Thanksgiving as Loyalty Marker

A study of loyalty markers positions Thanksgiving under the category of Cohesive Rituals.

Who created this category, and what makes it significant in gauging loyalty? The first answer is easy: Victor Davis Hanson. The second is more involved. It has to do with social cohesion that helps gauge whether we feel more of a tie to a traditional loyalty, Loyalty A, or to a newer, competing loyalty, Loyalty X.

Think of Loyalty A as a default loyalty to such historically uncontested pillars of social support as family, country, church, and employer. By contrast, think of Loyalty X as something fresh that offers the allure of being different, exciting, perhaps radical. Loyalty X emits a siren call to lure away from Loyalty A, often with an ultimate goal of undermining A altogether.

In this context, celebrating Thanksgiving is definitely an A game. It reinforces bonds to previous generations that share values and rekindle gratitude. 

For Loyalty X, however, maybe Thanksgiving looks objectionable, if someone tries hard enough to make it so. What is Thanksgiving's unforgivable sin to Loyalty X adherents? 

Not invented here. 

They cannot own it or exact tribute from it. What, then, do they offer in place of cohesive rituals? 

Most often, it is credibility-enhancing displays. Think of the rationale behind a cult's or gang's insistence on a candidate performing some crime or ritual self-abasement as a precondition for acceptance -- a Loyalty X mainstay.

Both loyalty indicators (5 and 6) represent loyalty markers (whose origins appear in citations provided in the book, below):

Making It Count

So what? Whether comparing a society against an opposing movement or an employer against an internal, would-be saboteur, it pays to track the influence of loyalty markers that play to the advantage of one side over another. One way to do this is by assigning numerical values to capture how much each marker means to an employee. 

All it takes to start comparing is to array the loyalty markers into a table, with columns on each side for capturing respective ratings for Loyalty A and Loyalty X. Borrowing a risk assessment methodology, a high rating shows as 0.9, medium as 0.5, and low as 0.1. Assigning numbers to qualitative ratings thus permits summing up totals to show which loyalty is scoring higher, overall, for a given individual exposed to both in the same milieu. This is how the table now looks as a loyalty ledger:

For a deeper understanding of loyalty markers and the role they play in first gauging and then countering slow-onset insider threats, I invite you to read Chapter 10 of this book:

Fun Fact: This book broadly distinguishes between sudden impact and rising tide (aka slow-onset) insider threats. The rising tide image inspired the subtitle and the cover image of a wave.

Bottom Line

Loyalty counts. So do cohesive rituals and all the markers that either reinforce desired loyalties or open the door to competing loyalties undermining the status quo.

Happy Thanksgiving. It matters.

Your Immediate Threat

 

Your immediate threat is not some vaguely drawn demon or cascading evil that remains years away from doing its worst -- eventually. Your immediate threat is what kills you first. The closer it gets, the more indisputable its intentions.

What prevents otherwise sentient beings from identifying such approaching threats? Some friends and colleagues marinated in the same brine of graduate work in homeland security through the Naval Postgraduate School recently traded observations on such matters while discussing at length the evils of the times. In the process of our iterative discourse, certain themes surfaced, including these:

1.  Popular fixation on distant, intractable dilemmas (at times reflexively characterized as "wicked problems" so frequently that the most blatant sign of wickedness has become wearing out this cliché). By concentrating on problems which may indeed be real but remain years or decades away from producing their apocalyptic impact, we fall into a trap that yields near term gain at a price.

The gain is bureaucratic insulation from accountability. In other words, the end of the world may eventually arrive according to whatever model projects its ETA, but as long as it does not get here on our watch, no one will hold us accountable for what we do about it. This liberation from consequences frees us to pursue prudent and wrongheaded strategies with equal gusto. And if we cloak our actions with popular, emotive resonance, there is seldom a penalty to face for wasting resources or getting it wrong. Such is the cost of doing business when one calls one's business saving the world.

The price for succumbing to such fixations extends beyond waste of resources. A big price is intentional narrowing of defensive focus to the point of losing the capacity to detect more deadly threats approaching obliquely, in flanking maneuvers. After all, an adversary bent on your destruction seldom neglects the value of surprise if he can catch you unawares and lower his risk by dealing a death blow while you are directing your attention elsewhere. 

2.  Diminished capacity to distinguish imminent threats to life from confected, outrage du jour that people styling themselves as victims rail against, whether their cause of the moment is some perceived social injustice or no longer having free meals at the company cafeteria.

3.  Loss of predator-resistant defenses. People now accustomed to having their stated preferences accommodated and their self-definitions validated see the world differently than their recent predecessors did. The latter had to fight. They grew up without expecting the world to go their way. The requirement to struggle, to compete, and to be ready to engage in combat for both advancement and survival imparted certain programming beneficial to defense. That programming included constant horizon scanning for predators and a premium on early threat detection, effective threat avoidance, and vigorous self-defense. When you have to fight for what you have, you optimize for keeping it and for thwarting attackers who contrive to take it away.

So What?

A distant threat becomes a disembodied abstraction, a topic more suited to debate than action. People obsessed exclusively with eventual and apocalyptic threats spend more energy talking about them and exploiting them for personal advantage than preparing to grapple with them on their own. Making this society's problem takes it off the My Problems list.

The net result is vulnerability that invites ruthless adversaries to strike such self-neutered targets. This situation favors those willing to slit throats over those programmed to see no fast-moving evil. And so, your greatest threat becomes whatever is willing and able to kill you first, because that threat will deny you the luxury of being around when the eventual threat comes to pass.

Perhaps Hilaire Belloc best captured the image of this kind of threat when observing,

"We sit by and watch the barbarian, we  tolerate him; in the long  stretches of peace  we are not afraid.  We are tickled by his  irreverence; his comic  inversion of our  old certitudes  and our fixed creeds  refreshes us; we  laugh. But as we laugh  we are watched by large and awful faces  from  beyond; and on these faces there is no smile."