snowflake

In hunter-gatherer bands, in primitive villages, in stateless societies like modern Somalia, people support each other in mutual aid as the norm. Most human and animal life is in support; conflict is the exception.

In these stateless societies, when the norm is breached, the natural balance is considered to have been disturbed and it must be rebalanced.

That redress is sometimes blood-vengeance, like in the Kanun law of traditional Albania. But it's very often compensation in the form of a transfer of assets. You broke my leg so I'm mad and angry. But then you transferred me three cows, so now I'm not angry any more. And I don't feel you got away with it: I have my dignit of not being a little bitch who can be victimised with impunity. A variant of this system was in place essentially universally before modern states, and still is in Somalia (look up 'xeer'). Or the tribal areas of Afghanistan are stateless and have Pashtunwali justice.

This is justice and it feels like justice. The offender is materially worse off because they offended. The victim is no worse off, they are restored. The offender's life is not unneccessarily ruined, like it is by a criminal record; the payment is the ed of the matter; balance is restored. There are no victimless crimes; you are not punished for smoking weed; you are punished/harmed when you inflict harm on someone.

The opposite would be injustice. The characteristics of injustice would be the opposite of all this. If the hatchet is never buried it's injustice. If one person can victimise another with impunity, in an asymmetrical relationship, it's injustice. If the system starts harming people who have not first done harm, it's injustice.

The purpose of policing and courts and prisons is to create injustice. It is based on the monopoly of legitimate violence. Cops can be violent with you: you can't be violent with cops. They will make you feel small, aggrieved, victimised, and they will never rebalance the issue. If you try to rebalance it (justice), that's what the system is designed to prevent; justice is the worst outrage against police and courts, the one thing they can never tolerate.

I'm indigenous, and my culture is a shadow of its former self. This got me thinking: what sort of a world would it be where indigenous cultures are all thriving everywhere? Then I followed that thought for way too long and built an alternate history world.

It would be a world of strong local flavor: everywhere you go, there's vernacular architecture, traditional clothing, local food. Inuit cultures rule the Arctic. Aztecs rule Mesoamerica.

I've written an alternate history that I won't bore you with. Imagine there was never a 'Great Divergence' (where the West pulled ahead) but instead various cultures developed at roughly equal speeds, and maybe shared technology more rather than use technology to exploit/oppress.

Technical services are on a guild-system. The guilds recruit young people, train them up, and each local community (tribe, if you like) has a deal with the important guilds: you give us your services and we give your members food, board, other privileges. This explains why technology (like the steam engine) spread around the world without being used by one culture to oppress another. A person would have tribe-membership, with its duties and perks, and maybe guild-membership too, with its duties and perks.

The Americas and Australia are totally different in this alternate history, because they never got Europeanised. Imagine a developed (21st century) Aztec culture, Cree, Inca etc. with the internet and electricity and so forth. Every culture is in its bloom of glory – it's a world of strong culture. I understand this opens me to charges of exoticism, but counterpoint: my own culture (not gonna doxx myself) is among them. Some worldbuilding is all about physics, some is all about military theory; this is all about anthropology, all the strange and fabulous variety of human religions, fashions, food.

There are international elements to counter the extreme localism. In the alternate history, in the age of the steamship and telegram, international culture emerged. (This 'internationalist' phase actually happened in the mundane world as well: the first modern Olympics was in 1896; Esperanto appeared in 1887. It just wasn’t very successful.) Speak your local languages at home: the internet, academia etc. are in the global language. There’s art in local languages (storytelling, etc.) and there's international culture in the international language – the equivalent of The Simpsons or Star Wars that you can joke about when speaking with someone from the other side of the world.

Another internationalist element would be cultural exchanges. Imagine you’re a Rus in Russia, and a Himba troupe come to stay in your community for three nights, do dance and storytelling, share your food, flirt. This is a form of diplomacy.

Thriving indigenous cultures implies thriving ecosystems, as the two are inseparable. So it’s kind of a solarpunk/environmentalist world. Which fits with the idea of local economies/local cultures.