How Family Structure Drives Ideology

Over the course of the 20th century, it's been fascinating to see how different societies have reacted to the massive changes that have come from the Industrial Revolution and the pain of the world wars. However much as people thought a single ideology, liberalism, communism, or the like, might dominate the world, what happened instead was that Germany and Japan went for fascism, the Anglo-Saxon world and France stayed liberal, while China, Russia, and the like went communist. What if I were to tell you that there was an underlying scheme for why this happened, and it's almost certainly not what you think? The resemblances between political ideologies and nation picks and its family structures are uncanny. Don't believe me? This will be a tour through the world's family structures and how they inform broader politics. Prepare for an insane ride that will totally change how you view the world.

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I'm going to be straight here and say a lot of the content in this video comes from a single book, *The Origins of Ideology* by Emmanuel Todd. The book's short, around 170 pages, but it's really remarkable in encapsulating this whole theory. And the original idea behind it was positive, but not articulated by the legendary French historian Fernand Braudel, who once said, "The history of the world could be written just off family structure." And with this, I'm officially rebranding what a "fallist" that shows that jerks off and revives obscure mid-20th-century French historians. There are eight different family structures around the world, and this video will go through each to explain what they are, the psychology that follows from it, and how they manifest politically.

Number one: The Exogamous Communitarian Family. As a fair warning, a lot of these terms get fairly analytical and complicated, but I'll break them down to a more explainable level each time. What exogamous communitarian means is that the whole family lives together under the same roof or in the same clan. Communitarian means people live largely in clans rather than breaking away and forming individual nuclear families. Clan family structures are largely the norm across most of history and the world, with the exception of the West. Exogamous means that people marry outside their clan, so you shouldn't marry a cousin, but instead someone from a totally different family.

The exogamous communitarian family dominates Russia, China, areas of Eastern Europe like former Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Finland, as well as Northern India, Cuba, and parts of central France and Italy. It's another piece of the evidence of the former Mongol Empire Iron Curtain block being a broader cultural institution outside of just the Cold War or the modern Russo-Chinese alliance. This is by far the largest family group in the world, where when Emmanuel Todd was writing in the '70s, it was 40% of the world's population, while all other groups hovered around 10% or less.

The main reality of the exogamous humanitarian family is just the stress that comes from having so many adult males and their wives under the same roof. When men get married, they bring their wives back home, where they live under the same father who can lord over and order his descendants around into adulthood until he dies. When the father dies, the family breaks up, and each son reforms a new household, lording over them as a grandfather in turn. Having this many adult males and their jealous wives who want more autonomy under the same roof breeds a lot of tension. Households like this have a lot of stress with so many families in proximity having to negotiate together to deal with all this tension. The father has large amounts of power over the family. Likewise, in all of these cultures except Russia and Eastern Europe, women are treated very poorly. Since to resolve the tension of having so many people having to live together and the resentment of the sons being ruled over by their father is to let the sons oppress their wives. The exogamous communitarian world has been the worst place for women of any large society in the world.

This family system ingrains an idea of unfair power, and thus it's no surprise that these societies have always been absolutist kings or dictatorships, whether under Russia's czars, the cruel dynasties of Northern India, or China's emperors. A great example of this is the "bad emperor problem," as Francis Fukuyama talks about in *The Origins of Political Order*, in that China's political establishment was largely more advanced than the rest of the world, except for that their leaders had no accountability, which then resulted in them making horrifically dumb decisions, holding all their societies back. At the same time, the sheer amount of power the older father had over his sons prevents the idea of political independence or the individual from developing. The parents literally pick their son's mates and then live with them, with them providing their children work. With this attitude common, it's easy to see how regimes in this part of the world treat their populations often like "tan and fodder," with service periods for conscripts in the Russian army of 25 years common under the czars and before that for life, and how Chinese emperors would call it massive parts of their population for vanity projects like the Great Wall, the Terracotta Army, or for giant armies of millions.

With that many people trying to coordinate working together, you need to enforce some kind of conformity in order just so weird and consistent agencies with your relatives' personalities don't drive you crazy. For these reasons, these cultures prize conformity, discipline, and fitting into a mold rather than creativity. This is a big reason why Confucianism, an ideology that prizes following social duties above all else and respect for authority, has become China's de facto religion for most of its history. Likewise, the idea of the father is the symbol for the family results in state worship being normal in this part of the world. In Russia, the state was used as a vehicle of glory and identity for the entire Russian race, while in China, the state is literally viewed as sacred under Confucian law and the manifestation of the will of the Chinese people.

