Loyalty makes a village

In a time when "nothing holds us together," we need a different way to think about relationships

Dominic Toretto, noted proponent of family loyalty. Credit: Universal Pictures

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Earlier this week, the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) published a blog post I wrote about how we shouldn’t let politics divide our families. In the piece, I bring up one of the most potent ideas I’ve come across while reading about the history of families: “universalistic” vs. “particularistic” relationships.

I first learned of this idea via the book The WEIRDest People in the World, which I bring up here often because it explains how the western world moved away from tribal-type family structures and toward a unique sense of individualism. My point in the IFS piece was that in much of the non-western world (today and in the past), people prioritize loyalty to loved ones. And if we emulated that attitude a little better, we might not have so many family rifts — including over relatively fleeting political issues.

But this idea is useful for more than just political reconciliation. In fact, it captures the essence of what I’ve been trying to articulate throughout this Nuclear Meltdown project, which is that relationships need to be stronger than many of us (or at least, I) have presumed. The idea of deep loyalty that overrides other concerns is, I think, an essential part of building a village that actually functions.

Universalistic verses particularistic relationships

In The WEIRDest People in the World, author Joseph Henrich explains the difference between these two types of relationships using a hypothetical scenario: What if your friend was driving and hit a pedestrian while speeding. Do you have an obligation to protect your friend, for instance by lying in court about what happened? Or, do you feel like you have an obligation to the truth, consequences to your friend be damned?¹

People in the West tend to choose the latter. They come from cultures that are western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (hence the acronym “WEIRD”) and prioritize ideas — “universal” principles — like justice and fairness over their relationships.

But people from non-WEIRD cultures tend to prioritize loyalty to their loved ones. And they do so even if that means breaking with other norms such as, in the example above, obeying the law. In non-WEIRD cultures, staying true to a friend or family member is considered the “right” and “moral” thing to do, Henrich writes. He adds of non-WEIRD cultures that “people aren’t trying to distinguish themselves as relentlessly honest individuals governed by impartial principles. Instead, they are deeply loyal to their friends and want to cement enduring relationships, even if this involves illegal actions.”

Another way to understand this concept is via inheritance. In a WEIRD culture, people celebrate giving away fortunes for the common good. Think for example of Jeff Bezos, who is often regarded skeptically, verses his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott, who is widely beloved for vowing to give away a vast fortune. They’re an extreme example, but people of more modest means give money away all the time to charities, universities, and churches. My alma mater, like many colleges, has a department devoted to convincing alumni to be generous toward the school in their wills. That’s classic WEIRD behavior because it involves prioritizing an institution or idea over immediate relationships.

Non-WEIRD people who have particularistic relationships, on the other hand, tend to view inheritance differently. One generation has an obligation to the next, and giving away an inheritance to strangers can be seen as a form of negligence or an abnegation of duty.

Obviously at the individual level there is a huge amount of variation in what people actually do. And it’s easy to see how this can go off the rails: The college admissions scandal from a few years ago is a good example of people even in a WEIRD culture breaking the law in an effort to advance their family’s interests.² So I’m not suggesting we run with particularistic relationships all the way to their logical conclusion.

But my argument in the IFS piece was that we WEIRD people should try to lean just a bit more into the particularistic side of the spectrum so that loyalty to our family members outweighs any bitterness we feel over their political stances.

Nobody wants a village

It’s one thing to think of particularistic relationships as a way to smooth over family political disagreements. But two pieces of recent writing illustrate the larger costs of a world in which people have a very weak sense of loyalty.

The first piece comes from the blog Cartoons Hate Her³ and argues that many people say they want a village but don’t actually “behave in a villagey way.” The piece resonated with me because for a long time I was that person, fretting about my lack of a village even as every major life decision I made did nothing to strengthen my social circle. The genesis of Nuclear Meltdown was me trying to grapple with those mistakes and figure out if they could be reversed.

In any case, the piece mentions among other things the author’s attempts to build a community as people around her flaked out. I think this is pretty common. I’ve had numerous conversations with people, often but not exclusively parents, who are frustrated that those around them won’t take relationships to a new level seemingly out of a lack of motivation. I’m talking about people who host dinner parties or invite their kids’ friends’ families over but never experience reciprocation. People who are consistently the only ones reaching out to casual friends to do activities, or who are the only people in the office trying to turn work acquaintances into real friends.

