saying that. Of course, we should never mistake the professed ideals of an individual or a society when we study history for the lived reality, right? And I'm not asking you to be that credulous here. But, okay, but I will ask you to consider a few things about Fiesel himself before you jump to too many cynical conclusions. Let me tell you a story. Lawrence tells this story about Fiesel in the book that Lawrence wrote after the war where actually, okay, let me preface this first. Lawrence loved Arab culture. Okay, he famously went about his native as a military officer can possibly go while still staying on his own side of the line. I mean, when Fiesel went to the Paris Peace Conference, Lawrence, who was still a British military officer at the time, attended the Paris Peace Conference as an advisor to Fiesel. And he came decked out in full Arab dress and everything. So he's a huge fan of these people. And yes, you have to keep that in mind when you read his accounts. And when you listen to the story that I'm about to tell you, but you also have to remember that there's a reason he became such a huge fan. Okay, so anyway, in his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom, it's the book Lawrence wrote after the First World War, Lawrence tells this famous story that begins with Fiesel in Damascus in the months just before his family raises its banners in rebellion against the Ottoman Empire. Fiesel has come to Damascus to meet with Arab nationalist leaders that are allied with his family and are going to rise up with him once the rebellion begins. But his business with them has to be conducted in secret because the Ottoman secret police are all over the place. The secret police are under the command of the notoriously brutal Ottoman general Jamal Pasha, and they are ruthlessly rooting out any hint of Arab separatism because they know it's in the air. So since the rebellion hasn't begun yet, in Faisal's Hashemite clan is still on paper, a prominent ally of the Ottoman Empire, Faisal is brought into Damascus by Jamal Pasha as a visiting dignitary, a visiting nobleman. But he's kept under close watch. There are suspicions regarding his family's loyalty, but no proof, so Jamal Pasha just simply tries to keep an eye on Faisal while Faisal ducks and weaves around the city in secret meetings with his friends and allies. Now whenever the secret police captured an Arab nationalist, Jamal Pasha would pull Faisal from whatever he was doing and he would force him to attend the public execution of this Arab. The condemned man had usually been brutally tortured by the time he's about to be hanged and he bore all the signs of it, beatings and cuts and bruises in all this as he's led out to be hanged. Now very often these were men with whom Faisal had just recently met and who were incurring this damage and subsequent execution because they were allied to Faisal's family. Very often these were some of his best friends, but Jamal Pasha already suspected Faisal's loyalty, so he would have his men watching very carefully for any reaction from Faisal or from the condemned man, both of whom had to go through this whole process, very careful never to make eye contact with each other and give any sign to indicate that they had any idea who the other person was. Faisal watched many men dozens of his friends be tortured and killed in this way and he would have faced the same fate if he had been caught in his secret meetings with them. He would have faced the same fate if any of his captured allies had given Faisal up under torture but not a single one ever did. Faisal only lost his cool one time during a hanging when he blurted out that Jamal Pasha's brutality was going to cost the Ottoman Empire everything it was trying to avoid and it actually took intercessions from some of the Hashemites high-ranking friends back in Istanbul, the capital of Turkey to save Faisal's life. So very often after an Arab separatist was captured, tortured and killed Jamal Pasha would make Faisal come up to his chambers and Faisal would have to sit there while Jamal Pasha ate his meal and drank wine and threw a temper tantrum where he would scream at Faisal a bunch of abuse about Arabs about how they were old dogs all scum and all just so-foyed things like that. So Faisal would sit through this night after night after night watching his friends be executed and tortured again and again and having to listen to this abuse from the person that's doing it, always looking for an opportunity to slip out for another meeting with his allies to plan this upcoming rebellion. So finally one day Jamal Pasha announces that Faisal is going to be traveling with him and a small retinue back to Medina. Now Mecca and Medina again are part of the territory that is under the control of Faisal's Hashemite clan. This is Faisal's home country so they're going to be heading right back into the heart of Faisal's territory. Now the Hashemites have been raising and training an army that the Ottomans thought was going to be used in the salt against the British on the Suez Canal but which was actually preparing to rebel against the Ottoman Empire for Arab independence. The purpose of this trip was for Jamal Pasha to go inspect this army that the Hashemites have been raising. So Faisal prepares to mount up with Jamal Pasha and a small bodyguard at Turkish forces when Jamal Pasha comes to him and says that they're going to have company. Coming along for the inspection of this Arab army would be the Generalissimo of the entire Ottoman army and Verpasha. Now this is a huge opportunity. Try to imagine at the time three generals were essentially in charge of the entire Ottoman army and two of them including the Generalissimo himself now were proceeding into the heart of Faisal's family's territory with only a small bodyguard to protect them. As they approached Faisal's Hashemite territory Faisal asked to ride ahead of the group so that he could prepare a proper welcome for the generals. I was the excuse he was trying to give them. He planned to rush into the city, find his brothers, raise the army, raise his father's banners and then ride out to attack the generals by surprise. But for whatever reason the generals refused. They insisted that Faisal stay close to them. He tried everything, tried a bunch of excuses, tried to break away but they wouldn't allow it and soon they were right outside Medina. So they wasted no time once they got there. They didn't go to their quarters or anything like that. The Arab army was ordered to muster up outside the walls to drill and present itself for inspection. As they were going along marching and the cavalry was performing mock maneuvers and the infantry was drilling and so forth several of Faisal's officers including one of his brothers Pullem aside and they said, "My lord, shall we kill them now?" Now they were going to be fighting this Ottoman army in just a few days and here on a silver platter totally defenseless they had two of the three high generals of the Ottoman army in their grasp. But Faisal turned to his men and said, "No, they are our guests." See Faisal had been desperate to get away from the group and ride ahead into Medina because Arab custom dictates that if someone is permitted to enter your land or your home peacefully then you must provide for him and protect him. If Faisal had gotten away and raised his army and wrote out to meet them before they entered his family's land it would have been fair game perfectly above board. But once they had ridden into Hashemite territory with Faisal they were protected by Arab hospitality custom and it would have been a red wedding scale betrayal for Faisal to harm them. He didn't like it he would have loved to have killed them but he was not going to do something so blatantly dishonorable to himself and his family just because it was in his interest to do so. Now unless you're a Game of Thrones fan who got that reference just now and unless you're a Game of Thrones fan whose heart was ripped out by the red wedding if you've gone through that trauma you probably get it but unless you understand that you probably think okay Faisal dude come on we get it you're an honorable guy you've registered your opposition to all this but get out of the way. You've got the two most important generals of the army you're about to be fighting and deception is part of war kill them right I mean his officers definitely thought he was taking this whole thing way too far how many of them were going to die on the battlefield later over this minor point of honor they thought Faisal was out of his mind so they decided to kill the generals anyway Faisal would just have to get over it in fact they thought they were doing him a favor because he had registered his opposition they would take the hit for it right he ended up having to get in the middle of his men in full view of the Turkish generals but just out of earshot and plead for the generals lives and he had enough respect with his men that he made a dent but some of his men still thought that they had an opportunity to finish off this war right here right now and they were determined to act so Faisal ends up putting his own personal bodyguard on the two generals escorting them around and eventually riding back with them to Damascus to ensure their safety now think about this I mean this does seem like something out of a comic book right capturing or killing these two generals would have been a huge deal it would have dealt a huge blow to the Ottoman army that Faisal was just about to start fighting and think about the fact that Faisal had spent months watching Jamal Pasha torture and kill scores of his best friends and allies for the crime although Jamal Pasha didn't know at the time of being allied to Faisal's cause it seems almost ridiculous not to take advantage of this situation right I mean the the generals actually ended up becoming suspicious of all the attention they were getting Faisal tried to explain it away as part of an Arab custom just to show symbolic respect by giving the generals a superficial personal guard but the generals didn't buy it so they become convinced that the Hashemites and their Arab allies are up to something they begin to reinforce areas that would become key in the uprising Faisal's