What aspects of yourself are shaped by your tribe? Politics, philosophy.
Your troop? Hobbies, "local physical culture", jobs, lifestyle.
Your pack? The significance of day to day details of your life, the overlay of *meaning* and motive.
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What do normies, with regular packs, tweet about? Little jokes, their day, back and forths with friends.
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Little jokes? Seemingly banal tweets about one's day?
This is the stuff of *meaning*: the significance of one's daily activities is modulated and *elevated* by their pack!
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This feeling of heightened everyday meaning via intimate pack is what I attempted to capture here.
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I recall my time in the normie-sphere as a joyous high. We'd float through time, secure and together, content even in failure.
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Move up a level from the pack. People who most identify with their troop are concerned with local affairs, hobby-posting, job-posting, etc. This is still considered reasonably normal.
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The distinction between imagined community and tribe is not entirely clear to me, so I'll refrain from trying to exactly disambiguate. But move further up and you get into ideology, politics, philosophy: discussions which cannot conclude. This is most of "toxic Twitter".
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Imagined communities are the intersection of conflicting tribal histories that only agree on one thing: that they are “about” the same thing, like “America”. That thing is the IC. A tribe’s mission is to monopolize an IC and dehumanize and eliminate competing tribes.
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I see, so someone who rejects common ideologies but still (somehow?) cares about "America" in abstract would be part of the IC but not a tribe?
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Not sure such a person exists but if they did, yeah. ICs supervene on tribes so being in an IC without being in a tribe is an unstable degenerate state. You’d join *some* tribe or end up mentally ill or something. Hikkikomori etc.
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My current hypothesis is: when somebody tells a story that models clear ingroup/outgroup trust decisions. Troops do in/out group at neighbor level and lack the abstractions that tribes provide to generalize across infrequent encounters. “Can’t trust Joe” vs “Can’t trust Irish”

