Tribal War is Coming, Part III

What, Why, and How You Can Prepare

For Part I, click here.

For Part II, click here.

If you prefer the audio of this article, click here.

Nothing in this article amounts to an endorsement of or a call for violence of any kind, political or otherwise.

In the first article of this series, we explained the causes and precedents of the tribal wars that are coming to the West. In the second article, we clarified the present moment in terms of the classical insurgency model accepted by war studies experts. In this, the final article in this series, we will give reasons why tribal war cannot be avoided, and will conclude with some practical advice for the reader.

In the last article we pointed out three ways in which the current situation differs from historical situations—the rise of the feral city, the instability of the megacity, and the advent of postmodernism. We begin with an explanation of these.

The Feral City

The feral city is a term coined in a 2003 paper in the Naval War College Review. The feral city is:

a metropolis with a population of more than a million people in a state the government of which has lost the ability to maintain the rule of law within the city’s boundaries yet remains a functioning actor in the greater international system.

In a feral city social services are all but nonexistent, and the vast majority of the city’s occupants have no access to even the most basic health or security assistance. There is no social safety net. Human security is for the most part a matter of individual initiative. Yet a feral city does not descend into complete, random chaos. Some elements, be they criminals, armed resistance groups, clans, tribes, or neighborhood associations, exert various degrees of control over portions of the city. Intercity, city-state, and even international commercial transactions occur, but corruption, avarice, and violence are their hallmarks.¹

While no cities in the West exhibit this scale of dilapidation, some are very clearly heading there—“ferality” is a scale. It is a testament to the speed with which the West is declining that back in 2003 such a city was deemed unlikely ever to exist, though it “should not be dismissed as impossible.”²

Today, in parts of many Western cities, you see partial state withdrawal, entrenched non-state authority (gangs, cartels, radical movements), collapsed or collapsing public services, and inability to enforce the rule of law in specific districts. No one city shares these blights across its entire metropolitan area, but certain areas of San Francisco, Chicago, Marseille, Malmö, and London qualify as feral.

As the government problems mentioned earlier continue to deepen, as infrastructure continues to crumble, as municipal governments continue to declare bankruptcy,³ as no-go zones and zones of negotiated police control continue to multiply—as ferality increases and becomes normalized in the largest urban centres, normal citizens will increasingly turn to gangs, private security agencies, and ethnic tribal organizations to meet their basic security needs.

The Instability of Urban Modernity

The urban studies literature has been warning about the instability of the megacity for a generation now.⁴ In fact, the city itself is inherently unstable—the simplest way to define a city is: a group of people living together in one place who cannot grow enough food for themselves using only the land and resources within their territory. Cities have a life support system which is located outside of themselves, access to which is an inherent security risk, and the exploitation of which is a relatively simple task for a belligerent.

The urban vs. rural divide which maps on to progressive vs. reactionary forces, is as old as urbanization itself. As tensions grow between these forces, and as certain urban centres begin to take on a more marked character as ethnic enclaves, at some point these cities will become the target of ethnically motivated attacks. Urban infrastructure is essentially unguarded, and for all practical purposes, un-guardable.

Targeting infrastructure makes a great deal of strategic sense for those bent on ethnic violence. Even in tribal conflict, people are more hesitant to damage things than people (if only for fear of personal risk), and targeting infrastructure involves a far lower psychological threshold.

More importantly, however, targeting infrastructure produces a large force multiplication effect. Once infrastructure begins to fail, cascading crises emerge: shortages, interruptions of power/gas supply, mass transit disruption, opportunistic rioting, population displacement, etc. Anyone who worked in logistics during the initial COVID lockdowns received an object lesson in just how vulnerable our global supply chain really is—“just in time” supply networks are extremely efficient but also extremely fragile.

Most of us have little more than a week’s worth of food at home and cities typically have little more than a further week’s worth of food on hand in grocery stores, warehouses, etc. at any time. Having millions of people living in close proximity, two weeks away from starvation, is a recipe for disaster, and it would take very little for this danger to be acutely felt.

Such a shock as would be produced by successful infrastructure attack, even if mitigated logistically, would cause cascading economic effects to ripple out into the broader society. A handful of coordinated attacks, in quick succession and in dispersed locations, could trigger a major economic event. People would feel exposed, and trust in “the system” would be dealt a significant blow, at a time when social trust and social capital are already dangerously low. Nothing I am saying here is in any way new, but has been discussed at length in the urban studies literature for many decades.

It would not take many people to carry off something like this. In fact, during the Troubles in Ireland, only a tiny fraction of the Catholic population was radicalized, but this tiny minority of a minority was able to become an organized, disciplined, and effective terrorist force. The bottom line is that as ethnic conflict becomes chronic, cities—even if ferality is dismissed entirely—will become more dangerous and less stable places to live than they have been in any of our lifetimes.