refusal in other words cost him the initiative and his rebellion I mean it almost seems kind of ridiculous except in a storybook kind of way but this is the guy who's trying to navigate the backroom dealings of the Europeans and the Zionists at the Paris Peace Conference and he might be able to believe that the Zionists in the British would try to renegotiate at the edges of their agreements but the idea that they were simply lying that the people that Lawrence was vouching for were simply lying was almost incomprehensible to someone like Faisal he wasn't a child you know he had his doubts but the word of Lawrence and the other British officers whom he knew to be honorable in their personal dealings that pushed him over the edge that was enough for him now Lawrence was a British military officer so he had to obey orders and tell Faisal what he was told and play his role but he hated it and so after the war he ended up doing everything he could to fight for the Arab cause at the peace conference and beyond now I'm making all this sound pretty romantic and idealistic right surely I'm whitewashing the reality of it right that would be the appropriate response from anybody in the modern developed world because we almost can't imagine anybody behaving this way at least not under duress you know when we We look back today at any age with values different from our own, or that the traditional histories say were different from our own. And today we are engaged in rewriting histories and deconstructing traditional narratives because we assume that those values couldn't have been real. They must have been white washed or exaggerated. Nobody behaves that way. This inability to imagine a worldview different in any fundamental way from our own is at the root of the incomprehension that I mentioned in the beginning. But am I exaggerating? Is this just a romantic idealization? I would say this. I would say that of course, Faisal is the kind of embodiment of this value system, right? He took it all the way. And then obviously not everyone, including his officers, took it as seriously as he did. But as to whether this is just some idealization, I would say not really, not really. But it's not really whitewashing it either. Okay, there's a dark side to all this. And we're going to dig into that a little bit because this is all part of a social system that arose in a specific environment to serve specific social needs. And like any social system, it's got things that can be idealized and it's got a dark side. These values are romantic to Westerners like Lawrence precisely because they seem to reflect something that we've lost in modern society. A lot of people like to say that nothing was lost because none of this honor stuff, none of it ever existed. It was all just stories. I don't think so. Okay, I don't think so. Men like Lawrence didn't think so. And that's why they were so fascinated by what they found out in that desert. But the question is where that sense of loss comes from because that nostalgia, if you look at our literature, it seems ubiquitous in Western culture. It has for a long time. Are we looking at something that we had but then lost or are we just looking at something completely different and not developmentally related to our society at all? That's the question I want to explore a little bit. And to start out, well, I want to start by trying to imagine a world that would create a person like Faisal. What would that world be like? You know, what kind of world is a place where Faisal is well adapted to it? Is it a world that just creates better human beings? Definitely not. Okay, if you go Google Faisal Paris Peace Conference and go over to the images they come up, you're going to see a photo of Faisal standing on this wide flight of steps behind them are several Arab and English officials, including Lawrence and in the very back of the group to the right and full Arab regalia is the only black African in the group. That's Faisal's slave. The personal bodyguard who protected the Ottoman generals from death, those were also Faisal slaves. So he was a man of his time and place and in that place at that time slavery was still a thing. So that's not good. That's definitely not good. So we're not talking about better human beings, just a different value system with different points of emphasis. So I'll come back to the question, what kind of world would create the specific set of values with their light and dark that we see in someone like Faisal? The first thing to notice is that it resembles the value systems we find very often in traditional societies all over the world that have tribal kinship based social arrangements that are far away from the centers of state power and the trappings of urban civilization. But I'm not talking about some noble savage or so in ideal where we're honest and innocent men were corrupted by the encroachment of civilization. Not at all. No, no, no, no, not at all. Society does not corrupt us in some simple one-way transaction or degradation of our original purity. Forget all that. What civilization does is relieve us of the burden of needing to be honest all the time. Now what am I talking about? What is this libertine or reprobate talking about? Just let me explain. Give me a moment. Because I want to repeat what I said. Civilization relieves us of the burden of needing to be honest all the time. Going back to the first episode of Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, the first episode of Martyr made toward the end of it, I mentioned that typical scene from old western movies or stories. A scene so common that it's become a pure cliche now where somebody is called a liar or they're playing cards and someone's called a cheater and the target of the insult, even if he's the good guy in the story, will be ready to throw down over that, even willing to fight with guns and kill the guy that insulted him if he asked to. So we're in the age of movies like Unforgiven and the HBO series Deadwood, right? Where we're busily deconstructing and mocking all this stuff. But for a long time, until very recently, people accepted that as the proper, if maybe a little overzealous, response to being called a liar. You know, up until very recently, Americans would watch a western and the good guy would get called a liar and kill the man who called him that name and people just watched that and thought, yeah, well, that's the proper response to something like that. Maybe a little bit, you know, overzealous, but hey, you did call them a liar. What are you going to do? What is that? Is it just an example of romanticizing violence or some overplayed macho bullshit? I mean, maybe a little bit, but but but actually no, not primarily. It's something that Faisal would have recognized immediately. It's that lost thing, that lost thing that so enchanted Lawrence. When you live in a place without strong institutions, personal relationships take their place. They have to or actually be better to switch that around. It'll be better to say that strong institutions where they exist replace reputation and relationships as social regulators. Let me break that down. They give it like this. In a country with strong institutions like the United States, a person at the bottom of the social hierarchy can go to the police or go to the courts to make a claim against someone higher up the social ladder who has more allies and is better known as a big family with a reasonable expectation of affair hearing, reasonable expectation. And I can hear everyone screaming the word inequality at me right now. Things are not perfect and there's discrimination and there are people who use connections and have access to better legal counsel and so forth. But generally speaking, the people in the society like the US expect to get a fair hearing. They expected the institutions are going to mediate their dispute equitably. Back in 2011. Here's an example. Back in 2011, a man was pulled off an airplane at Kennedy International Airport in New York and arrested on suspicion of sexual assault. The man who was arrested was Dominique Strauss-Con. At the time, he was the head of the International Monetary Fund, a leading candidate for the presidency in France, millionaire husband of a billionaire wife, so top of the food chain. The woman he was alleged to have assaulted was a hotel maid and immigrant from the African nation of Guinea. Now, however that case ended up, there was the case itself. There was a lot of funny business and many people continue to think that Strauss-Con may have been set up and so forth, but the point is that the police were not free to simply ignore the accusation because of the relative status of the accused. I'm not saying there are no inequalities in the justice system. Of course, the rich and powerful are always going to find ways to leverage their advantages. I'm just saying that the purpose of our institutions is to trim those advantages down. If you don't believe that, all you have to do is ask yourself how things would look if there were no police and no courts at all. What would it look like? You don't have to speculate about that. We know exactly what it would look like because we have more historical examples and even contemporary examples than we can count. We know what kind of social situation takes shape and it's something like a modified version of Hobbes idea of a war of all against all. Instead of all against all, that is, instead of every individual against every individual, it's more of a war of every group against every group. And in that world, survival comes down to two things. First, make damn sure you're part of a group. The most obvious and natural group is what? The family, right? Second, protect your reputation because it's all you've got. On one level, protecting your reputation means making sure that everybody knows that your word and the word of your tribe is your bond. That's what Lawrence was talking about, persons, not institutions. Remember, when there are no such thing as contracts and no courts to enforce them if there were, your ability and the ability of your tribe to get people to work with you to procure the things you need to survive, all this depends on maintaining a certain reputation. Fisels Hashemite clan had the prestige that went