White Izzat
How WEIRD Undermined Our Folkhood and What to Do About It
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Last week we explained how the WEIRD personality (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) is not primordially European. We further showed how the supposedly “foreign” folkways of izzat and asabiyyah answer to perfectly European folkways of honour culture and folkishness.
This week we will show how these folkways are superior to WEIRD. We will further show that the attempt to “progress” beyond them has both made identitarianism impossible and corroded the prosperity that we hold up as evidence of our superiority. We will show how WEIRD was temporary, unstable, and self-undermining. Finally, we will put forth a stronger foundation for our self-esteem than high trust and low time-preference.
To understand the superiority of honour culture and folkishness to liberal WEIRD society, we can turn to game theory.
Game Theory: Why Izzat and Asabiyyah Win and WEIRD Loses
Let us take the two separately and examine their strengths and weaknesses.
Izzat (Honour Culture)
Strengths
1. Deterrence
Izzat operates like a credible threat in repeated games: if you defect (by insulting or exploiting me), I retaliate. This solves the Prisoner’s Dilemma with the result being fewer opportunistic defection attempts. It also lowers the cost of external enforcement and reduces predation in weak-state environments. In essence, it discourages exploitation, at least of the in-group.
2. Solves the Hobbesian cooperation problem
In environments without strong state capacity, individuals risk being preyed upon. Izzat solves this through reputation-based self-help: if harming me is costly, it’s safer to cooperate. Honour becomes an efficient enforcement mechanism. In essence, it creates order where institutions are weak.
3. Public signalling
Izzat solves an important problem of information asymmetry by reducing uncertainty, which reduces transaction costs and actually makes society more efficient. Everyone knows who can be pushed and who retaliates, whose word carries weight and whose kin-group will intervene. This clarity stabilizes social expectations. In essence, it fosters transparency and thus predictable interactions—and predictable interactions are what civilization is built out of.
4. Encourages pro-social behaviour within the group
To retain honour, individuals must be generous. They must avoid shameful conduct. They must keep promises and behave reliably. This creates a positive-sum equilibrium within the honour-group. You don’t gain honour by ripping off your kin but by enriching them—a professed virtue that the identitarian supposedly wants. In essence, izzat boosts internal cohesion and trust.
5. High cost of defection
When one member’s honour is attacked, the group must respond. This creates strong kin alliances and coalition networks that can mobilize rapidly. “What you do to my cousin you do to me” is precisely the bulwark against liberal tyranny. In game theory terms, izzat induces aligned incentives and collective commitment, increasing group fitness. In essence, it produce an abundance of asabiyyah—the two work hand in hand.
Weaknesses
1. Over-retaliation spiral
This is the runaway punishment dynamic that the 4chan anon was worried about. Izzat encourages responses to even small slights, creating escalating retaliation and vendetta cycles. This is a well-worn feature of Greek tragedy and Norse saga. Izzat creates conflict traps.
2. Inefficient honour signalling
The 4chan anon pointed this out too. Individuals must defend reputation even when it is strategically unwise, such as retaliating when the cost outweighs the benefit, or sacrificing resources to avoid losing face. Honour can sometimes override optimal strategy.
3. High transaction costs in mixed groups
Izzat works smoothly within the honour culture, but in interactions with strangers, bureaucracies, and impersonal systems, it creates misalignment, because the izzat code expects public signalling and retaliation, whereas modern institutions expect procedural compliance. This mixed-group inefficiency can be seen as a strength in some cases (it undermines multiculturalism) or a weakness (it undermines liberal, rules-based environments).
4. Fragility: status is zero-sum
Because honour is publicly ranked, izzat tends to create rivalry and status anxiety. Game-theoretically, zero-sum games dominate and reduce positive-sum cooperation. The effect is to reduce cooperative potential outside the kin-group. Again, depending on how you look at multiculturalism, this could be a good or a bad thing.
