Amerika

A society that can no longer say who belongs to it can no longer say what it ought to preserve. The statement seems intolerable only because liberalism has succeeded in turning a relatively recent historical circumstance into an apparently self-evident moral truth. Openness, equality, mobility, diversity, individual emancipation, and the dissolution of inherited obligations have all been gathered beneath the general category of progress. Their internal differences matter less than their common direction: each diminishes a community’s capacity to distinguish between inside and outside, one’s own and the alien, member and visitor, obligation and choice.

For two centuries, this erosion has been interpreted as liberation. There is another possibility: that it has also amounted to a gradual loss of form. Marc Defant offers an unexpectedly useful starting point in “An Evolutionary Perspective on Socialism.” His explicit purpose is to explain why socialist institutions collide with certain persistent features of human cooperation. Our species, he reminds us, did not evolve under conditions of abundance or universal altruism. Cooperation emerged among organisms capable of competing, deceiving, defecting, and exploiting one another. It therefore developed conditions. Reciprocity, reputation, punishment, partner choice, and the exclusion of opportunists are not later corruptions of an originally limitless solidarity. They belong to the very mechanism that makes solidarity possible (Defant, 2026).

Socialism commits one of its fundamental errors when it imagines that this architecture can be replaced by an abstract distributive obligation. Liberalism commits another when it assumes that the same architecture can survive after the individual has been detached from nearly every loyalty preceding his own will. Democracy, socialism, and liberalism appear to be adversaries because they compete over the administration of the modern world. Seen from a greater distance, their kinship matters more than their disagreements.

All three begin from an emancipatory anthropology: the individual must free himself from the extended family, the inherited community, traditional authority, cultural restraints, hierarchies, obligations he did not choose, and finally even the boundaries within which his rights acquired political meaning. The socialist promises emancipation from property and economic inequality. The liberal, from community and authority. The democrat, from any political distinction that has not been submitted to the arithmetic of the majority. The accumulated result is the modern individual, sovereign in theory and dependent upon impersonal systems in nearly every aspect of his existence.

Karl Popper called the “open society” an order in which individuals can critically judge their institutions and escape obligations imposed by custom. Its adversary was the closed society: tribal, organic, governed by traditions that had not been brought before the tribunal of individual reason. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, the transition from one to the other appears as one of the great emancipatory processes of the West (Popper, 1945/2013). The vocabulary already contains the verdict: “closed” arrives at the trial burdened with guilt. “Open” arrives acquitted.

Yet every form requires a boundary. A cell without a membrane does not attain a higher freedom; it dies. A house without walls does not practice a more inclusive architecture; it ceases to be a house. An organism that abandons the distinction between self and foreign does not attain universal fraternity; it loses the ability to preserve itself.

The same question can be posed politically. A closed society need not mean an immobile society. It may simply mean a society that retains the ability to determine the conditions of its own reproduction. It knows who belongs to it. It possesses a shared memory. It transmits norms before endlessly submitting them to plebiscite. It expects loyalties that need not be justified through an individual contract. It understands that certain distinctions between member and stranger are constitutive rather than administrative accidents destined to disappear. Popper perceived in all this the danger of tribalism. He did not perceive with equal clarity the opposite danger: that a completely open society might eventually lose what made entering it desirable in the first place.

Defant allows the problem to be reformulated in terms of cooperation. Human beings are capable of remarkable altruism, but that altruism flourishes within particular structures. Direct reciprocity works when there is a reasonable probability of meeting again. Reputation works when information about behavior circulates within a community. Punishment works when there is agreement about what conduct deserves sanction. Partner choice works when it is legitimate to reject someone who systematically exploits cooperation (Defant, 2026). Each of these mechanisms presupposes boundaries. Not necessarily state borders, but social boundaries.

The great moral innovation of late liberalism consists precisely in becoming suspicious of them. Exclusion appears morally inferior to inclusion; preference for those near to us, inferior to impartiality; normative homogeneity, inferior to diversity; particular obligation, inferior to universal altruism. Applied consistently, this morality turns every concrete community into a mere local administrator of universal duties.

Here entropy begins. The term should be understood as an analogy rather than as a thermodynamic law of history. A high-trust society maintains an enormous degree of order through behaviors that scarcely need to be made explicit. People queue. They return lost property. They maintain tolerable levels of noise. They respect common spaces. They honor contracts without every exchange requiring police supervision. Parents transmit certain forms of conduct because they inherited them in turn. Streets can be used by strangers because there is a sufficiently strong expectation that those strangers recognize the same restraints. Such order appears spontaneous only after one has forgotten how long it took to form.

Kevin MacDonald interprets part of European history precisely through the gradual weakening of kinship structures and the development of forms of individualism capable of extending trust beyond the immediate family. His evolutionary explanation is controversial and many of his broader extrapolations have been extensively disputed, but one central intuition remains useful: Western individualism did not arise simply as a negation of community. It became possible within societies that had previously accumulated powerful normative discipline and relatively impersonal forms of cooperation (MacDonald, 2019). The modern error consists in imagining that the result can be preserved after indefinitely destroying the conditions that produced it. Trust thereby becomes a consumable resource.

One generation inherits safe streets, relatively predictable institutions, work discipline, usable public spaces, and a willingness to cooperate with strangers. Because it never had to construct this social capital from nothing, it can mistake it for the natural condition of human affairs. It then begins dismantling restraints that appear superfluous. Every boundary is presented as prejudice. Every obligation as oppression. Every difference in status as injustice. Every demand for adaptation as intolerance.