along with being the custodians of Mecca and Medina, the Holy Cities, and of being descended from the tribe of the Prophet Muhammad and so forth, some built in prestige, say, but they weren't kings. Okay, there was no state that existed of which they were the heads. When they raised their forces in rebellion against the Ottoman Empire, they weren't ordering their army around. They were calling on their loyal allies to join them, but those allies were under no obligation to join them. Certainly no legal obligation. There were no laws, no courts, no police to manage any of this. Those allies were on or bound to come to the aid of their pledged ally, but that was it. So in a tribal culture, your word and the word of your allies This is all you have. God. For those of us in developed nations, it's really hard to understand how important this is or what it would really be like. If you live here in Los Angeles, where I'm at, you can go down the street to Best Buy and plunk down a few scraps of dirty green paper with a president's head on it, and Best Buy will give you a brand new flat screen TV right then and there. They'll trade a TV for your dirty green paper even if every one of your friends and family all think that you're just a dirt bag horrible evil liar. They don't care. Best Buy does not care because your reputation does not matter to them. All that matters is the reputation of the institution that issued those green pieces of paper in your wallet. In this case, the US government, even when your reputation does come into play, say on a credit application, the whole thing is part of this bureaucratic system with scores and official reports and step-by-step ways of repairing your credit and all that. Even if the money you give Best Buy is counterfeit or if you steal from them, we have systems for that. Best Buy doesn't send an assassin after you to send a message to everybody that this is what happens when you steal from us. No, they just fill out the appropriate paperwork and filing insurance report, call the police. It's all standardized. It's all institutionalized. It's all perfectly, gloriously boring. We take it for granted. We have no idea how lucky we are that things like this are boring. Imagine if you lived in a society where none of that existed. Where if you become branded as dishonorable and untrustworthy, even if it's unjustified and mobiles, you might not be able to work, you might not be able to marry, you might not be able to trade to procure your basic needs, or even if you have something tangible to offer in exchange. In a society where reputation means everything, other people may still not want to risk associating themselves with you. That's where we flip over the coin to reveal the dark side of all this. I've spent a lot of time in the Middle East and I'm always blown away by how polite and hospitable Arabs are. In an honor culture, a premium is placed on integrity and individuals go to great lengths to avoid giving offense to others. But it also becomes imperative to make sure that everyone knows that you're not going to put up with even the slightest disrespect or insult. It's that old West cliche again, right? One cowboy calls another cowboy a liar or a cheater and it's not just a possibility. It's expected that the one being insulted has to be ready to fight, even to the death right here, right now to defend his reputation. That's not macho posturing. There's a sociological purpose to it and it's what we're talking about here. When you can't rely on institutions to mediate and regulate your interactions with others, your name is all you have to stand on surviving in an honor culture doesn't mean you have to be violent, but it does mean that you have to make it clear to everyone that you're willing to take it there if you're pushed. Now under a state, the state claims a total monopoly on the use of force. Individuals agree to completely give up their right to retribution and to seek individual redress and self help. They agree to submit all of their complaints to the state institutions for arbitration and judgment. Now, we've lived this way our whole lives, right? So we're used to it, but it's not hard to imagine why some people, well, most people, honestly, most tribal people that the Western world has moved in on often resist this encroachment of the establishment of states. It takes such an act of trust that you almost can't believe it ever happened at all. A good example of all this really good illustration of it rather is in the Bible, some of the early books of the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament, if you are Christian, basically records the process of a group of loose kinship-based tribes trying to make this transition, make the jump into being an early state from a traditional society into a complex society. In the first book of Samuel, for example, the various Hebrew tribes are telling their leader Samuel that they want to have a king, like all the other peoples around them. They want a king. And Samuel's trying to tell them that they're not going to like it. You guys probably don't want this. And once you step that way, there's no going back. He tries to tell them they should just stay the way they are. Things are better this way, but they insist they want a king. And so Samuel has this little chat with God about the whole thing. He says they want a king. What should I do? God says, tell them they don't want a king. Samuel says they're insisting. God says fine. They want a king. They want to be like everyone else. Let them have a king like everyone else. Go tell them. So Samuel goes down in front of the people and this is what the Bible says happens. Quote, Samuel told all the words of the Lord and the people who were asking him for a king. He said, This will be the manner of the king who shall reign over you. He will take your sons as his own and they will run in front of his chariots and be his horsemen. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties and others to plow up his ground and reap his harvest and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. This king will take your daughters to be his perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields, the best of your vineyards and olive groves and give them to his servants. He will take a tenth of your grain and a tenth of your vintage and give it to his officials and his servants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle he will take for his own use and your asses he will put to his own work. Real quick, I don't care what anyone says, even if you're a raging atheist, you got to love a millennia old book, a millennia old holy book that has someone warning his people that if they choose a king that king is going to take their asses and put them to work. Anyway, back to the book of Samuel. He will take a tenth of your flocks and you yourselves will become his servants. When that day comes, you will cry out from relief for the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day. But the people refuse to listen to Samuel. No, they said, "We want a king to rule over us. Then we will be like all the other nations. We're the king to lead us and go up before us and fight our battles." And when they say, "King here, what they're talking about is a state. They want a state." Samuel is trying to tell his people that they're going to give up a lot of autonomy here. Once it's gone, there's no getting it back. But they're seeing the people all around them with states and armies and they want to be able to level up and compete with those people. And Samuel is trying to tell him, "It's a trap. It's a trap. It's trying to warn them that this king is going to take away their sons and daughters. That's a very important part of that message." And remember, this is being written after the fact. So this is almost a lament of something that did happen. He tells him that the king is going to take away their sons and daughters and press them into the service of the state. And that's exactly what happens in nearly every complex society. In the last episode of fear and loathing, I said that family loyalty and state institutions are naturally antagonistic. When European explorers started coming across cultures and various stages of development, we got to see this playing out in different ways and they'd often matched up with exactly what we saw in European societies when states were consolidating power. In perfect examples, in places like Hawaii and Tahiti and also in Uganda, actually, the Bugonda people, we found societies that weren't quite fully established states as we would think of like a higher-edic state, but that seemed to be on their way to becoming states. They definitely weren't kinship system tribal traditional societies. They had a king, but the noble families still held a lot of independent power. And the fledging state often did things that were clearly designed to break down clan loyalty. You had a king, you had a fledgling state, but out in the provinces, you still had very powerful and independent clans. And the fledgling state was doing things specifically designed to break down the clan tribal loyalties. In many kingdoms, we find the practice, we even have this in European societies where you have the practice of honoring quote unquote honoring noble families by having their eldest son, the family heir basically to come be raised in the king's court. And it's presented as an honor to have a noble clan leader's heir raised at court close to the king and other noble men with all the comforts of the king's court. But the purpose of a move like this is pretty clear, right? You're getting the sun, the heir of that clan out of whatever province his family controls away from all of the people that he would normally be around, raising him to be loyal to the king and to the state and not to the people in place that he comes from. There are a thousand other little moves that fledgling states make. Most of them are not as clear and obvious as this. A lot of them are more subtle, but a thousand moves that these fledgling states make to break down family loyalty and replace it with loyalty to the king and the broader institutions that he represents. The Hebrew people that Samuel was trying to talk out of choosing a king, they wanted that