How does an economy become regenerative? What makes an extended family, a business, a neighborhood, or a nation sustainable past one generation or one business cycle? What turns a culture into a perma-culture?
The principles are often the same at all levels. What is true of a functioning family will be true at other scales. We focus on the family here because hopefully everyone has one. Should you be pronouncing on the fate of nations when you can’t keep your own home straight?
In this transmission, we are going to start at the family level and then zoom out.
Let’s start with the observation from Work, Serve, Play that joint family work avoids a lot of the grumbles from kids that our culture has taught us to expect.
The reality is that young kids love working.
Young children especially love working with their Dad and Mom on something and you should get them involved in jointly working with you to do basic household chores like washing dishes or watering plants as much as you possibly can.
To understand why young kids love working but still have trouble with their chores, we need to talk about one of the permanent human realities: status.
Status isn’t a bad word. Your kids looking up to you is what makes your family work! In any case, it’s a reality. You can’t wish it away any more than you can wish away needing a roof to keep out the rain.
People naturally try to imitate people with more status than them. This can be conscious but will still happen even when people aren’t consciously thinking about it. A lot that has been said about mimesis is exaggerated, yet children certainly learn and grow largely by imitation. Adults are just large children in this regard.
One of the tensions in a functioning family is that chores Dad doesn't do and similarly, to an arguable extent, the chores Mom doesn't do, become lower status.
Kids actually like a lot to do grown up jobs, especially ones they seen Dad and Mom doing. They will enthusiastically help you pick up your room or pick it up for you if asked, while still dithering when it comes to their own sock pile.
Second best to doing it yourself from time to time is watching them doing it and admiring or visibly enjoying the results. A kid will be much more enthusiastic about making their bed if you occasionally wander into their room and lie down on it. "Mmm, your bed is pretty comfortable when you make it up nice, I like taking a little break here, come chat with me for a second while I enjoy it." That's just how status works. Things high status people (you) do or enjoy become more enjoyable for everyone else to do or enjoy.
We say that kids want to be grown ups, which is true, but that desire is just the general human desire to feel like someone higher status. There is no difference between a little girl staggering around in Mom's pumps and a French bourgeois of the 17th Century taking lessons in dueling.
There is a tension, though, because authority requires differentiation between the parents and the child. There is a further tension that a healthy diversity between the sexes in the family, providing good models for the children, also requires differentiation between Dad and Mom's roles.
Aside: The notion that all sex role differentiation needs to have biological roots or cultural backing is false. If in your family the wife washes dishes more, you could if you want to believe that it is so because Is Is Tradition, or because evolution has given women a superior eye for small detail and higher concern for purity/hygiene, or whatever. But in a sense that doesn't matter. Role differentiation is what's required, it’s better if the differentiation has biological and cultural weight behind it and in the natural course of things those kinds of role differentials are the most likely, but the important thing is that there are role differentials. Maybe Mom always balances the budget and nobody is allowed to clean Dad's maps but Dad. That’s good.
The problem of devaluing work because high class people don’t do it generalizes. A healthy society needs higher class people doing lower class stuff occasionally so the productive members of the lower classes maintain their necessary sense of self worth. Upper class dudes with blue collar hobbies is lindy. One of the Bowling Alone problems is that churches and fraternal organizations that cut across class lines do service projects together, like cutting up a dead tree in a widow's yard or putting together a bbq, and the members do all the grunt work. The blue collar guys end up assuming a quasi-directorial role, like a sergeant in the Army when the unit is executing some practical task. But churches and fraternal organizations are thinner these days.
(Dave Thomas, former Wendy’s CEO, was famous for taking turns at the drive through and the grill)
Our current system in business and government and institutions generally combines leadership roles with management. The subliminal message is that management is what high status people do. We all know the problems with our current elite idea that "managers only need to know how to manage.” It removes the necessary reality check on educated people's schemes, giving them fanciful notions of what is likely or even possible, it takes away skin-in-the-game, etc . What you now know is that it is also bad because it tends to devalue the actual work that the organization is doing. High status people not even knowing how to do the actual work tells everyone's hindbrain that the actual work is unimportant. The institution gets worse and in the process the class divide widens. At the broadest societal level, it leads to blue collar workers increasingly checking out and increasing attempts by leaders to immiserate the lower classes so they can be more effectively forced to work. These are trends we see playing out now.
Washington getting off his horse to help some Continentals move a log is a master class in organizational theory.
Elon Musk reviewing code alongside his devs.
(George Washington’s hands-on first job was as a land surveyor in the wilderness.)
Pithy Smart Guy Summary: the general point is intermixing levels of status, like intermixing levels of abstraction in a learning process, to avoid undue stratification.
The biological comparison is the trophic cascade. A biological system without much interaction between its niches would be artificial and fragile.
Case study:
I worked at a restaurant once when I was a young man, and the owner, who otherwise was always just off in a corner doing business stuff or something, would sometimes come over and show me how to do x job more efficiently.
