Your Mama Done Told You

Turns out that the European Union has its own set of backward southern states. This has turned out to be an advantage. Culture lag is generally bad, but if you're lagging behind Die Reaktion, you can come out ahead. Recently I had to include both Irelands in this because the Socialist Workers Party is active in both.

Once you take Raphael Patai’s Golden-River-Golden-Road Axis seriously as a civilizational fault‑line rather than a literal geopolitical bloc, you end up with a map of discontent that cuts across both Irelands — and also across Spain, Greece, Portugal, and even parts of Italy — in ways that look strangely coherent.
The key is that he wasn’t describing a region so much as a structural position in the world‑system: societies caught between an older imperial integration and a newer, often externally imposed, institutional order. When you apply that lens, Ireland (north and south) fits the pattern more than people expect.
I won't mention extending this Axis to the Western Hemisphere due to the Moorish Conquest and the later Spanish Empire. Things are complicated enough.
What simplifies the picture is how imperial systems all over the world, and all through history, have a tendency to sodomize their conquests. The history of the fault-line in the circum-Mediterranean stretches into remote antiquity. Interestingly, so does that of the Celtic Fringe despite their separation and isolation from each other. Empires have quite a reach. Now that we're living in "Interesting Times" again, the political culture with deep traditions of resistance, non‑cooperation, and suspicion of external control is shaking itself off, stretching and flexing its claws.
The risk of characterizing entire regions is the accusation of "essentialism", a sort of racism that is frowned upon because it lumps individuals together into some genetic-deterministic mass. But everyone takes a whack between the eyes or a kick in the arse unkindly. The geopolitics is where this happens the most often. It isn't oversimplified to expect this attitude from oft-conquered and exploited peoples.
By “als ob essentialism” I mean in the sense of culture behaving as if certain human traits were essential, even though they are not biologically fixed — that is what I am describing. I'm biased because it’s a sharp, almost Spenglerian insight: culture creates the illusion of essential traits by selectively actualizing some potentials and suppressing others until they feel innate.
Hans Vaihinger’s als ob philosophy says humans often act as if certain ideas were true because doing so is socially or psychologically useful, even if the ideas are not literally true. Growing up in a family of "dyed in the wool" John Birchers made me feel "als ob" I was trapped in an asylum. Now that you've been made aware of how numerous Trump supporters are, so do you.
What “als ob essentialism” means in this here context in these here Interesting Times (to cop a steal from a lefty newspaper).
Applied to culture:
Cultures behave as if certain human traits were essential, fixed, or natural — even though they are actually produced by cultural selection.
In my previous unreadable blog (thank me for not making one of those time-compressed videos with a thousand cuts to edit out those pauses and intakes of breath for basic respiration), I "Spillaned" how culture selects potentials → treats them as essential. Human nature contains a vast range of potentials. A culture cannot use all of them, so it:
1. Selects certain potentials.
2. Actualizes them through institutions, norms, and training.
3. Suppresses incompatible potentials.
4. Stabilizes the selected traits into a modal personality.
5. Symbolizes those traits as “natural,” “proper,” or “essential”.
6. Painting and playing the piano are not included, but they are optional if you want the crap beaten out of you behind a bar in Gary, Indiana (except now they're coming fer yew).
This is als ob essentialism: the culture acts as if the selected traits define human nature itself.
Cultures need this illusion. I'll be blunt while you weep: a culture cannot function if its members constantly question the arbitrariness of its personality structure. (Look what happened to Francis Farmer.) So cultures must create:
1. a sense of inevitability;
2. a sense of naturalness;
3. a sense of essential identity.
This is not deception; it is a functional necessity.
A warrior culture must act as if courage and aggression are essential human traits. A monastic culture must act as if self‑denial and contemplation are essential. A mercantile culture must act as if calculation and foresight are essential.
Without this as if, the personality structure collapses.
Culture creates “essential traits” by repetition. Anthropology is developmental, not biological.
Traits become essential because:
1. they are rewarded;
2. they are ritualized;
3. they are mythologized;
4. they are trained from childhood;
5. they are embedded in institutions;
6. they are repeated across generations.
Eventually, the selected traits feel natural, and the suppressed traits feel unnatural.
This “als ob essentialism” is the "living tissue molding machine behind:
1. civilizational character;
2. elite ecology;
3. institutional drift;
4. cultural rigidity;
5. civilizational decline.
Once a culture treats its selected traits as essential, it becomes blind to alternative potentials. This blindness is what makes adaptation difficult and decline likely.
My entire theory of institutionalization rests on this point. In the 1970s there was a revival of scholarship about civilizational personality structures — the Western achievement personality (Faustian reach for infinity), the Confucian relational personality (which makes Chinese II extra-inscrutable because some parts are recognizable now, creating an effect Poe called "uncanny"), or the Medieval hierarchical personality — to show how each civilization’s “essential traits” are culturally constructed rather than innate. Culture is a selective actualization of human potentials that becomes so habitual, symbolic, and institutionalized that it feels essential — even though it is not.
Is the EU drifting toward a Universal Empire morphology, and are Spain, Greece, and Ireland its “axis of resistance”? I've already decided that the Levantine Danger Probe situation is an allergic reaction to a "settler-colonial"* transplant.
*I am open to new jargon. List some suggestions in the comments below.

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