The Future Belongs to Those Who Promise

The Tortuga Code of Honor

Retarded Reddit Groups Vs. Higher Fellowships

I have been a member of the Tortuga Society for almost a year at this point, and my experience thus far has been exceptional. The other day, I was reflecting upon this, and I realized something rather profound: this is not a community but a fellowship. I thought it might be worthwhile to share this little insight. Not only is it something many of you will find interesting, but in making this implicit feature of the group explicit, I hope to reinforce it as we move forward together.

What do I mean when I make this distinction between communities and fellowships? Many philosophers and sociologists have investigated the nature of community, and it’s fairly common to distinguish between a community that one joins voluntarily versus thrust into without consent.¹ But we are after a much deeper point: what binds men together in a consensual community once they’ve joined?

The Group-Soul

The first, lower, answer to this question is what we could call “ignorant co-experiencing.” In these cases, the members of the group unconsciously imitate each other in a form of psychic contagion.

In your average Reddit or Discord group, people are united by a certain idea or thing. All members enjoy Marvel, identify as non-binary, are “fans” of something. They cluster around their objects of interest, seeking communion with others who share these parts of their “identity.” What tends to happen is that, over time, a collective hive-mind develops. Members of the group are either accepted or rejected based on whether they conform to the dictates of this ”group-soul” or “egregore.” Purity laws are established and boundaries become firmly delineated.²

We don’t need to posit any occult entities (but it is fun to talk that way). All we need is to recognize that what holds these groups together is something like a “field of feelings.” Eventually, all members of the group, under the pressures of conformity, begin thinking the same thing, and degenerate into some human slime-mould, with each member a more-or-less identical copy of the next.

The cult of personality is similar to the hive-mind except that, instead of arising organically through passive feeling for each other, the group holds itself together in the image of a single man. Admired for his work or his popularity, this figure dictates what is and is not acceptable and the members unconsciously mirror him. Over time, they become his minions, their genuine individuality absorbed into the field-of-feeling which is the group-soul. Interestingly, the leader is often not in control here, and there are many leaders who are tyrannized by the ideas others have of them. This is related to “audience capture” in the online space.

What I have called the group-soul is “organismic”: it tends to grow out of a group, ranging over those activities that are automatic or semi-automatic. It is also necessarily impersonal and anonymous. Over time, a set of behaviours, feelings and ideas all mysteriously congeal such that the individual members almost become instantiations of a single collective subject. I have no idea how this works metaphysically, but it is very easy to observe in real life. Sometimes you’ll find people who seem normal, but then, when a boundary of the group-soul is contravened, they will appear almost “possessed” by the spirit of the group.

The group-soul is capricious and touchy. To join a group about feminism and then reject that we live under a patriarchy is to hurt the group-soul, to attack the hive-mind, to be polluted in its sight. Of course, there are no consciously-held principles at play here. Everything lies on the emotional plane, and ideas are only important insofar as they reinforce this collective sense of identity.

What you’ll find in such groups is that the members almost always feel alone. The group-soul acts as a kind of stabilizer, providing a grounding for people who otherwise feel unstable and insecure. They join because of a shared interest, but the real purpose of such communities is to buttress a flaccid personality with collective approbation. This often results in a temporary loss or dissolution of the personality itself.

The Group Mind

There is a higher, more wholesome way of holding people together, which brings me to Tortuga. I know firsthand that Theon Ultima and Rajeev Ram have struggled to find a unifying idea or set of principles for Tortuga, but unbeknownst to them, this confusion is actually one of our society’s greatest strengths. None of the people I know in Tortuga joined because they believed in any unifying ideology. Some, like me, just joined because we liked the vibe. But what is this vibe? Is it simply the reverberations of the group-soul? No. It is a group mind.

This is actually a very important distinction—and a subtle one. I characterized the group-soul according to ignorant co-experiencing or psychic contagion. The group-soul infects us with the ideas and feelings of those around us. When Marvel Fan #1 gets angry because somebody says Marvel movies suck, Marvel Fan #2 does not perceive his anger, but becomes angry with him. The two of them feel the same way, experience the same emotion. This perverse empathy binds many groups together, but there are better alternatives.

In opposition to this passive, mirror-like identification with others, is active, personal co-experiencing. I share a sense of community with others, but the bond is directed toward something; it is intentional (in the philosophical sense).