Overall
Izzat works extremely well under unstable conditions. When central authority is weak and the environment is continuously threatening, honour culture shines. It is an existential necessity when you are the minority—when you are beleaguered by strong kin networks with whom you interact repeatedly, you cannot survive without it. The identitarian right would be wise to note this. It also works under other conditions such as localized economies and high-value reputation markets.
However, izzat becomes counterproductive from the perspective of liberal proceduralism and multiculturalism. In these societies, diverse groups are forced to cooperate across honour-norm boundaries and institutions can reliably punish defectors. Interactions often become anonymous (as in the court system). The racist liberal wants to revive that world, but not only will he fail, but it’s better if he does fail.
In short, honour culture is optimal for tribal worlds but suboptimal for liberal-bureaucratic worlds. This is why it flourishes in the current environment, which is quickly turning into the tribal future—a fragmented, low-trust, neo-medieval context.
Asabiyyah (Folkishness)
Strengths
1. Solves the collective action problem
Groups with strong asabiyyah can mobilize quickly, and their members are willing to accept personal risk for group benefit. These groups suppress free-riders and punish defectors internally. Game-theoretically, there are high internal payoffs for cooperation and high internal costs for defection. Folkishness enables coordinated, large-scale action that low-cohesion groups cannot match.
2. High trust, low transaction costs
Within the group, trust is high and signalling costs are low. Enforcement is extremely efficient because it is informal and often members self-police. Negotiation costs are low because of shared norms. High trust makes implicit contracts reliable. This creates a high-efficiency coordination equilibrium. Folkishness fosters cheap, fast cooperation.
3. Enables effective aggression against outsiders
Externally, high-asabiyyah groups fight cohesively, and this allows them to deter rivals through credible commitment. They shift from the Prisoner’s Dilemma (low trust, rational defection) to the Stag Hunt (high trust, high reward): social life moves from “everyone defect to protect yourself” into “we can coordinate on high-payoff cooperation because we trust one another.” This allows these groups to expand territory and influence, which is why such groups historically conquer, found dynasties, and displace low-cohesion elites. Folkishness means collective force projection.
4. Reduces vulnerability to external manipulation
In folkish groups, information is shared and members are sensitive to outsiders. Internal policing is strict. Loyalties cannot easily be bought, so game-theoretically, external defectors can’t bribe or coerce individuals away from the group. Folkish groups are mostly immune to infiltration.
Weaknesses
1. Vulnerable to Success
This is Ibn Khaldun’s core insight: asabiyyah is highest in hardship, but success erodes it. Game-theoretically, high resource abundance reduces the need for cooperation and for punishment of defectors. Individual freeloading grows, followed by signalling to external networks such as court, bureaucracy, markets, etc. Prosperity destabilizes cohesion—folkish success plants the seeds for its own failure.
2. Free-rider problem at scale
As group size increases, kin-based enforcement weakens. Personal trust becomes abstract, so monitoring costs rise. Cliques emerge along with parasitic members and political factions, and we get fragmentation and internal betrayal. Folkishness does not easily scale without breaking the cohesion equilibrium.
3. Intergroup conflict
Strong internal cooperation invariably brings with it hostility to outsiders and the inability to trust neutral third parties. In game theory terms, folkishness solves the Prisoner’s Dilemma within the in-group, but accelerates it between the in-group and the out-group, making peace unstable. As with aspects of honour culture, this may be a strength or a weakness depending on your perspective.
Overall
Asabiyyah thrives in the same environment as izzat: the unstable, high-threat ecology of resource scarcity. Folkishness is nigh unchallengeable in small- to medium-sized kin-groups with strong honour norms. When state capacity is low, folkishness is essentially a recipe for state capture. Folkishness struggles, however, in the opposite environment: the low-threat ecology of abundance and scale. At this point, bureaucracy replaces kin enforcement, elites pursue luxury and individualism, and kin-group members are courted by outsiders—brother turns on brother, and families fragment over petty politics. Asabiyyah is game-theoretic high-trust cooperation that enables collective power—but its very success undermines the incentives that sustain it. This is the exact structure of Khaldun’s political cycle.
