In fragmenting times a tight-knit team
is knit together by a dream.
This transmission is more abstract than most. It is a largely conceptual view on what holds institutions such as families, communities, nations, religions, or other institutions together.
The first part points out that there has long been a free ride on institutional continuity that is now ending.
The second part outlines the four axes on which humans can cluster to form identifiable groupings: Aesthetics, practices, creeds, and shared references.
The third part suggests two key tools for founders or renovators—Capture the Imagination and Seek Outsized Rewards—and suggests applying these with respect to past, present, and future.
If this isn’t for you, no shame. If clarification or discussion would help, ask in the comments.
The Need for Insourcing Continuity
The free ride
does not abide
As far back as memory runs, policy, polity, enterprises, parties, organizations, brotherhoods, communities, neighborhoods, and families have been able to outsource the technology of long-term social cohesion to society at large. Contracts and laws, sufficiently neutral and reliably enforced, along with social expectations about loyalty and teamwork and group purpose along with society-wide character training did the work for you.
The free ride is ending.
Just as an animal or other creature may drop a function if the environment will provide it for free , here are proteins you can no longer synthesize because your body has decided it can get them from food always. Which is a great plan, until you are a sailor and in dire need of vitamin C. You can then no longer take environmental provision for granted.
The days where the social environment provided stability are over and our social organisms have to re adapt or die.
In part, the social enviroment is a victim of its own success. The unusual features of high-trust, large-scale cooperative civilization with the rule of law and loyalty and fair play ethics enabled its own decay over time. For example Taylorism properly understood is a form of tragedy of the commons. It takes advantage of trustworthy, larger social networks to enforce factory rules and factory order and to backup the factory owners exploitation but it draws down at the social capital of those larger communities until they finally are too thin to revive.
In fragmenting times law and contracts and social norms no longer keep people loyal and committed to the long term. They've learned too often that there is no long term. Even rational self interest will no longer do it. Partly for rational reasons the expectations of long term benefits for staying the course have to often proven to be lies or promises, ironclad promises with legal guarantees turned out to be flexible when desired. But it is partly also because in fragmenting times the inner scorpion that we all have rises, the one that stings the frog in the middle of the river even though they will both drown.
So here we want to talk about social technologies for insourcing the production of loyalty and commitment and mutual ties over the long term.
As an employer, increasingly, your available models are to have employees who are something like serfs, mercenaries, or comrades.
Serfs—downtrodden and exploited. Sullen and incompetent or possibly just apathetic and not very capable partly because they choose not to be, because what’s the point?
Mercenaries--contractors or skilled employees that you know will be temporary hires. You hope to get
as much as you can out of them now, and you have to offer benefits now, because neither party has any confidence that the other will be around long term.
In both cases, you have a very high management burden. With the serfs to get work out of them and keep things unbroken. With the mercenaries to make sure you are not being cheated or exploited or betrayed too badly. It can be done. This is why highly driven and domineering people in disintegrating or decayed economies can often achieve large financial success and have fingers in so many pies. The difficulties of making anything work at all create huge barriers to entry. But it is also why small minorities that have already developed trust can also achieve outside success in such arenas. They don't have the huge compliance agency costs.
And of course, even if you do have a fairly exploited exploitative model that appears to work on paper you are still relying on the utility and integrity of your courts, your police, and your other enforcement mechanisms. Why are they trustworthy? Because you pay them? Quid pro quo? Remember that in fragmenting times they will often kill the golden goose. They can't be relied on to stay bought in a rational self interest.
Finally, there are comrades. People who are actually loyal. Employees or counter-parties. But these are not cost-free either. You still have to put the work in to create and inspire loyalty. Be aware that loyalty goes both ways. Commitment is bought by commitment. Those who you expect to sacrifice for you, you will have to sacrifice and be willing to sacrifice for them.