In other words, I agree that many people don’t “behave in a villagey way” at even the most basic level.

But fundamentally, what seems to be happening here is a failure of loyalty within social networks. The people who flaked out as the author tried to build a community weren’t willing to do anything to actually prioritize their relationships. There was not a sense of give or take, no sacrifice. Relationship building took a backseat because, apparently, it was inconvenient.

That’s a long way off from the relationships-above-all particularistic ideal. And it bears out Henrich’s observation that WEIRD people are “bad friends.”⁴

This really captures the problem. You just cannot have a village of people when there is no sense of duty or loyalty to anyone. If you’re trying to build a tribe, it can’t be filled with people who have a “bad friend” worldview. A community is built out of people who are good friends, which is to say those who have a more particularistic view on relationships.

When I tweeted the Cartoons Hate Her post, I got some pushback from a follower who argued that people do have villages made up of, for example, folks they see at the playground or library. But I think that response (which, for the record, I appreciated) zeros in on the way that we’ve actually lost sight of what a village even is. Sure, casual acquaintances at the library are part of a village, but would you include them in your will? To return to Henrich’s thought experiment, would you commit perjury for someone you chat with at the park each Saturday?⁵

That’s what a village is supposed to be. People who show up and put some skin in the game (though hopefully they stop short of breaking the law). A village is made up of people who are loyal, sometimes to a fault and even when that loyalty costs them something. The Cartoons Hate Her post illustrated how far off we are from that ideal.

The second piece of writing I want to highlight illustrates the downstream consequences of the world Cartoons Hate Her is describing. The piece comes from Gen Z writer Freya India and describes an “age of abandonment.” It’s a raw look at how a fear of abandonment leads to things like skepticism of marriage and the rise of therapy culture. This passage in particular stands out:

Plus, total abandonment of any sense that we belong to something bigger. Loss of faith—not just in religion, but in all social bonds. No sense that there’s anything binding us, that we even share the same values. Forget loving our neighbour, we can’t even make eye contact with them. Nothing holds us together anymore. We are alone.

What India seems to be describing here — the idea that “nothing holds us together” — feels like basically a different flavor of what’s happening in the Cartoons Hate Her post. India’s take is more bleak and resigned, while Cartoons Hate Her is searching. But in both cases, they’re exploring the experience of existing in a world that lacks the glue that makes connections possible. And the comparative bleakness of India’s take feels like the result of letting this problem of weak relationships metastasize over multiple generations.

These are big problems that will require complex solutions. But at the core, it feels like what we need is a different way to think about relationships. For IFS, I raised the possibility that being more particularistic might be helpful for people with differing political views. But there’s more to it than just that. If we want a community, we may need to rethink loyalty. We’ll need to find a different paradigm in which we can stop being bad friends and start being good ones.

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1. The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Joseph Henrich. Pages 44-46

2. The college admission scandal also illustrates the practical reason you don’t break the law: you might go to jail, at which point your ability to lead and influence your family breaks down. Ethics aside, criminal activity is a high stakes gamble — and one that all those wealthy and famous parents lost. Lori Loughlin (“Aunt Becky”) even managed to critically damage her daughter’s budding but successful influencing career.

3. It wasn’t until I started writing this post that I realized I only know Cartoons Hate Her by her pseudonym, and that she appears to use that pseudonym pretty constantly. So, I don’t know her real name.

4. Page 44

5. This Twitter interaction made me realize that pro-village people like myself may be failing to articulate what we actually want. The follower seemed to be under the impression that parents clamoring for a village just want free babysitting etc. I think that’s actually a common misunderstanding. Sure, help with childcare would be a lovely collateral benefit of a stronger village. But also, a village is a group of people who pass down knowledge about how to fix your car, or the lullabies new parents sing. It is friends who have local businesses and hire teenagers for first jobs. It’s the people you call just to brag about your kid accomplishing something, or to vent after a bad day. I guess I’ll maybe need to write a post actually defining what a village should be, because it should not be entirely comprised of casual acquaintances and paid workers — which is where a lot of professional class people seem to have ended up at this point.