Sawing Away at the Branch We’re Sitting On
Since that greentext on izzat has made the rounds, the predictable result has followed: white identitarians have snickered and chortled about how debased and stupid Indians are, while their izzat proceeds to short-circuit the identitarians’ civilizational firmware, leaving them exposed and defenseless. A chorus of ululations has mounted up to the heavens that these Indians are parasitizing Western prosperity which could not exist if we lowered ourselves to their level and started playing their primitive game of tribalism. Our ethnic chauvinism forces us to assert as “civilized” the very thing that is undermining our ethnic chauvinism. This is hubris befitting a Greek tragedy.
The sad irony is that these identitarians have it backward—their chauvinism rests on flimsy foundations. They believe that folkways such as honour culture/izzat and folkishness/asabiyyah are parasitical on different, supposedly Western folkways. This has it exactly backward. The higher social trust and good faith assumed in Western societies are built atop a deep foundation of such tribal structures.
High trust is not “natural”; it is compressed kinship. The original solution to the trust problem in Indo-European and medieval Europe was not abstract universalism; it was kinship, oath, reputation, and shared cult. In other words, “high trust” is the late, abstracted surface of a long tradition in which people had thick, redundant reasons to trust one another.
WEIRD-lovers are historically illiterate, or they would know that medieval and early-modern Europe had its own izzat/asabiyyah system. What people call “jeetery” absolutely existed in Europe. The feud systems in Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, and Scandinavian lands involved blood-price, honour-price, and wergild, where kin were required to avenge or compensate an injury. Sacred peace (“frith”) existed within the kin group or lord’s hall, but not outside. Violating frith was both a legal and spiritual crime. The medieval comitatus was based on lord–retainer ties which were based in turn on honour and loyalty. This is asabiyyah: warbands as cohesive, tightly bonded units. It is not exotic. A medieval Tuscan clan or a Highland clan or a Saxon village looks, in structural terms, much closer to “third world” honour cultures than to late-modern liberal individualism.
Modern Westerners experience trust as being able to sign a contract with a stranger and mostly expecting it to hold. To us it means being able to walk down the street without bribing police. We assume basic good faith in transactions. This feels like something rational, neutral, and procedural. But the only reason these expectations can function impersonally is because for centuries, people like us (same confession, same ethnicity, same basic folk customs) were the default, and heavy sanctions existed for dishonesty, blasphemy, perjury, betrayal. We went from “I trust you because you’re of my clan” to “I trust you because we’re all Christians” to “I trust you because… well, that’s just what white people do, right?” The revelation is in seeing that the last one is just the residue of the first.
The usual Western critique is that Indians or Chinese import clannishness, patronage, and honour codes, and then they turn around and exploit our universalist good faith. They don’t play by our neutral rules; they use our institutions as battlefield terrain for their group advantage. They certainly do that, but European societies were once run on similar logics of kin honour and group solidarity—we just gave them different names and gradually laundered them through law and theology. This critique is also structurally naïve: those groups still have functioning folkishness and honour systems. We dismantled ours and replaced them with a thin proceduralism that presupposes the very solidarity that this proceduralism has eroded.
So instead of “they’re parasitic on our institutions,” it’s closer to “they still have the underlying social machinery that once made our institutions work.” Western high trust was a late-stage phenotype of deeper tribal and corporative realities. Once those foundations are destroyed, the phenotype cannot be sustained.
But We Were Racist Liberals… Weren’t We?
The objection that looms over this historical lesson is that we seemed to have managed the sweet spot for a time. Somewhere between living in a one-room longhouse with your 47 cousins and antifa murdering whites in the street, there must be a happy medium—mustn’t there? Unfortunately, no. There is at least no stable middle ground.
Extended Analysis Below:
Why liberalism could not long maintain ethnic solidarity
Liberalism cost us not only solidarity, but also even prosperity
Why WEIRD gives us the worst of all possible worlds
A better alternative to HBD for ethnic self-esteem