predictability and that security we were talking about earlier. But Samuel is trying to tell them he's trying to convince them that it's not worth what they're giving up. Because remember, it's not just the power of the government that can become oppressive. It's that life under a state is fundamentally different for individuals and for groups. Personal relationships erode and importance, values change. The importance of an idea like honor becomes entirely a matter of tradition and piety. Nothing more than a ceremonial or fashionable place in the society, a real sociological purpose to it. And it's not just our own society. the wax nostalgic about the about the days before contemporary society ruined everything. No, no, no, that's a running theme in just about every civilization that you can think of. The Roman Republic and then the Empire was always all about how the current generation, whichever generation that meant at a time, of a current generation never lived up to the example of the hardy, pious Romans of the very early days. And once the Hebrews and the Bible finally established their kingdom, the story is basically one long record of what a terrible idea that was. And when a good leader in one of these civilizations does come along, he's usually admired for how well he embodies the all-long lost virtues. Now, there's a reason that this is an almost universal golden age myth and civilization throughout history and all over the world. It's because they all have this sense that they gave something up. Maybe they don't know what it is, but there's this idea that they lost something and something has been lost in most cases. When Faisal asked Lawrence to endorse the promises of his government, there was this huge disconnect because Faisal, he thought he was talking to Lawrence, the human being, when he was really talking to a captain in the British army. Okay, Faisal was speaking for himself, Amir Faisal, son of Hussein, grandson of Ali, of the Hashemite clan, a flesh and blood human being embedded in a particular social context, where it mattered if he lied or if he spoke the truth. Now, he thought he was talking to a person in Lawrence, but he wasn't. And going back to the Old West and the United States on the frontier, in an Old West town, you go down to the general store and you buy something from John Smith, the owner of the store who lives down the road from you with his family. Today, when I go to a corporate supermarket and buy something, it doesn't matter who I am or who the person behind the counter is, taking my money. It doesn't matter. Neither of us are specific people from certain families with personal histories. It doesn't matter. In a civilization, every human interaction is decontextualized. They aren't meetings between two flesh and blood human beings. Not really. It's more like in every human interaction, people just slide in and out of roles according to the need of the moment. In a traditional society, for example, a marriage, every marriage is an event of great importance to two families and to a whole community. It matters very much who the two people are and what the circumstances of their marriage are. It matters. In our society, it's just a matter of contract law. It doesn't really matter at all who the two people are or why they're getting married. It's just a legal arrangement. And you can swap out the names and nothing would be different. And I said in the last episode that existentialist philosophy and talk about alienation begins as a society passes from agrarian and herding arrangements to urban civilization. And that's not a coincidence, things change. And this is part of the organic process of a society's development. There's nothing in my opinion that can be done to stop it. But in most societies, after they've got their state, they look back and they feel like, well, they feel like they gave up something important. But don't get me wrong. It's not just the values. Okay, something changes in your relationship, the power as well. Something changes when you're under the power of a state. Sure, you can go to the state institutions to complain if somebody harms you. But the thing is, it's not just that you can go to the state institutions. Now you have to go to the state institutions. If someone attacks your sister, you might want to tear that guy's head off and normally you would do that. But now you can't. Now you have to go to the police. And if it turns out that your sister's attacker has a cousin at the police department, or if he slipped by because the cops didn't read him his rights or whatever, well, you're just going to have to live with that. Again, there's a lot of trust involved here, right? You have to trust all over the world today. We see failed or failing states. And in the vast majority of them, the main obstacle is trying to figure out how to make that leap of faith and establish that mutual trust that the institutions are going to do their job and work as advertised regardless of who's controlling them. We basically, more or less generally believe that in the United States. You go to a place like Afghanistan or Somalia. The main reason they can't get it going is because they can't get past that obstacle. I mean, hell, go to a place like Ukraine and that's their problem right now. One group takes power and they are entirely pro-Russia. And so the other half of the country is angry at that. Then the other group takes power and they are entirely pro-European union and the Russian side gets angry. And they just switch off and both sides try to undo everything that the last sign did consolidate power, make it so that the other side can't take back over. It's just this back and forth battle. You know, we completely take it for granted in the United States, but we have had dozens of transitions of presidential power administration to administration to administration. Some of those transitions were bitterly contested, right? The 2000 election, George Bush and Al Gore, you still have tons of people today that George say George Bush shouldn't have won that election. It went to the Supreme Court. It was a corrupt process and all that. But regardless of that, not once, has there every single one of them has gone through peacefully. Al Gore didn't go get together all his people in the Democratic Party and raise a rebellion against George Bush to take the presidency. No, the institutions work and we transition peacefully. It's incredible that we have done that dozens of times now without having any major incidents. But actually, you don't even have to look at failed or failing states to see this at work. You can see it at work right here. We have some of this same dynamic in developed countries like the United States and subcultures that have less of a positive relationship, say with the institutions of state power. If you look at the criminal underworld, any criminal underworld, or if you look at the drug game in the US, for example, you see that same old west attitude where people can get killed over the slightest sign of disrespect. I mean, half of gangster rap and that whole aesthetic is about letting everyone know two things, right? That you're ready to throw down at the drop of a hat and that you've got a whole stable of loyal allies who are ready to throw down with you and stand with you. This isn't just some random appropriation of an old value system. This is the social system that always emerges in a situation where you don't have a secure relationship to state institutions. In America's inner cities, you've got whole populations of people who, whatever the reality of the situation, I'm sure it varies from place to place and city to city. Whatever the reality is, don't feel like the state institutions are there to serve them, but they don't work for them. They feel disenfranchised. The state apparatus exists, but although they live inside the borders of the United States, a lot of these people have traditionally been on the outside of that state in important ways. They're in the borders, but outside the state in many ways. See, we have to remember something important about states. And this is something that can really easily get lost when you live in a place like the United States. If you live in the US and you look up at the map of the United States, you see the outline of the country, including Alaska and Hawaii. And we think of the state, right? The state government and so forth of the United States of America is being co-extensive with the lines on that map. There's no spot anywhere within that shape that we call the United States that isn't under the full control of the state. Now, you can hide. You can slip between the cracks and whatever, but you can't defy the state and carve out your little thiefdom. You can't do it. If you live up in an empty region of Montana, say, and you get all your friends together and you're all ex-special forces, guys, who know how to shoot a gun, know how to fight. And you just decide that you're not going to follow the laws in your town or in your county. You know what's going to happen in the US? First, the sheriff's going to show up, right? But maybe the sheriff doesn't have the resources to fight with you and you can fight off the sheriff. You think you win, you don't win. No, eventually the state police show up. And maybe you have the firepower to fight them off. Great, good for you. Eventually the National Guard shows up and we will take it all the way to the Air Force and the US Marines if we have to, but we will go to full blown civil war and drain the whole US treasury before we let you win. There is never a point at which we will just sort of shrug our shoulders and say, well, nothing we can do. I guess he's got us. No, we'll go to civil war before we let that happen. This doesn't mean you can't carve out a little area of control. I'm sure things like that exist in different places, but the point is you have to stay off the radar of state power. Even if they know that you're there, you have to stay off their radar. Kind of it doesn't matter who you are. Street gangs, militias, the mafia. If you get the state's attention, if you, if it becomes a matter of open defiance, you're done. So we're used to looking at states and thinking of them kind of as code extensive with the borders