Love in the New World

18 June 2025 · 3 min read

I think something that shows like Cowboy Bebop¹ and other Sci-Fi intuitively picked up on was that culture is heading towards the birth of found-tribes, as opposed to birth-tribes. Birth-tribes would be the tribes you are born into², and the ones you have access to in a limited sense based on where you live. Found-tribes are something different³ though I think, and I believe that this is the natural evolution of a global world.

What Cowboy Bebop got right is that as both individuality and collectivism get pushed to their logical limits and privacy becomes less and less real in both a micro social (friends, family, coworkers, the commons) and meta social (the government spying apparatus) sense that people start to feel alienated from essentially everything. Every character in Cowboy Bebop is alienated⁴ from something, for some reason, before they all come to meet one another they are trapped in collectivist systems where the only way to truly survive is to be individualistic and bide your time. This to me is what the modern world has become.

We find relation to others not from happenstance but from a shared alienation, we bond over what we have shed off and rejected, we find comfort in others who we only could have known in this day and age. This is what I mean by the found-tribe. I think this is increasingly common and it almost seems like a return to pre-agricultural ways of thinking⁵, yet at the same time, within a post-industrial framework that is not collapsing but the opposite, ever expanding and growing.

In the playground of technological progress the most adaptive strategy is to fall in line outwardly, but not inwardly⁶. Those are the people who survive regime changes, they are the people who survive civil unrest. When people hold onto that idealism too strongly they are shot down, hammered down⁷, never paying attention to the swaying of the tides, so never being able to prevent their own drowning.

Where does love come from in this kind of world, where does trust come from? In the past these things made more sense, monogamy and polygamy both had their roles in the maintenance and establishment of societal systems, yet in this new world we enter none of these things matter anymore. Monogamy makes sense for an agricultural top down world⁸, and polygamy makes sense for a chaotic and bottom up world. Neither of these matter anymore.

No matter who you are you can have children in the near future, you can have as many or as few as you want. The 'breeding' era is essentially over, cities grow and grow and people become more individualistic and inward focusing, babies are born whether you say anything about it or not, if you want to the option is there.

Thus, relationships of the future cannot be about childrearing. They also cannot be about romantic love in the traditional Victorian sense, no, love in this new age is decidedly something far different, it is an almost return to the caveman era, the era of abstractions with regards to love are stripped bare. The time of Tristian and Isolde⁹ is over, not their love of course, but of their tragic fates. No longer must love be tragic, no longer should love be tragedy.

In the world of tomorrow which is presently today, what can traditional frameworks offer us beyond informing our outlook for the future? I think they offer very little.

So... this may seem somewhat unrelated to the question at hand, but personally I think this is extremely relevant. All of these frames of reference, even the seemingly new ones like 'polyamory', are completely outdated for the world that is coming.

To answer the question simply, yes, one person can meet all your needs, and that person is yourself¹⁰, and increasingly this becomes more and moreso the case, the pragmatic reasons for relationships and marriages fade away, and with them the sacrifices we make for their sakes. We should increasingly start asking the question, how do we love in a world where there is no reason to love beyond love itself¹¹, and what shape does love take in such a world?

Notes

By the editor.

Cowboy Bebop is a Japanese science-fiction anime directed by Shinichiro Watanabe at Studio Sunrise, first broadcast in 1998 and running 26 episodes. It follows a crew of bounty hunters aboard the spaceship Bebop. It is a space western and a jazz-scored noir, and its subject is people with no home, which is why she reaches for it. source ↩
The sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies drew the older version of this in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887): community (Gemeinschaft) of kin and place against society (Gesellschaft) of chosen association. Her 'birth-tribe' is what she means by a folk in Why I Wholly Reject Nationalism: families, clans and tribes sharing a language and customs. source ↩
The French sociologist Michel Maffesoli, in The Time of the Tribes (1988), was perhaps the first to use 'neotribalism' in a scholarly context. He predicted that as modern institutions declined, people would regroup in small, chosen, emotional communities, and he called the postmodern era the era of neotribalism. Her 'found-tribe' is the same observation. source ↩
Spike Spiegel is a former hitman who left the Red Dragon Syndicate, Jet Black a former police officer of the ISSP, Faye Valentine an amnesiac con artist, Edward an eccentric hacker child, and Ein a genetically engineered corgi. Each was cut off from a past before they met. It is the found-tribe in miniature: a household made by shared homelessness, on a ship. source ↩
She makes the larger argument about pre-farming humanity in The Point of Civilization Is Utopia: before farming we were apex predators whose natural state was not toil. Her suggestion here is that the post-industrial world, by loosening the bonds that agriculture tightened, brings back some of that older social shape. ↩
Czesław Miłosz named this Ketman in The Captive Mind (1953), borrowing the word from Arthur de Gobineau, who described Persians paying outward lip service to a faith they privately opposed. In Miłosz's account of the Communist states it is the clerk who recites the line in public and keeps his own mind. The pattern is old, and it is what she says survives regime changes. source ↩
The Japanese proverb deru kui wa utareru, 'the stake that sticks out gets hammered down', says the same thing about pressure toward conformity. Her pair of verbs, shot down for the idealist and hammered down for the one who sticks out, sets the two proverbs side by side. source ↩
The anthropological record supports the link with farming. The anthropologist Jack Goody tied monogamy to intensive plough agriculture, where property passes down within the nuclear family. In Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas of 1,231 societies, about 85% permitted polygyny. Joseph Henrich and colleagues (2012) argue that normative monogamy spread because it reduced conflict between men in large societies. source ↩
Tristan and Isolde is a medieval love romance of Celtic origin, ending with both lovers' deaths. Famous versions include Gottfried von Strassburg's poem of about 1210, the basis of Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde, which premiered in Munich on 10 June 1865. Denis de Rougemont's L'Amour et l'Occident (1939, English Love in the Western World) is the classic study of how this myth shaped the Western idea of romantic love as tragic passion. source ↩
She makes the same case about rescue in Carve Your Own Block: nobody can save you, and waiting for a rescuer keeps you stuck. In What Women Really Want or 'Just Bee Yourself' she says what counts is living from your own centre. Older precedents are the Stoic ideal of self-sufficiency (autarkeia) and the Buddha's last counsel to be 'an island unto yourself.' ↩
In What the Ghosts Actually Are she holds that love is a higher principle, more fundamental to the universe than Sex, and that Sex is the Highghost that best embodies it. If love is the ground of things, it needs no practical reason, and her closing question asks what shape it takes once the practical reasons are gone. ↩