You can explain a lot of historic quirks looking in this lens. For example, the West's incomprehensibility to Russia and Russia's lack of freedom, cruelty, and what has been seen as its "Oriental character," well, at the same time, the Russians have been physically indistinguishable from other Europeans and Christians. It all makes more sense. In between arranged marriages, clan life, and rule by a strong patriarch, the Russians lived lives much more like that of Asians than Europeans. Russia did, however, give women much better treatment, more in line with European standards than Asian ones.

I do wonder if Todd was correct in labeling all of European areas he did as being part of this group. Looking from their history and how they develop societies and how arranged marriage has been incredibly rare across Western history, I doubt the Baltics are part of this group. But when he was writing in the '70s, they were part of the Soviet Union, meaning the Soviets would have suppressed data showing cultural differences from the Russians, and said data would have been pretty hard to find. The West, anyway. Likewise, Finland was a nomadic herder society until recently, which was extremely loose and free dealing, so I kind of doubt it functioned in reality close to China or Northern India.

One of the jokes in the waterfall test staff is "India as the exception to every rule in history." If you want to make any kind of principle that the past just write India out, since there's no way it will conform and it'll just keep doing its "India thing." India doesn't conform to a lot of the principles of these kind of societies. India doesn't really have self-imposed native tyrannies or strong government and the like. However, the collectivism and poor treatment of women does carry, and I think this is due to the caste system, which is a bigger factor. For more details in the caste system, watch my video on India. But long and short, every person's life in Indian history has been ruled by caste or their tiny self-contained occupational group. They must breed in, work, associate, and the like, and this caste system has overwrought the powerful pro-government forces that you normally see from exogamous communitarian societies.

The exogamous communitarian world has gone for communism very strongly in the 20th century for reasons that may seem obvious, given this movement's emphasis on authority, cooperation, and conformity. In fact, you really struggle to find any successful self-contained communist movements outside of this cultural area. The map of the exogamous communitarian world, accepting India, are basically the same as the Second World communist block during the Cold War. Yugoslavia and especially Cuba, totally cut off from the rest of the world with very different geography and culture, but still being exogenous communitarian societies, are very strong evidence for this. On top of this, the Italian and French communist parties were based out of the parts of their countries that had exogamous communitarian societies and were very weak outside of those blocks.

There are three big reasons why communism is so appealing to exogamous communitarian societies. One being that the father's rule creates resentment among the brothers who can rebel against the father, which seems like a perfect corollary to the rebellion of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. Most society's conceptions of God and the government deviate from how fathers act in their society, and so resentment against the father naturally leads to communism's atheism. The pent-up resentment against the father wants the sons gain power, which promulgates further tyranny, seems like a perfect model for how the resentful communists filled the shoes of the already cruel and corrupt regimes they replaced.

The second reason being the structure of families and societies is that once the father dies, the family breaks up, and each son becomes his own family immediately, tearing up the family. This is a great corollary to how the nation is torn up in the great revolution and culture totally changes. Likewise, the massive cultural changes that have happened with stuff like Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Qin Shi Huangdi, and Zhu Yuanzhang, all predating communism, as well as later communists like Stalin and Mao, make sense given since the families totally reform every generation, erasing its history, it creates the idea that the nation can do the same as well.

The third reason being that in an exogamous communitarian family, the family picks the mate, occupation, and governs the children through their whole adult lives until their parents die, and thus it intuitively makes sense that the state, which is the manifestation of the family, would provide the citizen with everything across their whole lives, which is communism.

Part 2: Endogamous Communitarian. We're moving from one type of clan structure to another, this time from those who marry outside their clan to inside it. In an endogamous communitarian society, people marry their third cousin in arranged marriages and then live together as a clan under the same roof. This may sound like a tiny difference, but it's had profound effects around how these cultures have evolved over time. The endogamous communitarian world is the same as the Islamic world geography. I mean, I could sugarcoat that a little by saying the Islamic world is bigger with some stuff in Africa, Bangladesh, or Malaya, but for the most part, the borders of the Islamic world exactly match this region. If communism is the classic ideology for exogamous humanitarian society, Islam is that for this one. This is since the structure of Islam fits well with the social conservatism that comes from internally bound clan life.

One of the key differences between Islam and Christianity is that Jesus said, "Love thy neighbor and don't be a douche," and then got crucified. Meanwhile, Muhammad created legal code, founded an empire, and transcribed the exact words of God. Christianity believes that God's law is written in our hearts and up for interpretation, while Islam believes the Quran is literally the word of God itself. It should be felt without question. Islam was able to conquer and maintain control over this area due to the shared family structure that worked well with its ideology. The Muslims kept control of Turkey and lost control of Spain, converted Pakistan but not India, since the local family structures meshed better with Islam. This works for the conservatism that comes from these kinds of societies. Bringing in outside wives causes immense social tension in the exogamous families, but since you're marrying your fourth cousin, it's all in the family and pretty frictionless, since everyone knows everyone else and is related. There's a quote from an Arab that sounds strange to Western ears: "I love her since she's my second cousin through my uncle."