we see on a world map, but usually it's better to think of states another way. It's important actually to remember that throughout history, and in many places still even today, that's not how state power works at all. Most of the time it's better to think of state power like a magnet or like a series of magnets centered in the cities and military garrisons exercising strong control near the center, but then kind of shading off and weakening as you get further away from those centers of state power. Large populations like the large populations of cities can only be supported in fertile areas with plenty of food, plenty of resources, and so all throughout history what we see is river valleys and trade crossroads, places like that coming under the control of states. That's where cities crop up and states control those areas. The tribes they get pushed out to the hills and deserts and that's where we see tribal dynamics and more traditional groups flourishing in areas where there aren't enough resources to support large populations and so they become kind of uninteresting to states in the first place and where populations are more isolated and spread out. So it just becomes inefficient resource wise for the states to put forth the effort to dominate them. So you see these regions by the way even in the borders of modern states, it can be really deceiving. Look at a place like say Iran's a pretty developed modern state in many ways. Iran, but there are a whole regions up on the Iranian plateau or over around where like around the Balooka stand border region with Pakistan where nomadic tribes live simple lives with almost total autonomy. It can be very deceiving because they're within a country, but in most ways they don't really belong to that country, that state. They live autonomously only occasionally making contact with any signs or representatives of state power. Most importantly though, even though these people fall inside the borders of modern nation states, they very much consider the governments of those states to be essentially foreign powers. They retain all of their tribal dynamics and power structures and consider the governments to this whatever state they happen to fall in as a sort of, you know, as a sort of foreign power almost, they identify fully with their tribe. And when they have dealings with the representatives of the state, they experience it as something like meeting with a foreign dignitary. It's hard for us to imagine that, but that's really how it is in a very literal way. Now the states are very powerful and they have armies and so forth and the tribes know this. So they have to respect that power. And sometimes they try to ally with it or use that power in their own tribal lives or disputes, but they don't identify with it. Now think about this much closer to home, we see the same phenomenon in Mexico today. We all know the shape of Mexico on the map, but that's not really Mexico. Mexico is a series of magnets spread out around that territory with influence fading the farther you get from each magnet. And where those magnetic fields don't overlap or where they're interrupted by mountain ranges or deserts, you can't really call that Mexico in anything but a geographic sense. Politically it doesn't make a lot of sense to call it Mexico. You know, in the US, that group of special forces guys in Montana, they would never reach a point where they win, right? Where the state apparatus just shrugged its shoulders and said there's nothing to be done. In Mexico, this is exactly what happens for whole swathes of territory. There are whole regions that are under the control of the cartels who when the government forces come around, they don't hide from the government. They reach for their guns. Okay. So coming back to the US and other developed societies and some of the subcultures and keeping this kind of idea of what a state is in mind, think of it like this. If you're an African American and one of our inner cities, very often the extent of your direct experience with the state probably consists of getting your head cracked by the cops that come prowling through your neighborhood in a car with a shotgun across the dashboard. They don't really have a relationship to the state or any level of familiarity with the apparatus other than that in a way that would allow them to interface with it in the way that other people might be able to. If you're talking about drug culture specifically, that underground, then you're talking about a situation where you literally cannot use the state institutions to mediate your relationships. You can't go to a notary and sign a contract for a drug for a drug deal. You can't go to the cops as someone jacks you, right? And even if you could, when you feel disenfranchised, you probably wouldn't. It's like Tony Montana said in Scarface, right? What did you got? All I've got is my balls and my word. That's what he said. Now, he's not just being a tough guy here. His balls and his word really are all he has in a situation where he cannot appeal to a higher authority for conflict resolution. So anyway, coming around to bring these two ideas together, the idea about state power being like a series of magnets and the subcultures in the US, the next step is to realize that the state is not one thing. Now the very word state makes it sound like the most solid permanent thing there is, but really the state is a series of institutions, layered institutions working together to manage a series of tasks and relationships. And each of these layered institutions, it's like its own series of magnets and they all have different levels of coverage. You have the state's instruments of violence like the police, the prisons, the national guard, the army and so forth. And their reach and resources are pretty much infinite for all intents and purposes, right? If you're a citizen of the United States, if you're an inner city dealer, you're very familiar with this aspect of the state. There are no gaps in the magnetic fields. If you were to draw a map of the practical coverage, the practical coverage of the state's instruments of violence, those institutions, it would look the same as the map of the US. But then there are countless other layers, other institutional layers that don't have nearly the same penetration. Okay, think of if you're an upper middle class family in the suburbs and you have a dispute with someone, well, we have a state institution for that. You can get a lawyer and take it to court and submit your case to the state for arbitration. If you don't like it, appeal the judgment, whatever. If you are a poor African American and West Baltimore living in a row house, you can theoretically do all of those things. But in reality, well, if you were to draw a map of the practical real world coverage of this aspect of the state in terms of whether the people can in real life, access it and relate to it, you would see blank spots all over the place, like one of those old maps from, you know, from from the days before we explored the globe. Does that make sense? These states, the state's institutions of violence cover every square inch of our territory. But there are gaps in the overlapping magnetic fields for many of the other state institutions. You've probably heard a common cliche that gets tossed around a lot that the family is the basic building block of society, right? I actually think that can be really misleading in a modern society it can. It's helpful for me to think about a society not as being a structure and edifice built up out of solid blocks, right? As the psalm or the aggregation of all these little solid family blocks, but instead think of it as a series of interlocking networks. Okay, that's how we think of a society as a series of interlocking networks through which individual people interact with each other in different ways. What I mean is a family can live off by itself, like little house on the prairie and not really be a means by which an individual interfaces with society. Even in modern cities, actually, if you think of like in a modern city in the United States, the family doesn't really serve that role. It doesn't really serve as a sort of port that I can jack into to plug into the broader society. Many people, you know, we visit families for holidays, but we don't really list the family as one of the meaningful ways that we interface with the society. It's like those visits and phone calls with the family. It's like they're social cul-de-sacs, right? You go to interact with your family and it's sort of a good in itself, but it's not a method that you use. It's not an outlet to the broader social world, right? I guess what I'm trying to say is in very few instances is your status as a son or as a brother or a grandfather or a grandmother, an uncle or something like that. In very few instances, is that going to be the decisive role that you wear in a given social context, right? Very few instances where you're going to be outacting in the broader society and your status as son or grandfather, whatever, is going to be something that matters that anybody cares about. That's going to be the role you're playing in a given context, very, very rarely. And so, and this is not the case in a traditional society that's based on the kinship system, by the way. The fact that you are grandfather or that you are cousin or second cousin relative to someone else or uncle or whatever, that is the decisive factor. It determines your whole role in the society and your place and your status and your duties and responsibilities. and other people's obligations to you and so forth, right? It's the decisive factor. That is how you interface with the society is through the medium of your family. Well, if I'm not interfacing with the society through that medium, how am I interfacing with it? The answer is several different ways, through several different networked institutions, right? I plug into an economic network every time I buy or sell something, right? And I plug into that network through the medium of the Federal Reserve or another financial institution. If I'm using currency or credit card or something. In other words, I am interacting with another person or another group of people and who they are and who I am in this particular