Milk consists of a collidal suspension of fat droplets within water (plus proteins and the sugar lactose). Butter is formed by churning milk in such a way that these small droplets coalesce allowing the fat and water to seperate.

In past our social circles were geographically limited. There was our work peers, our family, our church group, civic group, our neighbors. These overlapped to a great degree and were smallish. It is analogous to the idea in differential geometry of a atlas for a manifold. A less esoteric example of this is the maps of the Earth which being spherical can’t be simply mapped out on a flat sheet of paper. So you have a map of different regions and two maps of adjacent regions will typically have some overlap where parts of the region on one map also appears on the other.

(Patience! We’ll get to the point very soon.)

Now think of the global society as a colletion of smaller overlapping communities. Individuals were typically members of more than one “community” and this provided the connectivity between these distinct communities through which cultural values diffused and evolved.

Within a given community there would be reflective valuation towards it members. The gossip about individuals both good and bad would spread quickly. Actions were praised or condemned, individuals were revered or ostracized. The community’s status heirchy and its dynamic unfolded.

So what was the individual of low status his home community to do? When ostracized or relegated to the bottom rung of the status ladder, especially when their low status was persistantly enforced, they had the option to immigrate into another community. This is agood thing when a community becomes too tyrannical, the oppressed can simply walk away rather than acting out with violence against their social oppression. Imagine the gay youth in the bible belt town moving to the city where he can find acceptance within one of its subcommunities. Or imagine the quiet man who rejects the fast life of the city building a new life and starting a family in a rural community.

By such mechanisms the unhealty communities decline (which is what defines them as “unhealthy”) and the healthy communities expand. The petty tyrants lose power through the defection of those under their thumb. The wiser community leaders will see their influence grow as their community does. And it is not just a matter of individual leaders who come and go over time, but the culture itself of each community. Its values, traditions and structure encode an impliclt belief system about how to treat each other which evolves through a form of natural selection in the ecology of communities with its own “survival of the fittest” consolidating true wisdom within its framework over the long term.

One thing that is certain is that a “nihilistic community” is an oxymoron. For example, the progressive left fervently condemns “judgment” and “discrimination” as they judge and ostracize those who disagree with them. But before we critique them on their ironic hypocrisy let’s consider the functional role of a community exemplified in the behavior of current woke cancel culture.

The [ DRAFT continue from here.]

[Serial Prisoner’s dilemma and the role of social rejection in achieving group optimum behavior. Metagame theory, where the actions in the group game are to vary the rules in the individual games.]

[But individuals being shunned by a community may or may not have been treated justly. There are no universal rules to judge overtly. The only test is in the relative functioning of social groups. There’s the possibility that one of the roots for xenophobic instincts is that the lone stranger is more likely than the random individual to have been rejected by his prior community and there’s a heightened likelihood that it was justified by his character. The lone stranger is thus viewed with suspicion until he proves his character, in the process likely needing to also improve it. ]

[IT is a complex dynamic. It is exacerbated when force (state-sponsored or spontaneously generated civil violence) is used against the declared pariah. See Nazi Germany, Salem witch trials, religious inquisitions, etc]

[Thesis: The scale at which community dynamics occurs has been greatly magnified via the internet. Continent-wide and worldwide communities can now act in unison to, fairly or not, ostracize the dissenting individuals. As the communities grow larger, overlap less, and establish more monolithic cultures, the “biodiversity” of this “ecosystem” drops to the level of deep instability. I assert that some form of “woke culture” was inevitable. That it is neo-Marxist is to some extent accidental. It could as easily have been nationalistic, fascistic, or theocratic. The harm is in the actions of the majority to drive the “despicables” out of, not only their own community but out of the domain of access to the same resources as that community. I’m thinking specifically of the broad banning of Trump on social media along with the alternative social media that fed off of the intransigent dissenter’s need for their services.]