Revolutionary nepotism

National Interest, The, Winter, 2003 by Steve Sailer

These intense family bonds are most often found in areas where government is ineffective or illegitimate or both. These are places where you need your extended family's muscle to survive, because the police are either feckless or predators. There's a vicious circle: Strong and just governments are also hard to establish and maintain among populations whose extended family structures are conducive to mafia-like activities.

This might be especially true in countries where inbreeding is common: cousin marriage is remarkably common from Morocco to parts of India. For example, two studies in the later 1980s found that half the married people in Iraq are wed to either a first or second cousin (versus under 1 percent in the United States). These "consanguineous" marriages strengthen family loyalty. If you arrange for your daughter to marry your brother's son, your grandson and heir will also be your brother's grandson and heir, so there is no need to fight over who inherits the family land or herd.

On the other hand, cousin marriage undermines loyalty to the state and society, which is one reason why Middle Eastern countries teeter between anarchy and tyranny. Shortly before the recent war, commentator Randall Parker wrote on his website, parapundit.com:

   Consanguinity is the biggest underappreciated
   factor in Western analyses of Middle
   Eastern politics. Most Western political theorists
   seem blind to the importance of preideological
   kinship-based political bonds in
   large part because those bonds are not
   derived from abstract Western ideological
   models of how societies and political systems
   should be organized. Extended families that
   are incredibly tightly bound are really the
   enemy of civil society because the alliances
   of family override any consideration of fairness
   to people in the larger society. Yet, this
   obvious fact is missing from 99 percent of
   the discussions about what is wrong with the
   Middle East. How can we transform Iraq
   into a modern liberal democracy if every
   government worker sees a government job
   as a route to helping out his clan at the
   expense of other clans?

Salter also points out that family-based mafias especially flourish when totalitarian regimes collapse, as in the Soviet Union, the Balkans and now Iraq. The ideological dictatorships destroyed most of the non-family associations of civil society (such as corporations, labor unions and political parties). Along with the secret policeman's alumni club, one of the few forms of organization that always survives totalitarianism is the basic biological one of kinship.

Not surprisingly, failed and ex-totalitarian states torn apart by battling clans generate large numbers of refugees and emigres. They tend to gravitate toward more ethnically homogenous, less nepotistic northern regions like Scandinavia, where the Rousseauvean citizenries offer lavish welfare because they are not yet familiar with their new arrivals' more Hobbesian worldviews.