interaction is being defined by the institution that is mediating our exchange. I'll have another interaction where I'm an employer or I'm an employee, right? And those are roles that you can put on and take off when there are institutions to mediate your relationships there. In another context, I am a health insurance customer, say, or in another context, I'm a member of a political party, right? And so I hope this is making sense, but this is where I'm going with all this. The state is not the buildings and the offices and the titles and any of that. It's not anything, okay? The state is the network of institutions that mediate and standardize the relationships and exchanges between individuals. I want to repeat that one more time. And someone might object that, you know, it's not just the state that many of the institutions that we jack into are private institutions. And that's true. It's not just the government, say, but even those private institutions can only exist under the power of a state. A financial institution needs a state to mediate disputes and issue currency, et cetera, right? When it comes down to it, and I'm talking to anyone out there calling yourself an anarchist. When it comes down to it, your important choices come down not to oppression or freedom, but to institutions or gangs. Those are your choices. Nothing we would call freedom has ever existed except under the domination and control of a state, ever. And true, independent tribes have certain liberties that people under states give up, but go do a survey of a woman's life or even of a man's life in most cases and Poshchun was here a stand today and get back to me about how free it is. The groups have, it's like this, the groups have freedom as groups, but it often comes at a greater cost to individual liberty than any states require. 'Cause individuals can't survive on their own. You have to have a group. You have to be able to call on allies, usually your family to back you against other groups. It's like, you know, they say in prison, say, that you gotta find a gang, right? I don't know if that's true, but it's on TV. Anyway, so even though you're theoretically free to do whatever you want, there are no laws or police to tell you you can't. You're theoretically free to do whatever you want. Groups tend to police individual behavior internally. They police individual internal behavior fiercely. And they have to make sense, right? I mean, if there's a possibility that my whole tribe is gonna get sucked into a multi-generational blood feud because my loose cannon cousin tries to sleep with the daughter of some tribal leader, I'm gonna make damn sure that my loose cannon cousin gets tightened up real quick. And that girl's father is probably gonna make sure that, you know, his daughter stays indoors or puts a burglond when she has to go outside. And Homer's illiad, right? The Akien's go to war and destroy the city of Troy because a prince of Troy ran off with the Spartan king, men allow us his wife, Helen. A whole city in people was destroyed to avenge that insult. Well, if Helen had been in a burka, that probably wouldn't have happened. Probably wouldn't have happened. And the classical Greeks actually seem to have taken that lesson from the illiad, by the way. And I don't know how much you've read about it. You read about how the Athenians were with their wives and it's not an exaggeration. And we make the Taliban proud. That's not an exaggeration. I don't know how the enlightened Greeks get off the hook for that, by the way. Now look, I'm not saying any of this is good. Okay, definitely not. I'm definitely not saying it's good. I'm just saying that it had a sociological purpose. It had a sociological purpose that had nothing to do with religion, by the way. And everything to do with the group anarchy of a tribal system. So generally speaking groups, groups give up their autonomy under states, but unless you're one of the most powerful members of the most powerful tribe, individuals usually experience more freedom under state power. You know what, though, actually, let's talk about religion for a second very quickly because I know a lot of people out there are gonna have strong opinions one way or the other about what I just said. I'll stick with things most people today associate with the Islamic world because that's kind of what we're talking about. So most people think about the sequestration of women or female dress codes like the Berka as being rooted in the Muslim religion, right? Or to take the most extreme example, they consider something like honor killing where a girl is killed by her family members because of some real or imagined unapproved sexual relationship to be about the Muslim religion or at least about religion since honor killing is occasionally happening in other groups as well. Other religious groups occasionally. But all of these things existed before Islam ever came around. Okay, the prophet Muhammad didn't invent the Berka, he didn't invent honor killing or any of that. These behaviors existed before it came around. They're rooted in tribal social arrangements where as ugly as they are and believe me, there is ugly to me as anybody, they had a purpose at one time. It's not a justification to say that something has a purpose and I'm not interested in having pointless conversations about whether things like this are justified. It's not about that. See, very often even the most oppressive laws laid down by a new religion are a moral step forward at the time. And that's something that's really hard for a lot of people to grasp. We see it out of context today and all we see is the oppression. People will point out some rule in the Bible, say, like how if a man rapes a woman, then all that man has to do is take her as a wife and pay her family some fixed amount of money, right? People bring that up as evidence of how the Bible is endorsing evil, patriarchal values and it's hard to argue with that line of reasoning, right? It says right there, you can do whatever you want to, a woman as long as you have 50 pieces of silver to give her father. And sounds pretty obviously horrible until you realize the reason that a rule like this comes about. I mean, what do you want? Thinking back to that time, what do you want? You want the rapist to go to prison? Who's gonna arrest him? There are no cops. Who's gonna sentence him? There are no courts, there are no judges. There are no prisons. So do you want him to be killed then? Okay, great, because that's what would have happened before this rule. Someone rapes your sister, you and your brothers go kill him. You were honor bound to avenge your sister and go kill him, but it doesn't end there. It's not over. It doesn't matter that you had a good reason. Now the family of your victim is honor bound to kill you and your brothers. They have to avenge their family member. So they call on their allies to get ready to fight and it steps up one level. Once you and your brothers are all killed, now you're tribe, your whole tribe is honor bound to avenge you all. You see how this goes? This is how the Starks and the Lannisters end up fighting each other and the seven kingdoms get torn to shreds. You see, the 50 pieces of silver rule looks horrible to us. When we have, we have experiences with institutions, but when it was written at the time, it was a first step. Okay, it was an attempt by these people and the absence of all that. It was an attempt by these people to get together and come to some kind of an arrangement. Where there were commonly agreed upon penalties for violations so that they could stop getting into these full-fledged multi-generational blood feuds every time a crime happens. At the time, it was a step forward. It was an attempt to answer a pressing social question in the absence of established social institutions. Now coming back to states, I said earlier, I want to come back to something because I can hear people choking on whatever it is they're eating. Even though I'm in the past and inside my own house right now, I said earlier that individuals often had more freedom under states and I should qualify that. It's probably important to say that, you know, individual experiences may vary, right? Obviously, some states are tougher to live under than others and for most of human history, states were undisguised mechanisms of oppression and exploitation. But while modern states, states, vary in the degree of coercion that they apply, you cannot coerce all of the people all of the time. So those institutions, they depend first and foremost on some level of common agreement. Without those agreements, there is no state or at least no legitimacy. And without legitimacy, all you have is force and you can only push that so far. And those agreements, they depend more than anything on trust. I keep going back to that same thing. They depend on trust. People have to be able to trust each other. And I should say very quickly, okay, that these are just models, by the way. Everything I'm saying, don't mistake the map for the territory. Don't reify any of this. This is just a way of thinking about things that helps me understand certain ideas and certain behaviors and dynamics. But again, don't mistake the map for the territory. It just helps me to think of a society, not as a structure built out of individual blocks, but as the series of networks, which allow individuals to regulate their interactions with each other. And by the way, societies come apart when too many people become unable to find network jacks that they can kind of plug into. Okay, that's something that we need to keep in mind and are developed societies today. You can have all the state apparatus you want, but when too many people find themselves in those little blank spots, those areas with no coverage, find that they can't access the broader a society through the state institutions. Look out, okay, that's how societies come ripping apart. The critical thing to keep in mind is that all of those different networks have different areas of coverage, different areas of participation, right? Now there are many, many places all over the world and even in developed societies where if two people have a dispute, they don't have access to the state institutions. If two people have a