Islam provides stable laws for fundamentally unchanging and conservative clan society. An interesting and massive difference in exogamous and endogamous clan societies, and since the whole clan stays intact through inbreeding, there's a lot less power and tension in the father's hands. Since the family is so intact, upbringing and family discipline doesn't just fall on the father's hands, given there are so many uncles, cousins, and grandfathers lying around. The Islamic father is not an overbearing force, just a part of an interconnected web of family that encompasses all of life. Thus, the idea of atheism is unimaginable to the Muslim world, which has always been religious. Likewise, the moral laws that govern interpersonal relations inside the clan cannot be blamed on a single force, since they're upheld by all males. This is shown that the religious laws of the Islamic world are maintained by a council of male elders called the ulama, rather than the Pope or a hierarchical church as in the West.

Something a lot of Westerners don't believe is that historically, the Muslim world has, of the four main Eurasian civilizations, treated women the third worst, after in India and then China. A woman in the Muslim world isn't a dangerous outsider controlled, as in those other two societies, but a beloved cousin to be taken care of. Not to say the Muslim world's great, but this lack of tension is why female liberation has not occurred in the Muslim world, but has in much of the rest of the world. Islam conceptualizes the world through the clan. When the greatest Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun wrote a history of the world, he did it through the lens of the moral strength of the strongest clan determining the success of the nation. The clan allows great treatment of insiders. When I've been to Muslim countries, I've been shocked at how hospitable and casually kind they have been. I never felt threatened traveling to Egypt and was shocked no one tried to sell me [ __ ] or get in my face. Likewise, it's shocking to go to dirt-poor Muslim countries and see no beggars, since the clans take care of their own. However, at the same time, since the clan doesn't interface with the rest of society at all, really, these societies have often been terrible to outsiders. Islam was the only one of the major four Eurasian civilizations to practice slavery on a truly massive scale until very recently, and still does in small ways even today. If you border a Muslim country, you have twice as high a chance of being at war than an average religion. The Muslim idea of violently spreading the house of family of Islam, Dar al-Islam, seems like the way clans view the world through expanding their genes.

Part 3: Authoritarian Families. In some ways, I feel like the authoritarian family is the weirdest ideologically and geographically, and that's partially by design. For a lot of these family groups, they have a single ideology that kind of encompasses their worldview, with the notable previous examples being Islam and communism. Likewise, they have a single block of coherent territory, whether Dar al-Islam or the former Mongol Empire. However, for the authoritarian culture, there is no such unity. The cultures this family style is part of includes the Koreans, Japanese, Germans, Jews, Scandinavians, North Spanish, Gypsies, Occitans, Occitans, Celtic people like the Scots, Irish, Breton, or the Quebecois in Canada. Likewise, they followed political ideologies ranging from fascism, nationalism, democratic socialism, hard Catholicism, and the like. However, once you dig a bit deeper, you find a broader cultural unity that makes all this diversity a feature, not a bug.

An authoritarian family is only the oldest son inherits, the rest get nothing and have defined their way in the world. Many of these sons end up in the priesthood or in the military, and these cultures often have a combination with warrior monks like in Ireland, the Teutonic Knights, or Zen Samurai. All these young people need to push out to establish themselves makes these societies often irrationally aggressive. This worldview where only the oldest son inherits naturally leads these cultures viewing inequality as a natural part of the world, and so every naturally fascist country in the world has come from one of these cultures. This includes Hitler's Germany, Imperial Japan, two countries that share very little except this family structure. Franco's Spain was based out of the authoritarian north of that country, and Mussolini's Italy is the only outlier, but they also fill part of the egalitarian nuclear model we'll talk about in the next section of macho strongman, and also they were the least effective of all the fascist states.

Since the ancestral line gets passed on from father to eldest son, it creates the idea of an indestructible lineage that must be preserved at all costs, bar nothing. These countries have a deep sense of history and stubbornness that allows survival and nationalism seeming normal, even noble. The idea of erasing history that comes naturally to the endogamous community structure seems disgusting and perverse to cultures in the authority-based family structure. A point Emmanuel Todd makes is that the Jews and Gypsies have very little in common except they share this family structure, and they face centuries of horrifying depredations that gave them every right to lose their culture. However, for these societies, losing the ancestral lineage is disgusting. This is why these cultures are all these tiny dots on the map, since they just [ __ ] refused to die.

