Good article, and I thought this did a decent job answering Arthur's questions and such. I write about folkism often as well, but primarily through the lens of the ancestral household religion.
One of my subscribers sent me this article. I have been thinking and writing about these ideas for some time now. I have come up with a new form of communitarianism that sets a basic structure up to protect what you would call the folk and what I would call culture. I very much enjoyed your article. This thought pattern about what you call identities I have also identified in the second article I listed in this comment. This is a simple thought made to be easy to explain to people. I once heard a man say, "Until you have a word for something, you don't see it." Science has backed this up with its studies of the corpus callosum. There are some fascinating videos on YouTube if you are interested. I hope my input is welcome. I know I am but a humble Appalachian gorilla, but I wish to participate anyway.
Of the three articles, I like the definition of folkishness given in this one best: a) conserve heritage and continuity; b) partiality toward those like oneself; c) importance of folk over the individual. These three laws describe its essence, and draw my own deepest allegiance.
I also like Mike Maxwell's take, on Imperium Press, that folkishness is a pre-political identity, though perhaps not in the way he meant it. He may have meant it temporally, as the identity of clans and tribes before the rise of the polis and the nation. I take it logically, as the grounding and identity of home and community that informs our politics and the political organizations we form, whether clans, tribes, poleis, or nations. The folk itself is not an organization like these others, but is instead the human culture that can constitute the raw material for them.
Looking at it in the temporal way, I think we have to be careful. We folkish people generally idealize pre-urban contexts, or at least I do. But I would argue that there is a standard one-way course of development that takes place in any natural region that humans can make a living from, once a certain threshold has passed, from foragers to agricultural or pastoral villagers, to chiefdoms, to feudalism, to towns and commerce, to empire, to imperial collapse and perhaps cycles of empire beyond. This societal evolution tracks relative population pressure and increasing tightness and dependency on property for making our living.
In western Europe, and places settled from there like much of the US, we have passed from the complex chiefdom societies of the Frankish empires and the Viking Age, through feudalism to Reformation and Early Modern entrepreneurial town life, to the beginnings of our imperial age, in little more than a thousand years. We are now in a phase comparable to the Fall of the Roman Republic in the ancient Mediterranean.
We did not lose our tribes and clans merely by outsiders and zealots taking them away from us, though that may have been among the immediate causes. We lost them because extended kin structures were the natural mode of life down to the time of the complex chiefdoms, when land was still abundant and accessible to any communal group wanting to make their living from it. But as the population grew and pressed upon it, the land was divided among peasant households whose defense was provided by a class of warrior landowners that milked them of their surplus. As the population grew still further, extra children of the peasants had to make their living by service, craft, or trade. These moved to central places to practice, and these places became towns. The towns grew to take over the whole landscape, and imposed their law and commerce over everyone, including those still on the land.
Clans and tribes became irrelevant. Our natural mode now is towns, commerce, and empire. Our folk must adapt to this new reality or perish.
I'm enamored by the idea of regaining a folkish way of life for westeners but it feels like it will forever fail at large scale due to discussion over definitions. As an Englisher, I already see all the markers of a successful folkish movement in the UK among out immigrant populations. Exemplified by the communal protectionism that has been observed during the so called grooming gang cases. I do feel hope in some American movements.
Good article, and I thought this did a decent job answering Arthur's questions and such. I write about folkism often as well, but primarily through the lens of the ancestral household religion.
https://tompnoid.substack.com/p/the-communitarian-manifesto
https://tompnoid.substack.com/p/you-only-think-youre-white
One of my subscribers sent me this article. I have been thinking and writing about these ideas for some time now. I have come up with a new form of communitarianism that sets a basic structure up to protect what you would call the folk and what I would call culture. I very much enjoyed your article. This thought pattern about what you call identities I have also identified in the second article I listed in this comment. This is a simple thought made to be easy to explain to people. I once heard a man say, "Until you have a word for something, you don't see it." Science has backed this up with its studies of the corpus callosum. There are some fascinating videos on YouTube if you are interested. I hope my input is welcome. I know I am but a humble Appalachian gorilla, but I wish to participate anyway.
Of the three articles, I like the definition of folkishness given in this one best: a) conserve heritage and continuity; b) partiality toward those like oneself; c) importance of folk over the individual. These three laws describe its essence, and draw my own deepest allegiance.
I also like Mike Maxwell's take, on Imperium Press, that folkishness is a pre-political identity, though perhaps not in the way he meant it. He may have meant it temporally, as the identity of clans and tribes before the rise of the polis and the nation. I take it logically, as the grounding and identity of home and community that informs our politics and the political organizations we form, whether clans, tribes, poleis, or nations. The folk itself is not an organization like these others, but is instead the human culture that can constitute the raw material for them.
Looking at it in the temporal way, I think we have to be careful. We folkish people generally idealize pre-urban contexts, or at least I do. But I would argue that there is a standard one-way course of development that takes place in any natural region that humans can make a living from, once a certain threshold has passed, from foragers to agricultural or pastoral villagers, to chiefdoms, to feudalism, to towns and commerce, to empire, to imperial collapse and perhaps cycles of empire beyond. This societal evolution tracks relative population pressure and increasing tightness and dependency on property for making our living.
In western Europe, and places settled from there like much of the US, we have passed from the complex chiefdom societies of the Frankish empires and the Viking Age, through feudalism to Reformation and Early Modern entrepreneurial town life, to the beginnings of our imperial age, in little more than a thousand years. We are now in a phase comparable to the Fall of the Roman Republic in the ancient Mediterranean.
We did not lose our tribes and clans merely by outsiders and zealots taking them away from us, though that may have been among the immediate causes. We lost them because extended kin structures were the natural mode of life down to the time of the complex chiefdoms, when land was still abundant and accessible to any communal group wanting to make their living from it. But as the population grew and pressed upon it, the land was divided among peasant households whose defense was provided by a class of warrior landowners that milked them of their surplus. As the population grew still further, extra children of the peasants had to make their living by service, craft, or trade. These moved to central places to practice, and these places became towns. The towns grew to take over the whole landscape, and imposed their law and commerce over everyone, including those still on the land.
Clans and tribes became irrelevant. Our natural mode now is towns, commerce, and empire. Our folk must adapt to this new reality or perish.
I'm enamored by the idea of regaining a folkish way of life for westeners but it feels like it will forever fail at large scale due to discussion over definitions. As an Englisher, I already see all the markers of a successful folkish movement in the UK among out immigrant populations. Exemplified by the communal protectionism that has been observed during the so called grooming gang cases. I do feel hope in some American movements.
It's early days yet. The definitional problem is only just being discussed now, and it will be solved.
I do hope so and will follow the discussion for sure.
For the Family, For Our Kin, For or Folk and For Our Gods.