My takeaway then and still now is that the owner should, as much as possible, be better at everything. He does not hire people to help because he is unable to do the tasks, or unable to do them well. He hires them because he is only one man with 24 hours in a day like the rest of us. The flip side is, he is willing and able to do what needs to be done, either out of necessity, morale, etc. It is not beneath him to do a job. It is beneath him to see that the job is not done well
Speaking of socks . . .
Pro-tip: Have a bowl full of safety pins in your dressing area. When you take off your socks at the end of the day, pin them together before throwing them in the dirty clothes. Will save you and your family a huge amount of man-hours that would otherwise be devoted to mating odd socks. If you have a family where the wife does the laundry, every time she sees that pinned sock, at a subconscious level she is reminded she is doing something you value, because you participate in it. Otoh mating socks is a perfect job for that 4 to 7-year old. Also one of the steader wives claims this will rip up socks, though another steader claims a happy track record with it. Try at your own risk.
Do What You Want Them To Value
Do What You Want Them To Value
Do What You Want Them To Value
How does an economy become regenerative? What makes an extended family, a business, a neighborhood, or a nation sustainable past one generation or one business cycle? What turns a culture into a perma-culture?
The principles are often the same at all levels. What is true of a functioning family will be true at other scales. We focus on the family here because hopefully everyone has one. Should you be pronouncing on the fate of nations when you can’t keep your own home straight?
In this transmission, we are going to start at the family level and then zoom out.
Let’s start with the observation from Work, Serve, Play that joint family work avoids a lot of the grumbles from kids that our culture has taught us to expect.
The reality is that young kids love working.
To understand why young kids love working but still have trouble with their chores, we need to talk about one of the permanent human realities: status.
Status isn’t a bad word. Your kids looking up to you is what makes your family work! In any case, it’s a reality. You can’t wish it away any more than you can wish away needing a roof to keep out the rain.
People naturally try to imitate people with more status than them. This can be conscious but will still happen even when people aren’t consciously thinking about it. A lot that has been said about mimesis is exaggerated, yet children certainly learn and grow largely by imitation. Adults are just large children in this regard.
One of the tensions in a functioning family is that chores Dad doesn't do and similarly, to an arguable extent, the chores Mom doesn't do, become lower status.
Kids actually like a lot to do grown up jobs, especially ones they seen Dad and Mom doing. They will enthusiastically help you pick up your room or pick it up for you if asked, while still dithering when it comes to their own sock pile.
Second best to doing it yourself from time to time is watching them doing it and admiring or visibly enjoying the results. A kid will be much more enthusiastic about making their bed if you occasionally wander into their room and lie down on it. "Mmm, your bed is pretty comfortable when you make it up nice, I like taking a little break here, come chat with me for a second while I enjoy it." That's just how status works. Things high status people (you) do or enjoy become more enjoyable for everyone else to do or enjoy.
We say that kids want to be grown ups, which is true, but that desire is just the general human desire to feel like someone higher status. There is no difference between a little girl staggering around in Mom's pumps and a French bourgeois of the 17th Century taking lessons in dueling.
There is a tension, though, because authority requires differentiation between the parents and the child. There is a further tension that a healthy diversity between the sexes in the family, providing good models for the children, also requires differentiation between Dad and Mom's roles.
The problem of devaluing work because high class people don’t do it generalizes. A healthy society needs higher class people doing lower class stuff occasionally so the productive members of the lower classes maintain their necessary sense of self worth. Upper class dudes with blue collar hobbies is lindy. One of the Bowling Alone problems is that churches and fraternal organizations that cut across class lines do service projects together, like cutting up a dead tree in a widow's yard or putting together a bbq, and the members do all the grunt work. The blue collar guys end up assuming a quasi-directorial role, like a sergeant in the Army when the unit is executing some practical task. But churches and fraternal organizations are thinner these days.
(Dave Thomas, former Wendy’s CEO, was famous for taking turns at the drive through and the grill)
Our current system in business and government and institutions generally combines leadership roles with management. The subliminal message is that management is what high status people do. We all know the problems with our current elite idea that "managers only need to know how to manage.” It removes the necessary reality check on educated people's schemes, giving them fanciful notions of what is likely or even possible, it takes away skin-in-the-game, etc . What you now know is that it is also bad because it tends to devalue the actual work that the organization is doing. High status people not even knowing how to do the actual work tells everyone's hindbrain that the actual work is unimportant. The institution gets worse and in the process the class divide widens. At the broadest societal level, it leads to blue collar workers increasingly checking out and increasing attempts by leaders to immiserate the lower classes so they can be more effectively forced to work. These are trends we see playing out now.
Washington getting off his horse to help some Continentals move a log is a master class in organizational theory.
Elon Musk reviewing code alongside his devs.
(George Washington’s hands-on first job was as a land surveyor in the wilderness.)
The biological comparison is the trophic cascade. A biological system without much interaction between its niches would be artificial and fragile.
Speaking of socks . . .