Loyalty is the coin of the realm. Disclosing personal emails, even if from an ex-friend, to the media in order to try to harm someone is treasonous.
It’s also to be expected. In a lower trust society, we can no longer assume that even our friends won’t betray us. This is doubly true if the friend has different politics from you. And it’s triply true if you are a conservative and your friend is a liberal, because liberals are more likely to unfriend you over politics…
We have to take stock of the new reality and simply put less trust in other people. It’s a good rule of thumb that you should not put anything in an email, text, or group chat unless you think you could handle the heat if it were published in the Times. Again, you especially can’t fully trust anyone with the opposite politics here.
We have to take account of the cold reality that we no longer live in a world of gentlemen, or one that lives by the old values…
[We should] find ways to build our own moral communities, whether in a church, a friend group, etc., where it’s possible to establish in-group standards that allow higher trust relationships to flourish.
In an essay on the quest for community, Aaron Renn wrote:
Our society deems any non-ideologically approved groups illegitimate. So any all male groups that aren’t devoted to some type of struggle sessions are going to be attacked. That’s why, as I’ve noted before, many of these men’s groups are now essentially underground and illegible.
What does it mean to be less legible?
…if you are not legible to the government and other entities, it is harder for those entities to impose their mandates on you.
One example is the growth of informal men’s retreats. As I’ve noted before, all men’s groups and organizations are heavily stigmatized in our society, and outright illegal in many cases. Church men’s groups, some remaining single sex schools, fraternities, and a few other groups are basically what’s left, and many of them have a target on their back. Witness the years long jihad the New York Times ran against the Augusta National Golf Club to bully them into admitting women.
What’s more, even if an all male organization managed to exist, becoming a member of it could be hazardous to your health, so to speak, if the media decided to make an issue of it, as they’ve been known to do.
