Building The Index: A Cultural Reactor
One of our goals with this book is to recruit new participants for what we call the Index: A “cultural reactor” that catalogs intentionally constructed family cultures and monitors their outcomes intergenerationally while distributing said information in a way that allows all participating cultures to improve at a faster rate than that of a non-cultivated society. We want to make it possible for cultures in the network to improve faster than normal intergenerational memetic evolutionary powers would allow through a system analogous to horizontal gene transfer in gene therapy or lateral gene transfer in bacteria.
To put it another way, we don’t want anyone to read this book and make the same choices we made. Instead, we want you to either be inspired to identify, reinforce, and restore the positive elements of your own ancestral culture while making them resistant to fertility-lowering memes or experiment with constructing something totally new from an amalgam of different cultural beliefs.
While the Index is an ambitious project that won’t start seeing much purchase for a few generations, it is still worth starting now if we want a shot of preserving at least some at-risk cultures before they go entirely extinct.
We also hope the Index will act as a database of families that can be used to opt-in for traditions that require larger populations than any one house can front (e.g., larger celebrations, dating markets, etc.). This organization is called the Index because its primary goal is to act as a repository of information about the cultures in its wider ecosystem (and not to serve as any active actor on those cultures).
Cultural groups join the Index through the “House” model, in which a House is the atomic cultural unit, a distinct set of traditions and ways of seeing the world. This atomization makes it easier to classify and record cultures while giving them an opportunity to update or redefine themselves intergenerationally.
To give an example of how this works: We, Malcolm and Simone, have created “House Collins,” which is the bundle of traditions we outline (at least in part) in this book. When any of our children prepares to have children of their own, they can choose to either remain in House Collins or create and take ownership of a new set of traditions through the creation of a new House—all while not fully losing their connection to the parent culture, as this new House would still be a member of the Index.
This spares multicultural families from devolving into a watered-down manifestation of each contributing culture. These families won’t feel obligated to forsake one culture entirely or try to raise children in full versions of each contributing culture in a fashion unlikely to inspire their children to pass down both cultures fully to kids of their own.
The Index and House system allow partners in a new family to reflect on the aspects of their birth culture—and other cultures to which they’ve been exposed—that have most significantly improved their lives, then weave them into a single, integrated, new culture in a way that is supported and considered normal by others in the Index network. This stands in stark contrast to many stricter cultures that shun family members who choose to deviate—even slightly—from central doctrine.
Better still, the Index allows distant descendants to review statistics on how families pursuing specific traditions fared, inspiring them to adopt particularly successful traditions from cultures unrelated to their own.
As you read this book, ask yourself:
“How would I construct my own House? What elements of my ancestral and chosen cultures are worth preserving? What elements of my current culture would I totally change? What would make this culture appealing to future generations, and how would the culture be designed to enable future members to iterate and improve upon it?”
Perhaps you’re thinking: “What if I don’t have kids? Can I still join the Index?”
See the Appendix chapter: “On Houses Founded by Sovereign, Childless Individuals” on page 723*. The answer is yes, but it is objectively harder to build an intergenerationally improving cultural unit if you don’t have kids.*