> It is so robust it outlasted the centralized government of Somalia and democracy, and even outperformed it.
This is a pretty rose-colored way of putting it. Put another way: Somali society has a long and deep history of decentralized clan-based organization which, for better or worse, was deep-rooted enough that replacement with a centralized democratic government failed.
The system you describe didn't merely survive the failure of centralization, it was one of the existing Somali institutions that resisted centralization and won out in the end. Which depending on one's perspective on Somalia's current state could make it deeply problematic as a local maximum that makes the current status quo unassailable.
shrug clans are small states (or whatever label you want to put on the organization that starts with small family tribes and scales to multi-continent empires), that kind of society organization was more or less everywhere in the history of every human society. There is a tendency everywhere towards larger, more complex states and a path up and down the scale locally as the bigger ones are created and fall.
Nope, clans are definitionally not states for several reasons. A state has definite territory, whereas clan-type structures have tended to overlap with each other geographically because they're usually embedded in some larger society. A state by definition has centralized authority whereas clans may not.
> or whatever label you want to put on the organization that starts with small family tribes and scales to multi-continent empires
There is no such label because these organizations are not just shades on the same theme at different sizes, they're fundamentally different in character.
> that kind of society organization was more or less everywhere in the history of every human society
True, but there are wide variances in how long in the past that form of organization was dominant.
You won't see Egypt reverting to decentralized non-state clan-oriented governance any time soon because they've been ruled by one state or another for 5000 years.
An interesting demonstration of relativism is that we might use the same phrase, say "brutally killed", to describe a players dominance in a friendly game of monopoly as we would for a Somali warlord firing a round through the head of a rival.
But, strangely, they are not the same thing at all.
Exactly. Also, OP pointedly avoided addressing the fact that the existing Somali institutions are responsible for the fact that their "democracy" devolved into warlords brutally shooting each other.
OP is saying that the old system is clearly better because when they tried the new system the old system fought back and killed people, so they shouldn't have tried to replace the old system in the first place. It's democracy's fault that Somali warlords had to be brutal to keep democracy from working. Everyone would have been better off if they had just continued to put up with the warlords' old way of working.
This logic isn't comparable to the logic of Western democracies, it's comparable to the logic of criminal mobs everywhere. Play along and no one has to get hurt.
I don't know of anyone or any form of relativism that thinks dominating a monopoly game is relatively 'the same' as a round to the head, and it's hilarious seeing the 'yass queen' response sister comment had to that absurdity.
Interestingly, when the quote 'democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others' comes up this sham form of relativism you present vanishes from comments. And that is because democracy objectively is severely flawed, and only justified because it produces relatively better outcomes than many of the other systems that it replaced.
Remember when the other faction in the US was declaring fake emergencies, brutalizing their political opponents, kidnapping them without trial, ignoring lawful court orders to release them, and imprisoning people for political speech after seizing power?
Me neither, because it didn't happen, and any attempts to both-sides this are dishonestly partisan.
Neither has a problem brutalizing foreigners in other countries, of course.
This is a pretty rose-colored way of putting it. Put another way: Somali society has a long and deep history of decentralized clan-based organization which, for better or worse, was deep-rooted enough that replacement with a centralized democratic government failed.
The system you describe didn't merely survive the failure of centralization, it was one of the existing Somali institutions that resisted centralization and won out in the end. Which depending on one's perspective on Somalia's current state could make it deeply problematic as a local maximum that makes the current status quo unassailable.