I'm half Irish and my mom's side's got a good amount of Scottish, and this is a part I understand from my own family basis. My father is a bit of an Irish nationalist, and he'd sing me rebel songs as a child. And my friends sometimes make fun of me for Rudyard, "Why do you keep holding on to this Irish stuff, given your family's been in America for 200 years and your other half is British, or the Irish's greatest enemies?" And it's sent an Irish culture, the idea of throwing away a lineage it stretches back to Coláiste and beyond, and your ancestors struggled centuries to protect, seems unimaginable. This is how the English stole the Irish's land, kept them from owning property, obtaining an education, voting, and starving them. However, with each humiliation, the Irish just grew tougher, building their entire personality around rebellion.

These kinds of cultures instill a lot of discipline among their members, an example being suicidal bravery when look at how an impossibly horribly outnumbered conflicts like the Germans or Japanese in World War II, the heavily Scottish-descended Confederates in the U.S. Civil War, or the Jews rebelling against the Romans, or how authoritarian cultures are willing to basically commit suicide for their own pride. I mean, I grew up assuming that a society's willingness to fight suicidally like this for something profound like national survival or honor was something deeply noble, and then I talked to friends and their reaction was, "That just sounds insane." To which my reaction was, "How can you not get this?"

This discipline manifests in politics as well, in which once these societies make a decision, their entire culture moves in lockstep to change immediately. The cultures that have gone through the fastest transitions are all in this category. This includes Japan and Germany's post-World War II 180-degree turns, Scotland and Japan's insanely rapid industrializations, or Quebec and Ireland's extremely rapid shifts from extremely Catholic to being very secular. The way these societies get get this much discipline is through the idea that their ancestral lineage goes back into infinity. Something I was unironically told as a child was that as the only male heir to my family, the honor and survival of my entire ancestral line hung on my shoulders. Also, with the oldest son taking everything from his father, it creates an immense amount of pressure the parents put on the oldest son, with the rest of the children growing up with the same atmosphere, but with the expectation of making it in the rest of the world. The amount of pressure these parents apply on their children creates a lot of weird neuroses, making these cultures remarkably not chill. With the weird eccentricities of the Japanese, Jews, Germans, Irish, and the rest, likely stemming from these overbearing parents. An interesting point Todd Emanuel makes about Freud's theories of hatred of the father stemming as much from Freud's cultural context as a German Jew than anything else. These neuroses manifest in society with Emmanuel Todd making an interesting correlation between areas in Germany that burned the most witches in the 1600s and those who supported the Nazis, and they're the same areas. Both witch burnings and the Nazis are fundamentally paranoid neuroses.

The overbearing and unequal family does have a lot of advantages. It always amuses me when feminists push for collectivism, given women do much better in individualistic societies in which they pair off with a single man and use their sex as leverage, rather than clans where they have no such leverage and are pawns of their elders. These authoritarian societies tend to give women authority as part of the ruling couple pair, and thus they tend to prize education. Also, since family lands are divided up every generation, these countries often have large middle classes. An important point to make is that even though this is called the authoritarian system, these countries tend to not be as authoritarian for controlling the individual as lots of other systems, notably the exogamous communitarian. And that's because our societies have so much clan that it's difficult for the government to lord over the individual. And if you look at countries like Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan, they weren't that horrible to the very Japanese or Germans that they ruled under, but leveled their hatred at conquered populations. These countries tend to view God and government in the same way, with an overbearing force that expects dignity and respect. The most socially conservative Catholic areas have tended to be in this region, while big government paternalistic socialism tends to dominate in areas that aren't Catholic. These countries tend to be pretty uniparty political systems, since one grows up and gets deep loyalty to a certain political party, and parties live and die on a generational basis, with the same parties ruling in say, Sweden, Japan, or Quebec, and the like, for whole generations.

The largest flaw of the authoritarian model is the overweening pride that comes from believing their ancestral group is the center of the universe and all others are useless. These countries make terrible empires, and if you look at Western Europe, it's never the authoritarian areas that unify countries. When they try to form empires, coalitions of literally everyone in their vicinity tries to form to prevent them from winning. It's not a coincidence that the ancient Greek city-states, which were authoritarian family structure, were never able to forge large empires, while the egalitarian Roman family structure, starting in a tiny city on the Tiber River, was able to conquer the known world. Likewise, even inside their own countries, these nations have been terrible at maintaining political unity, given they're so split by local governments and families. Then imagine themselves as special and infinitely stretching back into history. The Celts have never been able to unify independently of conquest, and the Irish make jokes about how difficult it is to make them work together. The Germans and Japanese have been split into tiny states for large parts, if not most, of their modern histories.

Circling back to the beginning, the reason the authoritarian family is split into so many tiny splotches around the world and it splits so many ideologies is they can't unify or spread easily, but they're also so impossibly hard to get rid of.