For example, one of the common views among Tortugans is “the institutions are failing.” There are two ways this statement can unite people:

1. According to the shared emotions that arise through contemplating the failing institutions: anger, resentment or even pride at having seen through the illusions of society. In this case, the group-soul is involved, and the members are united by the emotions that the idea provokes.

2. According to a co-execution of a judgment, we agree. I’m not passively identified with the man next to me; I’m my own person who is “with him” on this issue. I can agree that institutions are failing without feeling any of his emotions.

This latter kind of relationship is much less common, and historically, many philosophers have failed to distinguish it from mere empathy.³

Intentional co-experiencing also brings about a radically different kind of community. Rather than rising up “from the bottom” and taking over everyone’s sense of self as the group-soul does, the group mind works “from the top,” progressing from shared agreement down, preserving the individuality of each person. The result is that instead of a tyrannical bundle of feelings running the group, you get a wholesome vibe in the form of shared beliefs, goals and values. I don’t feel united with you; I see where you’re coming from. We don’t identify with X; we agree on Y.

Communities united by a group mind are necessarily much more diverse because each man is recognized as his own person and there are weaker (if any) purity laws. The members co-experience each other, yes, but this is always accompanied by a knowledge of one’s own self. I “feel you, bro”—but I am not contaminated with your emotions. It’s even possible for me to see where I disagree with someone and feel united through a co-understanding of our differences.

The group mind, to me, is one of Tortuga’s biggest strengths. It is a community bound together by higher laws of feeling and respect.

Promises and Deeper Principles

This line of thinking opens up a whole world of interesting questions, the first of which is attempting to define what values, goals and ideas Tortugans share—but I will have to investigate that another time.⁴ Here I want to deal with one idea that I have seen in action and that is a rare gem in the world today: promises.

Most—if not all—Tortugans think that the liberal world, with its human rights and contractualism, is kind of a joke. The Tortuga Society was very explicit about this from the beginning: jobstackers were to plunder the woke corporate world, using the stupid systems to their advantage. I have no issue with this vision. In fact, the spirit of cynically plundering a rigged game attracted me when I first came across it. I agree that there are no human rights; I agree that the laws of the country and the world are merely contingent; I agree that natural law, as it is commonly understood, is deeply problematic. Many of these obligations placed upon us are spirits and ciphers. However, I still believe wholeheartedly in a specific kind of obligation: the promise.

As to recovering a proper understanding of what a promise is and what it does, my source is Adolf Reinach, a German phenomenologist who wrote a remarkable little treatise on the foundations of civil law in 1913. Reinach’s central insight was that a promise creates a genuine obligation that exists independently of positive law, social convention or psychological states. When I promise you something, I bring into existence a real claim-right in you and a corresponding obligation in myself. This is not a matter of how I feel, nor is it about social pressure or legal enforcement. It is a metaphysical fact about the structure of social reality itself. A promise made necessarily creates an obligation.

This kind of thinking runs counter to the dominant views in philosophy and law, which treat obligations as either subjective (matters of personal conscience or will) or institutional (created and enforced by positive law)—but I like it a lot.

The Necessity of Promises

I doubt all other Tortugans will ever totally agree with me on the metaphysics, but that doesn’t really matter.⁵ We all agree in spirit. Everyone I have spoken to feels the importance of promises. In fact, I think they are essential to any group mind and a requirement for all forms of higher community, for all true fellowship.

When I make a promise, you and I co-experience the same intention. We recognize the same object and are thereby united. Promising is essentially related to all fellowship between persons. Moreover, when I make a promise, I put my honour and my standing as a man on the line. I’m obliged, but this obligation doesn’t depend on outside enforcement: it depends on me. To break a promise is to violate yourself as a being capable of forming these higher bonds. It also severs you from the community of men whom you respect, and whose opinion you value.⁶

A contract is just a shitty version of a promise. It’s adversarial and assumes distrust. A contract stipulates penalties, but once you remove third-party enforcement or if you find a loophole, the obligation evaporates. Contracts render all relationships into modes of exchange, all genuine accountability into calculated commitments and our faith in ourselves into fear of punishment. There is no fellowship here, no shared co-experience, and no real respect: only empty laws, whose hollowness makes them easy to bend. It may be true that the world is built on contracts, but that’s why we have a right to plunder it.