For a family especially there are no mechanisms for force or law that will help you maintain your family over the generations. If anything the larger society is set up to frustrate projects with planning horizons beyond a decade at most. You are unlikely to be able to come up with a set of financial incentives or material rewards to accomplish it. Its awesome if you can come up with some clever arrangement of trusts that courts or trustees won’t defeat when the time comes, which is at the same time flexible enough to handle the future’s unexpected circumstances. Yes, it's worth thinking about and it's always better to have more resources rather than less, always better to have more material incentives rather than less, but you are unlikely to be able to offer strong financial incentives for continuing your family project and certainly unlikely be able to offer decisive financial incentives in a fragmented time where your heirs are surrounded by fragmented people. And even if you think of a more or less good scheme of incentives you are still relying on trustees or executors or courts be your type and carrying on vision. What ties do you have with them that will keep them loyal? You have only removed the social problem of long-term cohesion and loyalty from your heirs to your lawyers and agents.
In short,
1) the longer-term your vision the less reliable rules and procedures, laws and contracts, are to maintain it because the future will be different than you predict or expect. You need human judgment from people who aren’t you.
2) Rules and procedures and laws and contracts are in any case increasingly unreliable. They will only work for you if the people who execute and enforce them are in some sense loyal to you and your vision.
3) While true of any group or vision, it is particularly true of family. With family, the laws and procedures are not just unreliable but often downright inimical. Essentially any member of your family can legally blow it up at any time.
4) But given broken social norms around courtship, family formation, and childbearing, even bare survival for your family requires it to function as a multi-generation project.
Boundaries
Whether it is called boundaries or clustering around some shared trait, every human grouping needs something that sets it apart to be a grouping at all. We will use the term boundaries and clustering interchangeably.
Voluntary cultural boundaries consist of aesthetics, practices, and creeds. Let’s also throw in shared references. This may be easiest to see if we give some religious examples. Religions for quite some time have had to rely on voluntary cohesion. Even in the era of state religions the religion still depended on the ruler’s commitment and to have anything to offer the ruler had to depend on some degree of voluntary, unforced commitment by the population because otherwise the ruler could just coerce directly. Beyond that in the Early Modern era and also of the early medieval era the various faiths were simply competing and coercion wasn’t always an option.
Aesthetics is probably the least widely acknowledged or understood. Catholics and Orthodox are the most obvious examples. Certainly they have distinctive practices and particularly doctrines, and would self-identify as primarily being defined by their distinct theology. It is clear though to an anthropologically- and sociologically-tuned observer that much of their character is aesthetic. Consider the difficulties of Catholicism after Vatican II damaged their core aesthetics and the continued vitality of the Latin Mass Catholic underground. Perhaps even greater example of an aesthetically driven church is the Anglicans. It’s not clear what if anything they actually stood for but they did and do have a distinct and appealing aesthetic.
There's more than one type of aesthetic. Old-fashioned southern Christianity with its small spare chapels and its plain folk hymns is also thriving. And it's not just because of the fundamentalist adherence to the old doctrines. The causal arrow goes both ways.
Practices-- many newer sects have thrived and expanded without a clear doctrinal distinction or even with a changing set of doctrines based on high fidelity, high commitment, and distinctive sets of practices. Seventh Day Adventists for diets and their Saturday Sabbath. The Torah and the Law for the Jews that have maintained them as a people for centuries generally with no forceful community mechanisms to speak of, and often with very few financial incentives. Mormons don't drink. Jehovah's Witnesses have distinctive proselyting practices and don't observe Christmas or birthdays. These sets of distinct practices can seem arbitrary. Maybe the are. But like the original shibboleths they bind people together.
Beliefs--the obvious choice for religious groups are distincive truth claims that bind them together. Think of the reformed tradition which perennially seems to come back to life based on its stark and assertive doctrines.
Most functioning religions draw in varying degrees on all three and have the strongest boundary definition when the three align.