For a long time almost nothing seems to happen. Civilization possesses inertia, and then the cost appears. What was once achieved through trust must now be achieved through surveillance. Cameras, guards, access controls, bureaucracies, locks, protocols, and private zones proliferate. Spontaneous cooperation declines while the administration required to replace it expands. Elites can continue celebrating openness because they privately purchase what the public realm no longer provides. This is one of the mechanisms of favelization: the regression of a common territory into a constellation of private appropriations, informality, uneven enforcement of law, and the erosion of shared expectations. It begins long before dwellings made from improvised materials appear. It begins when no one can confidently explain who is responsible for the common space.

Thus sidewalks become private commercial extensions. The public square acquires informal owners. Public transportation requires ever greater levels of surveillance. Infrastructure is used without any equivalent obligation to preserve it. Rules remain written, but their enforcement becomes episodic because applying them means confronting conflicts the political system would rather avoid.

Democracy aggravates the problem because it turns quantity into legitimacy. Its fundamental principle prevents recognition that a political community may contain interests that should not be settled through simple numerical aggregation. Every organized group learns to transform presence into demand, demand into right, and right into transfer. The rational politician responds by distributing resources whose costs are dispersed across a social body increasingly incapable of imagining itself as a unity.

Socialism completes the movement by promising to sever benefit from contribution. Defant observes that public-goods experiments repeatedly show the deterioration of cooperation when some participants can benefit from the efforts of others without making equivalent contributions. The decisive phenomenon is not the existence of the opportunist, whom no society has eliminated. It is the reaction of the cooperators. When they perceive that opportunism goes unpunished, they reduce their own contributions (Defant, 2026).

A society can sustain a certain number of free riders. What it can scarcely sustain is an ideology that turns the impossibility of excluding them into a moral principle. Egalitarianism introduces a second confusion here. Equal juridical dignity and material equivalence are different things. The former may restrict arbitrary power; the latter requires continually denying the consequences of real differences in ability, conduct, sacrifice, foresight, and cooperation. The more radical the egalitarian principle becomes, the greater the amount of coercion required to artificially reconstruct the outcome that reality keeps undoing. Communism carried this logic to its classical expression. Contemporary liberalism reaches it by another route. One abolished property in the name of the collective; the other dissolves the collective in the name of the individual. One sought to plan the economy from above; the other pretends that the sum of private choices, abstract rights, and global markets can indefinitely substitute for historical communities. Both ultimately weaken the intermediate bodies capable of resisting both state and market.

The family becomes temporary. Locality becomes residential. The nation becomes administrative. Culture becomes consumption. Citizenship becomes documentation. Even diversity, when turned into an absolute ideal within the same territory, participates in this logic. Cities have always contained differences. It is another matter to turn the permanent multiplication of incompatible norms, identities, and loyalties into a political good in itself. A community requires enough prior agreement to tolerate secondary differences. When diversity ceases to be a circumstance and becomes a program, common order increasingly depends upon a bureaucracy charged with managing conflicts among populations that share space but not necessarily memory, obligations, or expectations.

Managed diversity requires a stronger state precisely because it produces a weaker society. The contradiction is characteristic of liberal modernity, which promises less coercive community and obtains more administration. It promises emancipated individuals and obtains subjects increasingly dependent upon gigantic systems. It also promises spontaneous diversity and requires entire departments devoted to regulating its frictions.

The closed society, by contrast, begins by accepting something all these ideologies find offensive: we have not chosen everything that we are. We are born into a language we did not invent, among people who preceded us, upon a territory whose meaning was accumulated by the dead whom we never knew. We receive customs before we are capable of criticizing them and obligations before we are capable of consenting to them. Maturity does not necessarily consist in destroying that inheritance in order to reconstruct it from individual will; it may consist in becoming worthy of transmitting it.

This does not require turning every tradition into dogma or freezing a community in an idealized age. Living organisms change precisely because they retain enough continuity for change to have a subject. Elinor Ostrom, cited by Defant, discovered something similar on another level. Common resources successfully governed by local communities tend to depend upon clear boundaries, known rules, monitoring, graduated sanctions, and the ability to exclude those who repeatedly violate the rules. Cooperation does not require universality. It requires structure. The most durable solidarity is probably the solidarity that knows where it ends.

A community capable of protecting the weak must be able to distinguish them from the opportunist. A community capable of receiving the foreigner must preserve the right to demand incorporation. A community capable of helping others must retain sufficient material and moral resources to reproduce itself. A culture capable of speaking with other cultures must continue to exist as something different from them.

Unlimited altruism destroys precisely these distinctions. Its final destiny may therefore be less compassionate than that of an openly partial order. By exhausting the social capital it inherited, it forces individuals to withdraw once again into small circles of trust: families, gated communities, religious communities, private networks, protected neighborhoods. The officially open society fragments into small closed societies, but now without any higher culture capable of coordinating them.

Favelization would therefore not be the opposite of the open society. It could be its terminal phase, not because openness is always destructive, but because an opening without a membrane does not remain open for long. First it loses its interior. Then it loses the very reason anyone wished to enter.

The West does not need to choose between the concentration camp and the international airport, which is the false alternative implicit in much of the liberal imagination of the twentieth century. There is a third possibility: societies conscious of themselves, sufficiently closed to preserve continuity and sufficiently intelligent to incorporate what is useful without turning permeability into an absolute moral principle. The fundamental question is not how far we can open a society, but how far it can open before ceasing to be what we wished to preserve. And that is precisely the question democracy, liberalism, socialism, and egalitarianism have learned not to ask.

References

Defant, M. (2026). An evolutionary perspective on socialism. Skeptic.

MacDonald, K. B. (2019). Individualism and the Western liberal tradition: Evolutionary origins, history, and prospects for the future. Praeger.

Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press.

Popper, K. R. (2013). The open society and its enemies. Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1945).

Tags: karl popper, Kevin-MacDonald, open society, socialism