I have been aware of Henri Tajfel for several years. He is the originator of the Minimal Group Paradigm. In his experiments he took middle school boys somewhere in the Midlands whom you might consider to be all of a piece and randomly separated them into two groups. He favored one group over the other and watched the group behave differently.

Henri Tajfel and his colleagues developed the Minimal Group Paradigm in the 1970s as a way to explore the roots of group bias and discrimination. The experiments performed under this paradigm showed that people are prone to ‘group-like’ behavior even when the group distinctions are entirely meaningless.

When I discovered this, working my way out of the arbitrary designations of race in America, it closed a circle I had long considered which is that we humans all evolved at the same pace and thus are working with the same hardware from an evolutionary psychological framework. So what is arbitrarily attributed to genetics and race could be much better explained by psychology. Given that what we know about psychology at this moment in history is superior to our understanding of how genetics expresses itself in matters of social relations, I began taking psychology more seriously. This added to the complications of culture, anthropology, class, family, religion and education that I felt fairly competent writing about. Well, anthropology is new.

It was of course a great disappointment to see what is ultimately the scourge of prosocial self-censorship in academia weigh against the rational takes of psychology, but that’s still rather where we are in this dark populist era.

As I continue down this rabbit hole, I am doubling down on getting XRepublic built, and I believe I can generate interest from several quarters, so I’m kind of turning this publication towards that direction which has to do with a Stoic and dispassionate discussion around what ideas and attitudes can support the public square necessary for the continuity of the this Republic against the seductions of anarchy and oligarchy. I honestly cannot see an American Emperor happening in the next 100 years. So many things would have to go wrong - and I honestly cannot see a Chinese takeover in that period either. The entire weight against world government I think is self-evident, by the way, in the EU’s incompetence in self-defense and the failing integrity of the BRICs to adequately manage their own populations.

At any rate, I’m all about next-gen democracy. We’ve got the social media infrastructure to host it. I just need a couple tens of thousands of subscribers to a built XR to prove it.

Today’s angle is fourfold and the first was to get you up to speed on the Tajfel tangent to help you understand the origins of my thinking about this.

Infinitely Divisible
The second is to remind us, via Tajfel that no marketing demographic is deterministic. Start calling people Millenials and they will start behaving as Millennials. I had a dispute with somebody just last week who called me a Boomer. The technical fact is that I’m on the cusp of Boom and X, but I choose X. Why? Because Boomers don’t skateboard or dirtbike. Big Daddy Don Garlits was a Boomer and technically so was Craig Breedlove and most of the Apollo astronauts - so I’ll cop to that aspect, but I dug Japanese hotrods, mini-trucks and electronic music. That’s X, baby. Yellow Magic Orchestra FTW. Don’t get me started. What do you call such a cusper? Nobody knows or cares, the cross-section gets too much in the weeds. Nevertheless, those are the level of weeds I want to support and liberate us from the current social media algorithms. Which takes us to item Three.

Dynamic Community Standards
The first thing that is absolutely fundamental to XRepublic is its concepts of Agoras and Houses. An Agora is a space with few constraints. It’s where you start. The most neutral thing I can think of is to divide Agoras up by language and timezones. After some period of time, you as a citizen of the XR sort yourself into a House. So basically Harry, you hang out in the Great Hall for several weeks before you put on the Sorting Hat, which is in fact, your own preference. The crucial aspect of this is that your House has your community standards as defined by your lot. You police yourself, you publish your own community standards and that’s part of the eleventeen post-its on your front door. Your House will have its own terms of service and lawn sign. Pink flamingos of you like. You decide who to shun and shame. It’s your House.

The point is to get fairly like-minded citizens to come together fairly quickly and then establish areas of collaboration that cover the pros and cons of those subjects of most interest. The theory being that you are there for a reason and that reason gives you both purpose and patience with your similarly self-selected peers. Trolls and retards, by your community standards may be ex-communicated. Yet, they stay on the XR platform giving the platform its combined strength instead of being exiled out to Bluesky as from XTwitter.

No Algorithm
Thus with each independent House / Fief having its own community standards and all appropriate bars to entry, people join and split of their own accord. There’s no reason this needs to be more strict than blogging, and the NLP can be tuned to “Dry Bar Utah” or “Las Vegas Strip Club”. The point being it’s only ‘populist’ within the confines of a place you are already comfortable with. You can present your findings, polls, agreements, principles, statements of purpose, plebiscites, surveys, findings of fact, crowdsourced legal pseudocode and any other matter internally AND to the Agoras, or At Large Federated Katamari Damacy aggregation cosmos.

One More Thing
I mentioned Janis. So I am aware of the groupthink dynamic when it comes to decision making. I expect XR to overcome this by systematically surveying each and every House’s groupthink.

Q: Was it Tajfel who coined the term 'groupthink'?

A: No, it was not Henri Tajfel who coined the term "groupthink." The term was coined by psychologist Irving Janis in 1971. Janis introduced the concept in his analysis of foreign policy decisions, particularly examining cases like the Bay of Pigs invasion and other historical decision-making failures.

Tajfel is known for his work on social identity theory and intergroup relations, including concepts like in-group favoritism and social categorization, but "groupthink" specifically comes from Janis's research on group decision-making processes and the psychological phenomena that can lead groups to make poor decisions when consensus-seeking overrides realistic evaluation of alternatives.

I haven’t ruled out the possibility for academically curated and peer-reviewed findings of fact to be available for reference for XR citizens. But I expect certain houses to be more academically rigorous at any rate. Given that they won’t be, we can always call in Claude Morpheus to red-pill the sleepers.

The Bottom Line
We know many things about American democracy and education that are broken. Within a reasonable horizon, we will have the intelligent compute augmentations to enable reformers to do much more than ever before. In other words, we have the brainpower to think our way into new organizational spaces that will inevitably replace our 20th century institutions. But to save ourselves from oligarchy and anarchy we need a new kind of deliberative space. Social media is not providing it. Public education is not providing it. Party politics is not providing it. The XRepublic fuses all three with an emphasis on collaborative deliberation.

You might say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. All you have to do is join my club.