dispute, they're not going to court. They're fighting over it. My balls in my word, right? Again, he would have put it differently. He wouldn't have said my balls in my word, but Faisal would have understood that perfectly. Okay. He lived in a world where your balls in your word mattered. A lot of people in modern society today look back or look forward if you're watching the walking dead or something to a time when that mattered more than it does today. They look back on it with some nostalgia because today nobody cares if you have balls, right? And if the financial crisis in 2008 taught us anything, it taught us that worrying about your word is for suckers. You can be a cowardly, dishonorable dirtbag and you could end up with your own private island in a whole society that treats you like a king because your personal honor really doesn't mean anything. It doesn't. We have a few sensitive points here and there, sure, but we've gotten to a point where most people just expect that their politicians are lying to them, for example. We expect that and it doesn't hurt our politicians at all. You think they care at all? Do you think they care at all that you think they're dishonest when they're clinking champagne glasses at some thousand dollar a plate fundraiser? I assure you, they do not give a shit. But this was not the world that Fies lived in. In Fiesles world, the derth of legitimate institutions meant that personal relationships and reputation and honor, these things were still paramount. I mean, just ask, this is actually a good way to think about it. Just ask yourself why anyone was following Fiesles Hashemite clan in the first place back then. I'm going to speak a lot more to this point in the next episode because it's going to become very, very important to understanding the situation in Palestine and really in the whole Muslim world in the 20th century to be honest with you. So we're going to get deep into that in the next episode, but I'm going to crop it a little bit here real quick, actually. I want to make very clear that I'm not pretending to exhaust all of the ins and outs of tribal dynamics or honor cultures or the inherent difficulties of establishing states or national institutions with this talk. People spend whole PhD careers applying brains with way more horsepower than mine to these questions. I'm just barely scratching the surface and offering some random thoughts that came to mind as I was working on these previous two episodes. So if you have more thoughts on it, I'd love to hear them. And actually, if you have anything that you'd like me to explore and talk about, email me that too. I'll put out another one of these supplemental episodes with any questions that people might have. So, okay. So, I mentioned that Fiesles clan, the Hashemites were the custodians of the Holy cities of Mecca and Medina and that they were descended from the Kuraish tribe of the Prophet Muhammad. So their position is derived from a very interesting combination of political and religious authority. Very specific sociological reason for this. In the traditional tribal cultures of the Muslim world, religious figures have always filled a very unique and important sociological niche. Okay. So when there are no strong and legitimate states that hold them in not only on violence and retain to themselves the final authority to render and enforce judgments, groups have no choice but to resort to what anthropologists who study this kind of thing, who studied tribal cultures called self-help. Now, this has nothing to do with positive thinking or morning yoga routines, right? Just means that if you have a dispute with someone, it is on you to solve it. If someone kills your brother and there are no police, no courts to arrest this guy or sentence this murderer, the only way justice will be done is if you do it yourself, if you go and avenge your brother yourself. And since the killer probably has a family and a clan, the tribe who will be on or bound to avenge him, if you get to him from murdering your brother, you can very easily get into this back and forth cycle of violence and reprisal after reprisal that we mentioned earlier. And unless one side is wiped out, a blood feud can eventually pull in these vast super tribes that are allied to both sides and go on for years and years or even generations, unless the two sides can somehow agree to terms. And so very often, a mediator is called in to negotiate an end to the dispute. And very often, it's in the interest of everybody who's not directly involved in it, but who's being pulled into it to get a dispute negotiated. Now since the families are all nested into larger lineage structures, the mediator is often a common respected relative, right? So if you think of the tribal structure as like, I don't know, one of those Russian eggs that each contains a smaller egg or, okay, think of it like a gigantic family tree, tumbling down from a single ancestor into more and more granular families through the generations, the mediator will often come from someone on the same branch who doesn't have a preferred relationship to one side or the other, right? So if you have a dispute with your brother, your father, your uncle can serve as a mediator. But if you have a dispute with a cousin, your father, your uncle's not going to work because they're not going to be impartial. So you have to go up another level and maybe have your grandfather or another one of your unrelated uncles perform the function, right? See the thing is, neither side is bound to accept any of the decisions or terms that the mediator suggests. Remember, this is all voluntary. There are no state institutions, okay? No courts, there are no laws. There's no law saying that you have to listen to this guy. And the decisions he hands down are not legal judgments. If you don't like the mediator's suggestion, you can reject the terms and get back to your feud, okay? It's all voluntary. So the mediator has got to be someone who is so widely respected, whose honor is so unquestionable. He's so widely regarded that the two sides in the dispute feel compelled to put in an effort or else they're going to risk losing face. Maybe somebody was so much honor that all the people around, if you can't come to an agreement with him as your mediator, they're going to look at it as if you're the problem, okay? So successfully mediating disputes is one of the most powerful ways to gain a reputation, to gain honor and a culture like this. In the larger your reputation, the more gravitas you're going to bring to future arbitrations, right? And there's a leftover recognition of this whole dynamic even the American system, by the way, we still call a judge your honor, your honor, right? Well, in a culture where these informal arbiters don't have any institutional backing, you know, an American judge has institutions behind them where there are no institutions, their power to force both sides to the table and mediate disputes comes from their reputation alone. Okay, so that all works fine when the feud is between two families with the same great grandfather, right? What do you do when two whole tribes with no common lineage or overriding authority? That doesn't exist. They have no common lineage to bring them to the table. Or what do you do when the tribes of a region who are all theoretically equal and free need to deal with national governments? When those situations, well, actually I'll let a British anthropologist William Lancaster describe it. He spent decades studying the Ruala Bedouin tribe, spread out to the east of Palestine, and he talks a lot about this. He uses an Arabic term, Ibn Am, which is basically just an extended family with a common ancestor. between three and five generations back. So it's a branch of the family tree, and he uses the term Ibn Am. That's what it means here. And he writes, quote, "any ordinary tribesmen mediates within his own three or five generation Ibn Am. Or if he is well known between other Ibn Am's, he can never mediate on a larger scale because his reputation range is limited. And because there are no larger groups to mediate between until the level of the tribe, this is the job of the sheik, as well as acting as mediators at Ibn Am level for themselves and others. The amir and the sheik are mediators on behalf of the tribe or with national governments." End quote. So when the First World War brought about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in Arab territory, the Arab forces faced a choice. They could just allow that state authority to recede back into Turkey and go back to enjoying the freedom of tribal life, but they knew that once the Ottoman Empire was gone, that wouldn't be the end of it. They knew they were gonna have to contend with other states, including the European colonial empires, who could bring resources to bear that no collection of independent tribes could resist to compete with. If they hoped to have any chance of keeping their independence, now that the Ottoman Empire was gone, they were gonna have to give some of it up by creating and submitting to a state of their own. But who, right? Who could possibly be trusted to lead this state without just making it into an instrument of domination for the benefit of his tribe? See the balanced opposition of tribes that balanced opposition of tribes had been thrown completely out of whack with the introduction of the possibility of centralized states. Suddenly the battle for power became a winner, take all affair. There was no balanced opposition in a region with several independent tribes, right? Each tribe can always draw a line in the sand to let everyone else know where they had better backup or be ready to throw down. And if other tribes grow too powerful, you can always pack up and move a little bit further away. Power was reflected in a series of fluid relationships and shifting alliances. Tribes are always moving around. It sounds like chaos to have a bunch of tribes using deterrence to manage their relationships to each other. And I guess it kind of is, but it's a sort of structured anarchy with built-in limitations on how much of an upper hand one tribe can gain on all the others. But when you're talking about states, the game changes entirely. Now you have a single institution that