What is unfolding in Minnesota cannot be understood without first confronting a difficult truth: some cultures arrive intact. They do not dissolve on contact with modern society, nor do they gently adapt—they replicate.
Somali society is organized around the clan. Loyalty is not abstract, nor is it civic. It is biological and binding. The individual exists only insofar as he serves the group. Protection, marriage, honor, silence, and punishment are governed by this code. Obligations flow inward, sanctions flow downward. The clan precedes the individual and outlives him.
This structure is pre-modern, but it is also anti-modern. It resists the very conditions that make liberal societies function: individual accountability, transparency, impersonal law, and trust beyond kin. Ernest Gellner warned that a modern nation-state cannot be built on tribal loyalty. Tribalism fragments authority and dissolves shared obligation. Where it persists, institutions decay.
Industrial societies require a high culture that is transmitted through mass, state-run education, because only such a culture can sustain economic mobility, the bonds of social trust, and full political citizenship within a highly differentiated division of labor. Nationalism in this sense is not an irrational passion but the adjustment mechanism by which politics and culture come into alignment.
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