Number four: The Egalitarian Nuclear Family. Now we move on to the nuclear family, something that seems like gets mentioned on a daily basis by Americans, which, as you'll see, makes sense with how much it drives society. But there are two separate kinds of nuclear family, both of which evolve into democratic capitalist societies, but one with inherently different characters. The egalitarian nuclear family is based out of much of Italy, accepting the middle bit, Southern Iberia, most of Northern France, Romania, Poland, Ethiopia, and the mostly white or mestizo parts of Latin America.

The egalitarian nuclear family works through a nuclear family, or the mother and father move away and live as a separate couple, and then upon their death, their inheritance is divided up equally among all the sons. This sort of worldview creates an inherent tension between freedom and equality, which are inherently contradictory, since once you start to give people freedom to act as they would like, they start to achieve different results, thus not allowing equality. In nuclear families, people move away from their parents and marry through love, not arranged marriages, and thus there's an idea of an individual and freedom. But also, since all the sons inherit equally, there's an idea that people deserve economic equality as a sense of fairness to a certain degree. This worldview is largely encapsulated in the French Revolution's *égalité* or equality, liberty, and brotherhood. Across this and the next section, it will be strongly compared to the English-speaking world's inegalitarian nuclear system and its life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

These countries often have a socialistic government redistributionist bent to them, in that they view the idea of the government redistributing the wealthiest money to the poor as an ethical, natural thing. And so they often see the tension, especially in Latin American countries, between redistributionist demagogue bugs and technocrats who want to establish capitalism to a greater degree, and alternating between them. The ideology of this region could be called revolutionary liberalism, with the French Revolution followed by Napoleon being its perfect encapsulation. A problem here is that, ironically, unlike the authoritarian societies that tend to prize inequality, but actually tend to be fairly equal and have a strong middle class, in these countries, since lands are divided equally, it means that each generation lands are divided, meaning lots of families that can't feed themselves and have to sell their land, which results in the wealthy buying up their small, uninhabitable lands. These societies prize equality as an abstract, but have a social code that actively promotes inequality, which causes revolutions. This critical tension means that these societies often oscillate between military dictatorships and used to have chill absolutist monarchies and democracies. To read a history of a Latin American country, Italy, France, Spain, and the like, over the last 200 years is an endless litany of regime changes in monarchy, military dictatorship, and democracy. France has had five republics with different constitutions, while the U.S. has remained under the same constitution for a longer period. However, these societies still value the individual in their search for a life, and so they have tended to respect property rights and the general functioning society more so than other groups.

A strong part of this kind of nuclear family missing in the English-speaking world's version is the brotherhood that comes from all the brothers inheriting equally, while the daughters get nothing. This creates a culture of machismo that comes from the idea that the men are literally superior in these societies. These cultures produce preening alpha males as dictators on a frequent basis. However, since everyone inherits equally, no matter what, said preening alpha males are often not actually effective, since they have no incentive to be. This culture of male solidarity also predisposes these countries being military dictatorships when not democracies, given the male solidarity that also exists in the military. These cultures find the insane discipline expected of the authoritarian societies distasteful, and as the Catholic Church became more conservative in the Counter-Reformation, have tended towards chill Catholicism in general, secularism among the men, while women have often been religious. From a world perspective, being part of nuclear families of a man and wife stuck together, women have a lot of de facto influence in these societies, given that they have lots of negotiating power over their husbands due to sex and running the household. The idea of brotherhood of lousy societies to become very successful empires through the idea that all citizens of the empire are inherently brothers. All the Latin states in Western Europe are built off these egalitarian parts, conquering the other regions, while the Roman Empire is kind of the OG EG egalitarian empire, with all sons inheriting equally, thus allowing a sense of brotherhood among all men of the empire, allowing mass assimilation of conquered peoples, unlike the Greeks, as well as the Republic degrading into military dictatorships.

As a final note, Ethiopia's inclusion this list is fascinating. It shows that this family system almost certainly stems from Christianity, with Joseph Heinrich talking about this in his fabulous book, *The Weirdest People in the World*. It also explains what Ethiopia has been the only stable state in sub-Saharan Africa for thousands of years, and why it's the only big country in sub-Saharan Africa to be industrializing, alongside its oscillations between democracy and military dictatorship over the next couple decades. I would watch out for Ethiopia.