The Epistemic Divorce

Postmodernism is often taken to be completely opposed to anything like tribal society, but the collapse of “grand narratives”—along with modern information technology—pushes us toward fragmentation.

Additionally, ‘political polarisation’ has been enhanced by social media and identity politics, on which more below. Digital connectivity tends to drive societies towards greater depth and frequency of feelings of isolation in more tightly drawn affinity groups. Each of these is guarded by so-called ‘filter bubbles’, carefully constructed membranes of ideological disbelief that are constantly reinforced by active and passive curation of media consumption.⁵

This fracturing of narratives into information silos forms a major topic of discussion on this Substack, which we have coined the epistemic divorce.⁶ But to understand this divorce, we must understand exactly what is being broken apart.

From the beginning of time to the End of History, each political great power had its own set of concepts, imperatives, and political language, and none could truly understand the other. By the turn of the 21st century, even a Chinese communist, a Muslim theocrat, and a secular humanist spoke the same political language, obeyed the same basic imperatives, and framed the world by the same concepts. The epistemic worlds of mankind had been growing fewer since at least the Axial Age, and now we had finally collapsed them all into one, which we call “modernity”.⁷

From a very early time, the world has been getting smaller. But it has not been getting smaller uniformly—from time to time, the “epistemic longhouse” described above, this unitary conceptual framework we now call “modernity”, has reversed.⁸ This is a process that is now underway as multipolarity returns on the global stage, as the internet drives us into ever smaller echo chambers, and as structural economic and demographic factors drive devolution of de facto sovereign authority to more and more local levels. Postmodernity, not only in its technological aspect, but even in its philosophical foundation, is driving us toward the local and the folkish.

Since the Axial Age, epistemic communities had been collapsing into fewer and fewer, until we finally got to only one—modernity. But any propositional worldview is self-defeating, and postmodernism is modernity turning against itself and balkanizing into folkish echo chambers.⁹

The advent of the “post-truth” era marked the point at which the epistemic divorce became visible. But this is only the tip of an iceberg of epistemic devolution. Whereas the “post-truth” world sorted itself into two sides which corresponded to conventional political categories of liberal and conservative, the epistemic divorce threatens to devolve into a full-scale epistemic balkanization.

While we mentioned at the beginning that this epistemic fracturing is one of three ways in which the current moment is historically unique, this devolution is not strictly unique—it has just been absent for a very long time.

After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, there was no longer a single ladder of knowledge reaching from peasants to philosophers. Many communities developed local timekeeping, folklore-based geography, and cosmologies divorced from classical models. Each local or tribal culture had its own “truth-making” institutions: bards, saints, warlords, and local assemblies. The Germanic tribes inhabited a mythic-heroic worldview, where oaths, honour, and kinship held epistemic weight, where law was remembered orally, justice was personal and customary, and kingship was understood as sacral. Celtic Christian enclaves preserved unique blends of Christian mysticism and native cosmology, producing monastic scholarship, but outside Roman frameworks. The Byzantine world retained a high degree of intellectual continuity with Rome, maintaining a shared theological and imperial epistemology, with Greek remaining the language of philosophy, science, and administration.

With the Christian church too weak to impose an epistemic hierarchy via scripture, canon law, and Latin liturgy, this epistemic fragmentation eventually produced linguistic fragmentation, splintering into vernacular dialects which evolved into the Romance languages—and ultimately, new ethnogeneses.

The erosion of “grand narratives” in the current order mirrors the loss of grand narratives in antiquity. If the present course is not arrested, the next century or two are likely to resemble the Migration Era more than anything postmodern thinkers have envisioned, though this will be built atop the foundations that postmodernity itself has laid. The world that is coming will look very different ethnically to the world of today, though far from the “beige horizon” of progressive wishful thinking.¹⁰

The combination of the three factors just discussed—feral cities, unstable urban centres, and postmodern epistemic balkanization—gives us strong reason to doubt that elites will be able to put the tribal toothpaste back in the tube, especially given the structural problems mentioned earlier.

There is, however, one ace that the machine has up its sleeve. It has long ago given up on legitimacy, but it believes that it does not even need legitimacy.

Legitimacy is a rare and precious thing—it is a kind of sorcery that determines whether the cost of government is high or low. In a high legitimacy system, the sentiments, myths, and symbols of the society do much of the governing. Trust is high, enforcement and transaction costs are low, and people basically police themselves.

Low legitimacy systems are, of course, just the opposite. But in our low legitimacy environment, governance structures have hit upon a strategy—they believe that they can innovate their way out of the problem. In other words, they believe that they can manage rising enforcement costs by technological development, through the use of surveillance, AI, drones, etc.¹¹