Don’t dismiss one of these as irrelevant just because it isn’t common today in the type of institution that you are founding. Consider how these boundary methods might work. Corporations usually don't have creeds as such, so what would a corporate creed or corporate doctrine look like? Does your family believe anything beyond or in addition to what is taught by your religion about the nature of things?
Do you have a family aesthetic? What is a corporate aesthetic?
At the base level, before you have an aesthetic you just need to be aesthetic. Even a little attention towards beauty will set you well above the rest. Architecture in particular is overlooked. In a world of ugly buildings, having a human scale beautiful building will provide returns on investment every day. After you have started having aesthetics and are looking for an aesthetic (to the extent it doesn't arise organically), remember that are a wide range of options. Spare is an aesthetic. Shabby genteel is an aesthetic. There are approaches that fit every budget. Healthy bodies is an aesthetic. The only really dangerous aesthetic is probably “jumping on board fashion trends a little late in the game.”
Doctrines or practices will emerge naturally without even trying. There'll be will be a way your family or your enterprise does things. Everyone including you will at some level start to instinctually think that these are the Right Way. It’s hard not to.
But you, as a conscious leader, will consciously shape them and add to them. And maintain them.
Shared references are the 4th axis along which groups cluster and boundaries form. This can be something as all encompassing as a language or as everyday and unnoticeable as shared stories. To continue with our religious theme, notice how many successful and long lived religious traditions have a language component. Latin for traditional Catholics, Hebrew for Jews (and even before then, Yiddish), Plattsdeutsch for the Amish. Sanskrit. Even failed attempts like the Mormons with the Deseret Alphabet. Or in secular terms, the caste glue that was knowing Latin and Greek for the upper class British of the Empire. Now, if you and your friends and their families manage to teach your kids Great Basin Shoshone, congratulations, you don’t need these transmissions at all. Short of that, shared references usually take the form of stories, jokes, and shared cultural production.
Shared references emerge naturally from working together and spending time.
Startup Steading
Everything valuable is now in start-up mode. Every existing institution has been buttressed and steadied by social arrangements that no longer apply. Even institutions that can be reformed and renovated have to be reformed and renovated by a group of people who have to be founded and formed as a group.
Founders have particular challenges and particular possibilities. The challenge is that most of the work hasn’t been done for you already. Your cluster doesn’t already exist. The possibilities are that growth or at least the prospect of growth, along with doing something new, gives you some exciting tools.
Capture the imagination
Outsized rewards
As befits the West, lets look at those along a time axis.
Most new institutions are usually imbalanced between past and future. They will either be nostalgia-focused or future-focused. Families and social organizations tend to be past focused while tech and entrepeneurial start-ups are future-focused. The best institutions, such as religions, have stories about their past that they cherish to the point of holding them sacred, but also have clear promises about the good things the future holds.
Our chart emphasizes intangible rewards because they are extremely valuable, less obvious, and frequently easy to obtain. Don’t fear heroism, nobility, glory, and all those other fine old words. Some notes:
Capture the Imagination – Present : your people, your children, your employees don’t fully realize the strength of what they are doing right now until someone (you) describes it back to them
Seek Outsize Rewards – Past : Validating past experience in a new family, start-up, institution, etc., means helping people make sense of how what they did before ties into what they are doing now. Continuity and narrative arc from the past legitimate your story about the future.
Seek Outsize Rewards – Present: We live in a desert of friendship, loyalty, and love. That lack is your opportunity.
You don’t have to limit your vision to intangible rewards. All the old standbys could be in play: health, romance, marriage, wealth, power, success especially as the world at large fritters them away.
For material rewards, your vision for how your start-up family or institution gets there does not have to be a sure thing. The most important aspect of it is that the marker is layed down and that it has backward effects on current arrangements. You have to lay down the maker and show that you mean it.
The first attitude to change will be your own. Millions of years of gene-encoded memory are telling you to hunger for virgin fields and empty niches. Everyone loves a bit of honest plunder.