Part 5: The Absolute Nuclear Family. The absolute nuclear family could also be called the Anglo-Saxon without much of a stretch, since it exists in England, its diaspora countries like the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, alongside this, the countries the Anglo-Saxons came from on the European continent, such as the Netherlands, Denmark, as well as Normandy and all of which colonized England. Its dominant ideology is liberal capitalism. For most of my viewers, the absolute nuclear family doesn't need much explanation, given it's the system we just assumed to be normal. A family forcing a mother and a father from love, not arranged marriage, moves away from their parents, and the parents can divide up their inheritance however they would like, disinheriting children that piss them off, giving kids they like more inheritance, etc. Each child is expected to find their own way in the world, and it's nice if they happen to inherit something from their parents. The de facto reality has often been an egalitarian split inheritance among the common people and the authoritarian oldest son inherits all among the nobility, making this cultural system culturally between authoritarian and egalitarian nuclear family systems, which makes sense given Britain's history of shared German and French colonization. It combines parts of the pressure and discipline of the authoritarian system and part of the globalizing and free spirit of the egalitarian nuclear family.

An interesting point Emmanuel Todd made that these countries were often deeply racist in the manner of an authoritarian country until the middle of the 19th century, and the working classes gained more influence over the aristocrats, from which they moved to more universal views. The dominant assumption of cultures like this is that each individual is an atom responsible for its own success and conduct, responsible for its own results, and if someone succeeds, good for them. Your own life is in your own hands, as long as you don't totally fail and become a weirdo and then get rejected from the broader social system or get disinherited. Something Anglos have trouble understanding and why their social model is so hard to apply to the rest of the world is that this cultural system often appears alien and bizarre, if not disgusting, to other cultures. The atomization is often viewed as inherently cold and impersonal. I've talked to a Frenchman, and they've tried to impart upon me how inherently disgusting the amount of wealth of America's billionaires is in of itself, to which my reply is, "I'm happy they're able to succeed to that level."

The absolute nuclear family promotes rife capitalism, and the idea that the end result is fair, even if it's unequal, gives the societies immense stability, since it can reconcile equality and freedom by going with freedom. The English-speaking world, the Netherlands, and Denmark really don't have rebellions, crises, or political instability. Meanwhile, the idea that everyone has to play the capitalism and democracy game gives an onus to make this an unfair and functional, given that that's the structure of their families of providing children with equal upbringings and then expecting unequal results. This idea of free choice manifests under capitalism, liberalism, and Protestantism, which believes the individual's connection with God is personal and means these were the first countries in the world to become multi-party democracies or have religious freedom in the Western world. The ideas of God in these societies are that how you worship God is up to you, and God judges you for going to heaven and hell upon your death based off the multiform choices you've made in your life, without a state-sponsored or Catholic Church necessary, which sounds a lot like a parent judging their child in whether or not they should inherit after their death.

These cultures have to have high social trust and stability, given that the individual cannot expect anything from their families, which are in turn cut off from their extended families, which means that people have to turn to other communities like churches, bowling leagues, and the like to fish for friends and social networks, as well as employers and employees. These cultures tend to have a lot of unity, given how isolated people are from their families and need to rely on the community. At the same time, with the collapsed social communities like this, as seen in *Bowling Alone*, the negative effects in society have been incalculable, since each individual is viewed as an atom in these societies. These countries' foreign policies tend to be isolationist in principle and actually very interventionist in actions, since everything is up to independent and personal choice. England, the Netherlands, and America all play the game of proclaiming glorious isolationism or refusing foreign entanglements, and then bombing anyone that pisses them off and making giant alliance science coalitions in the same way as the people in their societies.

For all these reasons, the absolute nuclear family has been the most successful in history, going from a group of tiny marshlands in the North Sea to ruling the world. These are incredibly wealthy, successful, capable, and stable countries. I'd like to hazard some modesty here, given that the wheel of history eventually pones everyone, and so we'll probably eventually see a lot of flaws in this family structure that we can't now, but I kind of find it amusing Emmanuel Todd literally gives this culture which dominates the world two pages and is 170-page book, since it fits so perfectly in the French historiographic tradition of not being able to admit how hard the Anglos beat them.

Part 6: Asymmetric Families. I'm going to warn all of you that this is the one that makes the least sense of all of them to me. This family system is based out of Southern India and is based off the assumptions born out of that culture, and especially the caste system. The way it works, you can only marry the cousins of your female relatives through their female relatives, which works through arranged marriage. People then live in families as built through their mother's female relatives. In this process, the uncle, or your mother's brother, becomes her male protector who helps manage this system. This means that uncles are super important to a child's development. It's hard at times to disentangle this system from just the broader Indian cultural context, which I cover in greater detail in these videos. However, there are some important details that separate this part of India from Northern India. This is a post in Northern India, which has possibly been the area where women have been the worst treated in the world over history.