asserts a total monopoly on power, at least within that territory. There is no balanced opposition anymore. If one tribe or one Confederacy of tribes is able to take control of the state machinery, even if it's by perfectly legitimate institutional means, suddenly that tribe has tax revenues, armies, police forces, while the rival tribes not only don't have the power to retaliate and protect themselves, now it becomes illegal to protect yourself. Retaliating against the dominant tribe, now it becomes treason. There was no such thing as treason or sedition in a traditional tribal arrangement. So the big tribes in the Middle East, after the war was over, they were scratching and clawing and doing anything they could to keep their rivals from gaining the upper hand as centralized states were coming into power. And this rendered them totally unable to work together. And it left the Arabs with no credible leaders who could be counted on to represent the whole group if they were put in charge. Well, throughout history, religious leaders have often stepped into this credibility vacuum in the Middle East. In the absence of any neutral parties, the communities often turn to a respected religious leader to serve as a mediator or to be the voice of the people to an outside national power. Now, of course, the religious leaders are people, with interests of their own, but theoretically at least, and often at least to a degree in reality, the system worked because there was a value system that reinforced it and helped it work. You know, like I said, this was such a vital sociological necessity that successfully arbitrating a dispute and getting a reputation as an impartial mediator was one of these single most powerful ways to become a prominent influential person that was able to call on others anytime you needed them. And so there's this whole shared value system built around incentivizing this kind of honorable behavior. And Fisels' decision to protect those two Ottoman generals and to protect his honor and his agreement with Wiseman by attaching that note, all of that has to be understood in this context. His personal honor, famously firm, even in the most extreme situations, that was the key to the entire Arab national project, Fisels' personal honor because it made him into someone that all the independent tribes at Levant could trust to be the leader of their new state. They could trust him. This is why they continued to follow him, by the way, even when they didn't agree necessarily with the decisions he was making regarding the Zionists and the French. Whatever they thought about his decisions, they all knew that no one else had the kind of reputation that would allow them to step up and replace Fisels as the leader of an independent Arab state. He was the lynchpin of the Alliance. No one else could fill that role because no one else could commanded the respect that would allow the other tribes to trust their impartiality. There's so much more to talk about on this subject. And again, I'm not gonna pretend to be getting anywhere near the bottom of it in an hour. What I wanted to do in this little supplemental was hopefully just begin to answer a few of the questions and bridge a few really common cultural misunderstandings that have plagued questions involving the Middle East, even at the highest levels right up to the present day. There's this Arab proverb that goes, "I against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, me, my brother and my cousin against the world." In the Arab world, we're large deserts and inhospitable terrain, made it a poor and inefficient use of resources. We talked about for states to try to dominate, to spend the time trying to dominate every inch of the territory they claimed, and where it was difficult for large permanent settlements to take root anywhere away from the coast or the river valleys, these malleable tribal relationships persisted and actually continue to persist in many places, even today. In the 20th century, beginning before the First World War, the Arabs began to construct political institutions that might have one day created the conditions that would have allowed people to move beyond tribes and embrace national identities centered around legitimate political entities. Anyone today with a television set or a Twitter feed knows that that didn't happen though. The proximate causes for that failure differ in each region or country, but in every case, at least a portion of the blame can be laid at the feet of the outside powers who actively undermine any attempts to unite under secular identities. Now you'll hear writers like Edward Said, he wrote the book Orientalism where he lays out this view. You'll hear writers like him say that all this talk about tribalism or any other generalities is just, he calls it Orientalism. He says that the failure of Arab peoples to establish secular national states is entirely due to Western exploitation, but that takes it way too far, by the way. Western powers exploited internal divisions and took advantage of tribal dynamics, yes, but those weaknesses had to exist in order to be exploited. And so the question is, in one of these societies, if you're in a society that finds itself being exploited and colonized by outside powers, in every attempt to find common political ground on which to construct political institutions to face the threat is undermined, what do you do? What happens? You just give up, just agree to keep fighting amongst yourselves and being colonized and exploited forever. What do you do? What happens? I'll tell you what did happen. Starting after the First World War, Western powers moved into Arab lands, took control and installed leaders and political institutions that were never gonna enjoy political legitimacy, popular legitimacy on the local level. I mean, most of them were designed so that they would never enjoy popular legitimacy. The support of the majority of the people, they were designed that way. That's why the French put Shiites in control of the majority Sunni country of Syria. That's why the British put Sunnis in control of the majority Shiite country of Iraq and so forth. I mean, think of it like this, what are you supposed to do if you're a part of the oppressed Shiite majority in Saddam Hussein's Iraq? Are you just supposed to be a proud Iraqi and a proud follower of Saddam Hussein? Probably not, right? You're a second class citizen who is excluded from participating in the society and in the state institutions in any meaningful way. National identity is not really an option that you have. And so if national identity is out of the question as a rallying point, are you gonna take, what else, you could take the communist route and come together around class identity instead of national identity? We know how that turned out. That's a great way to end up in one of Saddam Hussein's torture centers, probably with an American CIA operator watching the proceedings. So that's out of the question. So what? What then? If you're being exploited and humiliated and colonized by outside powers, the only hope you have of changing that situation is finding some way any way to unite some common ground to unite on so that you can meet other nation states on an even playing field. So when the usual secular political identities are all illegitimate, what are you going to do? You're going to find something else. And in the Middle East, that's something else has been religion. A hundred years into this process and 14 years into the war on terror, we're used to hearing that there's something especially fanatical about Islam, right? There's something different about it. Something inherent in that religion that prevents the separation of politics and religion and people will go find passages in the Quran and so forth to back that up. In the next episode, we're going to start to see why that's nonsense. That is total nonsense. There's nothing special about Islam in this regard. Okay, every Christian in Europe a few centuries ago would have considered it just as impossible for the two realms of politics and religion to be separated as any member of the Islamic state does today. Go back five or six centuries to Spain or France and tell anybody you find that politics and religions should be totally separate realms and see what happens to you. Okay, they would have considered impossible. Religions become the identity of choice in the Islamic world because it is the only feasible legitimate rallying point in a part of the world where outside forces have made every effort to poison all the other options. Often these outside powers have gone so far as to fund and support religious extremists specifically to counter any secular nationalist movements. We've done this over and over again. In the next episode, we're going to see how this process began in Palestine and how it helps set the terms of the Arab Israeli conflict up to today and through that story, we'll also see how it shaped Palestinian and Arab identities and created the conditions now for a civilizational conflict. But I'll save all that for the next episode of fear and loathing in the New Jerusalem, the next narrative episode. Give me two, three weeks it most and I'll have it out for you. I've put it out there now so now I'm on a deadline if I don't have it out by then you can hold me to account. If you have any questions by the way or any disputes with anything I've said, feel free to hit me up, shoot me an email, or the website and leave a comment. If there's something that you want me to dig into and research or if there are questions you have, you want another supplemental episode, I'd love to hear it. At the end of each one of these by the way, at the end of each series, I'm thinking of doing maybe a question and answer so that I'll open up the floor and if anybody has questions about anything that we covered in the story, I might do like a good hour or two hour whatever episode where we really dig into some of the questions that come up more frequently. So if you have any questions, hit me up on Facebook or Twitter or on the website and I'll definitely get to them and get back to you one way or another. If it's not on the podcast, it'll be back with an email. So feel free, open door policy. I'll see you next time. [Music]