My view is that you can’t disentangle culture from a social order. In other words, there must be some kind of self-propagating culture attached to a “fully privatized” social order. In order for this to be possible, your social order must have some kind of boundary (not necessarily territorial or even geographical) by which people can be included or excluded on the basis of their conformance to the culture. This is essentially Hoppe’s view.
This thought leads to a couple realizations. First, there already exist flourishing, fully private social orders - the Amish, Gypsies, certain Jewish sects, and so on. On a more relaxed definition, I think even religious groups like the Mormons or even Scientologists can be considered fully private social orders. You will note that all of these organizations are mostly non-territorial, that they have some kind of “home base” or “headquarters”, that they have some kind of single leader even though he may far removed and may have no formal authority to enact his own ideas about any particular matter even in his own ambit, that they have strongly normed shared beliefs (dogmas) compliance with which is requisite to maintaining good standing, etc. The second realization is that - except for the overlapping of all the private benefits that accrue to private, informal friendships or formal membership in any particular organization (including governments, where we do not consider a mere resident or even a “citizen” to be a member) - there is a kind of “organizational tragedy of the commons” in the wider culture. And this must necessarily be so. The culture “out there” must always be un-maintained or, even worse, lorded over by vulture-like fiends seeking to lure and trap the unwary. So, unfiltered culture is shit - worse than shit, it is a coma-inducing toxin that renders you helpless to the predation of whoever it is that happens to be in the business of predating on uncultured incompetents. We could roughly approximate the State* as just such a predator.
To put it in very simple terms to convey the general idea, imagine that culture is nothing but teaching your children how to act. What is the benefit of doing this if they’re not going to take care of you in your old age? And why will they take care of you in your old age if they have no cultural belief (i.e. taught when they were young) that they should do so? So, a social order with a culture that inculcates the values of taking care of those within the organization and which transfers this culture from generation to generation is self-sustaining and manages to “internalize” the benefits that result from the production of the culture itself (education, arts, community, entertainments, match-making, etc. etc. etc.) The wider culture, of course, has no beneficiaries, thus, no one has any interest in preserving the positive within the wider culture, or eliminating the negative from the culture. So this is why we have Lady Gaga, Sacha Baron Cohen and Kim Kardashian. These people are the embodiment of shit culture. Listening to them, watching them and patronizing them cannot benefit you nor does it contribute to your willingness to belong to a self-sustaining social order of which they are also a part. If anything, it lowers your consciousness and makes you more vulnerable to all forms of predation at the hands of private opportunists and the State apparatus.
In general, when you see the death of folk arts (folk music, folk stories, folk festivals, folk wisdom, etc.), you are witnessing the death of a social order. The only way to prevent this, in my opinion, is to have some kind of “cultural guardian” class within the social order (let’s call them “the priests”) that conscientiously manages membership within the society (by excluding “heretics”, that is, those promulgating ideas that will sooner or later lead to the breakdown of the society) and filters the wider culture through the use of norms by which to guide the self-censorship of the members of the society.
Clayton -
*Including religion, military, business, academia and all the other cronies and parasites attached to the State apparatus…