Khmer culture

For all I know, it the ten years since I lived there, Western NGO creeps may have succeeded in their evil quest to turn Cambodia into another feminist dystopia. Assuming this is not the case, Khmer culture is strange in that it is co-alpha and yet still completely FUBAR.

They maintained the traditional strong distinction in females between wife class and whore class, with whores consisting not only of prostitutes but also beer selling girls, female entertainers and such like. For this reason, adultery and casual non-paid sex could be hazardous to your health, although it was not really necessary due to the availability of reasonably priced prostitutes. If you wanted to marry a Khmer girl, traditional courtship rules applied. Families tended to be very close and stick together.

So far so good. The trouble was that there seemed to be no sense of loyalty outside of close family relationships. No civic responsibility whatsoever. Everything outside the family unit was a business transaction. The most striking consequence of this, other than the relatively high crime and rampant corruption, was that rich and well-connected people could treat everyone else like crap. This happens everywhere of course, but in the West we still retain some sense that we should be somewhat equal, so the elite have to limit and obfuscate their outrages.

No such discretion was required in Cambodia. The delinquent sons of the elite were able to go around pistol-whipping and sometimes shooting people with impunity. In the unlikely event that cops tried to stop them, they would just hire people to kill the cops. Being a young female singer or actress was and maybe still is a very dangerous profession in Cambodia. The reason is that some rich guy would typically order the girl to be his mistress in order to gain face. If she refused then this would cause him to lose face, so the way to remedy this was to have her killed. If she consented and the affair went on for any length of time, this would cause the guy's wife to lose face, so she would remedy this in the most convenient way possible, which was also to have the girl killed. This situation was allowed to occur because the average person did not so much resent such behavior as wish he could do it too. The Khmer Rouge was arguably an extreme reaction against this.

I doubt whether the Khmers can amount to much as a society without some major cultural change. It just shows that in addition to traditional sexual morality you really need some tribal solidarity, perhaps backed by a unifying religion going to make a successful society.

What you described here seems typical of the third world.  Just a few miles away from me in Mexico, life is similar (though recently somewhat influenced by American feminism).  This kind of culture is neither co-alpha nor liberal feminist.  I think it is simply the natural state of a decayed culture.  The West should look like this in another century.

I described the co-alpha concept a long time ago in What is a co-alpha male?.  The basic idea is that a group of men cooperatively have control.  Decayed cultures lack cooperation which is why they don't function.  A good description of such a society is the book The Moral Basis of a Backward Society.  I also described this kind of society as the future in Post-Game Culture.

I think a lot of guys are initially thrilled with these kinds of third world countries because they see how much easier it is to attract women.  But living there for a while shows the weakness of this kind of corrupt culture.  So yes, tribal (co-alpha) solidarity is the key, and the usual means of accomplishing this is religion.

In the book Family and Civilization Zimmerman described three cultures: Trustee, Domestic and Atomistic. A trustee society enforces justice is personal blood feuds. Domestic societies unify by religion and agree to transfer authority to an intermediate government body. Atomistic societies are completely anarchistic and are incapable of enforcing anything so they're eventually conquered by a Trustee society. I think the third world is a blend between Atomistic and trustee, with some countries leaning more towards one or another. The middle east is probably more trustee.