Firstly, this part of India is much wealthier and more creative, with India's tech center being based out of Bangalore, for example. This makes sense, given women are treated much better in Southern India, and in societies where women are given more social status, they can bring their ideas into society, but also it forces men to try harder in order to impress them. This part of India has also had the only successful communist movements ever in world history, with the only democratically elected communist movements ever, which have not in turn turned themselves into totalitarian states. And in another example of India breaking every rule, have actually been very good government, making West Bengal and Tamil Nadu peaceful and successful societies.

Number seven: The Anomic Family. The anomic family type is an anti-system. In nomad cultures, there is no family structure. You can have a nuclear family, but you can also live with your clan. Incest is okay, marrying your cousins is okay, and if you don't want to marry your cousins, that's fine. Sometimes the youngest daughter takes care of the parents, and sometimes she doesn't. Anomic systems largely allow the individual to do whatever they want sexually and with their families. This system predominates in Southeast Asia and among the native peoples of Latin America. It used to be much larger, for example, encapsulating the Middle East Bronze Age states like Egypt or Babylon, as well as the Inca Empire.

A very interesting book I've mentioned before is Joseph Henrich's *The Weirdest Evil in the World*, which talks about how the Catholic Church banning cousin marriage was one of the biggest shifts in history, since it broke down clan structures and forced Westerners to get more social trust due to not having clans having to associate with broader society while creating the individual. However, this kind of nuclear family is dependent upon banning incest and cousin marriage, which does not exist in these societies. The lack of any kind of structure for breeding or parenting results in societies without clear principles or stakes. The dominant political system of this part of the world has been oppressive empires ruling over disaffected peasants, with across the pre-Columbian states in the New World, the ancient Middle East, and Southeast Asia, it often being a norm for one-third the population to be slaves. Without family structures, these societies and the peasantries on top of them really don't have a concept on how to politically organize. The ruling classes of these countries, in order to balance the sexual openness of their populations, have often practiced incest in order to keep as much inside their families as possible so as to control their populations. This incest, never looking outside their families, creates attitudes of conservatism and foolishness, which is why these countries are often so fragile and able to be conquered so quickly and easily, as has been the case with Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Inca, or the military ineffectiveness of Southeast Asian countries. The reason this group has shrunk so much is its ineffectiveness, and the reason it likely survives in Southeast Asia is due to that region being the area that has faced the least military competition of anywhere in the world. I don't mean this to be oppening Southeast Asia video, because you can't judge the quality of a society based off its political and military institutions, and as I said before in my video on Southeast Asia, this is one of my favorite areas in Asia for different reasons. So if I do come across as judgmental to certain societies in this video, don't take that as a personal attack, attack against the value of your society.

Without boundaries, people really don't know where to look or how to look at the world. These societies don't really see a lot of inner-driven social change. They tend to view the world matter-of-factly and not have techniques on how to think critically about the world rather than just accepting it. If whatever works sexually works, then what other principles do you need to understand the world in general? These societies tend to be very culturally conservative, where if you look at Mesoamerica, the Mayans, the Egyptians, or the Sumerians, they keep their artifacts and culture and religions basically identical for periods of 3,000 years, and there are differences in which gods are more important, but the fundamental structure is pretty similar. And if you look at Southeast Asia, I once read a history of Southeast Asia that said there was very little to none social change between 800 and 1800 A.D. in mainland Southeast Asia. These societies in general today are chill military dictatorships, societies tending military dictatorships when they don't have any other strong social institutions, since the military has to exist. These military dictatorships often face coups if the underlying structure doesn't change, and the military doesn't really try to change the social order, but just lets things be.

Part 8: The Flexible System. Africa is truly vast and diverse, with more genetic diversity than the rest of the world combined, and as well as that, hundreds and thousands of different ethnicities and languages. And Todd Emanuel first this area as the flexible family system, partially because we just do not fully understand the different African families, and there is a good amount of diversity inside of Africa, where the native Khoisan peoples of Southern Africa have their own communitarian family structure with a lot of gender equality, and this has influenced the Bantu migrating south, who in Southern Africa have a more monogamous and less patriarchal society. Once you get to West Africa, you have very high levels of polygamy, where 50% of the female population are part of polygamous marriages, and in East Africa, you have a separate family structure, and as we talked about before, Islam and Ethiopia are part of non-African larger family structures.