What I’m proposing here is not naïve romanticism. If there is to be any kind of higher community at all, any group mind capable of uniting men in a substantive way, then it can only exist among those who can make and keep promises, and between those who value promises kept. In these communities, what is meant matters more than what’s written, and one’s word weighs more than any legal penalty.

The second essay of Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals begins with this point: “To breed an animal with the right to make promises—is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? is it not the real problem regarding man?”

Pirates Who Promise

My experience inside the Tortuga Society has been characterized by promises. When someone does something, he gives his word, and that is enough. You wouldn’t believe how easy life is when you make handshake deals, when people can discuss a controversial topic and nobody gets mad, and when the man next to you thinks more about how you can succeed together than about how he can succeed at your expense.

I know I’m not an exception. I hope that by stating this, by making it explicit, I might entice other like-minded men to join because I can think of few things more valuable in the world today than trust.⁷

We in Tortuga are not trying to replace the state or anything crazy; we’re just creating a “walled garden,” as Theon likes to put it, a place where competence, and mutual obligation, are the norm. Members can undertake projects together (like my own Tortuga Philosophy Café - post coming soon), support one another in times of struggle, and maintain standards of excellence precisely because we can rely on each other’s word.

I do not think most people—even the members in Tortuga—have recognized the profound implications of this kind of view. Instead of trying to design the perfect system, the perfect set of “rules,” I think we would all be much better off if we merely endeavoured to be men who could make and keep promises.

I expect things to get much worse over the coming years, but one good consequence of these periods of uncertainty is that what’s truly certain stands out in stark relief. Groups of men who can trust and depend on each other will dominate everyone else, because they are the only ones bound by something higher.

As Tortugans, we may twist and even break the fake rules in the “real world,” but we play according to others that most people don’t even know exist. That will ensure our success.

1. There is a famous distinction from Ferdinand Tönnies between society (Gesellschaft) and community (Gemeinschaft). The former designates a group of people held together by structural, organizational or institutional bonds, whereas the latter depends on affective bonds of solidarity, as in families, friend groups and tribes. Scheler takes this a step further and distinguishes between two further groups: transient masses (people who just happen to be in the same place) and a personalistic system of solidarity—I’ll refer to them as “fellowships” for convenience (not his term).

2. I have written about this a little bit in my essay about morality. The key person to read here is Mary Douglas.

3. Schopenhauer doesn’t distinguish these two and neither does Nietzsche, whose attacks against pity are directed against the kind of empathy that leads to psychic contagion. Scheler’s The Nature of Sympathy does a good job of distinguishing between these, and Husserl and Stein also have interesting views on this topic. Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which is one of Theon Ultima’s favourite books, makes this point eloquently in Part 1.9 during an excursus on compassion, where he explains that all Romance languages form the word using the word for “suffering” (com-passio), whereas other languages like Czech, Polish, German and Swedish simply use the word “feeling.” The difference is between com-passion and co-feeling.

4. If somebody came to Tortuga and thought that the world was going swimmingly, DEI was a great achievement, institutions were thriving, and the arts had never been better; such a person wouldn’t be attacked—it would just be…weird. Like, why are you here? It is possible, however, that such a person could join and even thrive, provided they had a suitable sense of self. Maybe someone mature enough to remain composed amidst total disagreement would convince some of the rest of us. Or, more likely, we would eventually convince him. That’s just because we are right about a lot of stuff.

5. I know many people will justify the act of promising according to pragmatism, but pragmatism isn’t what’s going on here. It’s true that a community of people who can promise is better than one with people who can’t promise, but it’s a mistake to think that promises are therefore merely instrumental. A real promise, like a real sense of responsibility, has an affective component. I must feel that I should follow through. Again, this is complicated because the feeling is not akin to happiness or sadness: I don’t feel happy promising, but I feel the obligation it places upon me. This is prior to any pragmatic considerations, which are usually reasoned ex post facto and given merely as a genetic explanation.

6. The feeling that other people’s opinions are valuable is healthy, but it can be distinguished from general acceptance. I wrote a novel, and I value positive feedback from competent readers. I don’t care if some illiterate hack dislikes (or even likes) it, but it would be weird to have genuinely no regard for anybody’s feedback. I think a similar thing is at play here.

7. I also hope that this emphasis on promises makes people who don’t understand them copy our behaviour.