Hard Cultures
Hard cultures are almost always centered around young religious traditions. (When we say young, we do not mean the branch religion is young but the way it is being practiced now is—e.g., Jehovah’s Witnesses are part of a century-old religious tradition but are practicing things differently enough to be functionally young.)
In addition, hard cultures often feature a few characteristics that prevent bleed:
- They often encourage adherents to wear unique outfits or perform rituals that cause them to feel like outsiders when mixing with other cultural groups.
- They attempt to prevent adherents from associating with other cultures to the extent that they may even shun them for doing so.
- They almost always provide copious social safety nets for members.
- They incentivize members to proselytize (either to convert people or reinforce personal narratives about how great it is to be a member of that in group) in a way that would produce significant cognitive dissonance if they ever decided to detract from the culture (though this proselytization is rarely effective at increasing cultural spread in any significant fashion).
In addition, hard cultures typically promote an internal locus of control, encouraging adherents to take personal responsibility for their failings in life.
Examples of Hard Cultures
- Mormons
- Jehovah’s Witnesses
- Scientologists
- International Society for Krishna Consciousness members (known more commonly as followers of Hare Krishna)
- Haredi Jews
- Evangelical Protestants
- Amish
Characteristics of Hard Cultures
Until recently, hard cultures represented some of the world’s most successful civilizations, having a low bleed and high birth rate (which led them to grow at a higher rate than other cultures, making them inevitable beneficiaries of our society). In response to recent society-wide changes, this edge has eroded. In the last decade or so, many of these cultures’ attrition rates have skyrocketed while their birth rates have begun plummeting.
Consider Mormons: Their cultural bleed rate is currently 36% per generation (above that of even Evangelical Protestants) and as of this book’s initial publication, the Mormon population in Utah has almost fallen below replacement rate (2.1), a significant drop from the 3.14 birth rate enjoyed by the community around a decade ago (the USA’s highest birth rate at the time). What was one of the world’s fastest-growing cultures is, by the data, about to experience a catastrophic crash. This problem is anything but constrained to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Hard cultures, which for the past hundred years or so were the obvious candidates to inherit human civilization, are now in a death spiral.
Why? We suspect the ubiquity of the internet and social networks plays a critical role, as Amish and Mennonite groups are among the only cultivars to demonstrate resistance to the collapse (while Mennonites often use phones with internet access, they frequently lock out most of their apps behind passwords to which only friends or spouses have access, meaning they have to undergo the social shame of admitting defeat to a loved one to use them for anything but the bare minimum necessary to engage with the broader economic system of society).
Why are we so certain it is their control over internet access that is protecting them and keeping their birth rate high? As this[[72]](#_ftn72) writeup shows, “simply speaking Pennsylvania Dutch (the language the Amish speak) is not a powerful indicator of super-high fertility. It’s Pennsylvania Dutch and lack of a phone that seems to be the really strong indicator of Amish-type fertility.”
Side note: The write-up referenced above is fantastic if you want a deep dive into Amish birth rates. Essentially, it shows that while Amish birth rates are still high, even these famously fecund groups are in the process of a fairly rapid decline. (Though it does make some claims without citing sources that we have not seen substantiated elsewhere—like a 25% bleed rate in the community.)
Orthodox Speciation
An interesting phenomenon seen in the hardest of hard cultivars is something we will call “orthodox speciation,” in which a culture divides into smaller subcultures that are geographically locked. Essentially, when a group of individuals from an extremely hard culture migrates to a new region, little differences in how they practice their cultivar begin to evolve through random cultural mutation. Usually, these differences would not distinguish the cultivar, but in the case of a hard culture, they can quickly produce changes akin to behavioral isolation. In biology, speciation can occur through geographic isolation (one part of the species gets stuck on an island) or behavioral isolation (the mating dance of one branch of the species changes slightly).
Consider the differences between the Amish and the Hutterites (two Anabaptist cultures), both of which have extremely similar cultivars at the “genetic level” (at the level of their theology) but are different enough at the phenotypic level (their actual practices) that it would be very hard for a member of one group to enter the other. We also argue later in the book that we may be seeing the beginnings of this phenomenon between the U.S.-based and Israel-based Haredi Jews.
Here’s where it gets even more interesting: Almost all religions start as ultra-hard cultures. For this reason, you will almost always see a flurry of Orthodox Speciation in the first few generations of every major religious movement. Often, these new offshoots die out, like the Gnostic Christians. Occasionally, the splits remain permanent, as with the Sunni-Shia divide. This is why you almost always see much faster speciation early in a religious movement’s history as opposed to later (while speciation can still happen later, the number of offshoots per member per year will be astronomically lower).
The Index was designed to prevent this—to allow hard-culture-like factions to become different without losing the ability to interact and reintegrate.