The system is also called flexible because the clan is much more powerful vis-à-vis the nuclear family. The father might not have as much influence, but the slack is picked up by various cousins, grandpas, uncles, and the like. And this is also an area of the world that practices polygamy to a much higher degree than elsewhere. In most countries before European colonialism, polygamy was practiced, but by a tiny minority of the population. In a lot of countries in Africa, it was the norm for 5% of men to have a third of the women. The flexible system predominates in Africa and echoes through its diaspora. And these societies, the actual family is much weaker, with the clan and especially the women of the clan doing much of the job of raising the children. And on top of that, the men, once the structure of society is often the farming and child-rearing is done by women, while the men wage war and herd cattle. And as our God's fabulous book, *War in Human Civilization*, explains how this system of polygamy often plays out in reality. In a polygamist society, which a few men have most of the women, it creates a large class of sexless young men as a force in society in itself, who live and fight together. As Ralph Linton says, it is incredible the tree of culture. He talks about how the norm in many African cultures was for young men to live in the same tent as a war band from puberty onwards and wage war together. This is since in a society in which so many women are in the hands of a small amount of men, it creates no sex for large amounts of young men, who in turn turn to violence so as to take women or to improve their social status. This creates large amounts of violence, in which societies, polygamy often have large amounts of crime. The vast majority of the top 10 countries for polygamy are currently in a civil war. This creates a cycle in which young men wage war since they're sexually frustrated, and then in turn that kills them off, which also lowers the supply of young men, which as they die off means young women marry the older men who aren't waging war, thus making the problem even worse. This is how basically all societies in the world were until the rise of the state, but as the state lessened violence, the rule of law, and militaries, it forced elites to practice polygamy to a lesser extent. However, since the state's so recent and much of sub-Saharan Africa, this process is only now occurring. Likewise, the development of the plow, which only men had the strength to push, also pushed more intact families, where in previous societies and in Africa, agriculture has been done with hoes. In societies in which the nuclear family and strict family structure occurs weaker with the clan being more important, it allows much more male promiscuity.

An interesting thing Todd Emanuel looks at is that AIDS is more powerful the less strong polygamy is, where in Islamic Africa, where polygamy is entrenched in the religion, there is no AIDS. In West Africa, with higher polygamy, it's a lot less, and in Southern Africa, which is more monogamous, part of Africa, AIDS is much higher, and I really don't know why that is. J.D. Unwin said in his fascinating book, *Sex and Civilization*, "A society's ability to control sex is indicative of its level of development." And what society has lessened sexual restrictions, their level of development falls. This has since men are incentivized to work harder if they know their paternity is assured, and women to put more effort into their children's energy.

channeled into things besides getting laid. People aren't suspicious of other people trying to compete for their sex.

Fathers establish an idea of discipline for children. Without it, it's hard to have a conception of a unified God, which is pretty recent, and much of sub-Saharan Africa, as well as rule of law, which is also the worst in sub-Saharan Africa of anywhere in the world.

Tribal Africa is traditionally fear-based, as opposed to Europe, that's guilt-based, and Asia, that's shame-based. In fear-based societies, they are animist in their worldview, viewing reality as a series of different spirits and individual forces that have to be appeased in their own separate way, rather than creating broader principles like loyalty to nation, causal logic, rationality, religious law, and the like.

This means that for lots of African male culture, they try to push prowess and power rather than integrity and responsibility. And the result of this is that if you talk to people who try to do business in Africa, it's difficult to get African workers to show up at the same time, at the same day, because there isn't that culture of responsibility. And this might sound like a racist rant on my part, but cross-referenced this with someone who has lived or tried to work in Africa, and they'll just tell you that this is the case.

Women tend to be viewed with condescension much of Africa, while in fact being the bedrock of the society. I don't want this to be an "owning Africa" section, rather part of the explanation for why Africa is the poorest area in the world and hasn't moved from a tribal to a national level. We still have to keep in mind most of Africa was illiterate, had no state-organized religion, and the like, only a little bit more than a century ago. And from that perspective, Africa's progress since has been absolutely remarkable.

Likewise, Africa is already changing these norms, as evident in the declines in polygamy, almost certainly caused by the continent's mass conversion to Christianity and Islam, alongside the rise of the state, which makes wide-scale war no longer tenable. This leads me to the next point where Africa will, over time, gradually strengthen the power of its families and also at the same time become a more developed society.

But also, you're seeing very rapid changes in family structure around the world, and from that, you would expect to see massive social changes. And it really begs the question of what huge social shifts will come from that. I mean, for example, in both Russia and China, their old big family clan lives were broken down by communism. People live in nuclear families. I think that's part of the reason for why those countries have such low birth rates and are having such large social problems, because their previous social structure for millennia has been destroyed overnight.

Germany today has switched from having their authoritarian family structure to having the French egalitarian nuclear family structure. So should we expect Germany to become more like France? Alternately, in the West, you're seeing the weakening power of the family, wherein, for example, in the US, the African family structure is spread to much larger amounts of the white community. And if a family has this much impact upon how societies develop, it really begs the question, now that half of all marriages end in divorce, what will that do to society? And these are all questions for a future video.