The House System
How does one create a cultural infrastructure that can adapt to changing social values while not fully buckling when society takes an immoral turn? What sort of infrastructure allows a culture to develop and improve over time without being so unstructured that it means nothing to adherents? What sort of cultural infrastructure is weighted to respect and learn from the values of its minority opinion holders while not overvaluing extremists? How can a culture ensure that all groups—even those at odds with its central organizational structure—feel as though they are still 100% within that culture? Most importantly, from our perspective: How can one create a cultural ecosystem capable of recruiting iterations of diverse cultural traditions while preserving the unique value they bring?
While the House system used by the Index is designed to be flexible and accommodate many different perspectives, priorities, and value systems, its structure is informed by some shared foundational beliefs:
- To live life well is to have children that are better than you.
- One of the highest virtues is to learn from and adopt elements of perspectives that are different from your own.
- Through competition with other ideas, perspectives, and cultures, your own culture can improve intergenerationally through a cycle of creative destruction.
The Index is meant to serve as a controlled evolution chamber constantly bringing in and germinating new cultural strains that cross-pollinate and compete. It should be something of an evolutionary reactor that, while still maintaining a strong cultural throughline, does not blindly venerate the past but rather the future it strives to create.
The mandate of the governing entity at the center of the Index is twofold:
- The iterative improvement of every generation.
- The survival and spread of (in order of most to least important): Sapient life, sapience descended from our species, our species, and finally, our cultures.
The Index will achieve these ends with the “House model.” Essentially, its central governance structure is informed by input from a collection of Houses representing distinct cultivars. When a new cultivar joins the Index, it does so as a unique “House” responsible for building its own internal governance system and cultural traditions. The only caveat is that families belonging to Houses of the Index cannot demand their children follow their House’s governance structure or traditions after they reach maturity and form families of their own (i.e., there can be no shunning or other form of punishment resulting from a member’s choice to create or join another House).
When someone raised within the Index reaches maturity and starts a family of their own, they may choose to remain within one of their parents’ Houses, change houses, or create a new House (which starts as a provisional House and becomes a full one when they have kids).
One major function of the Index is to act as a reference guide for families creating new Houses by recording outcomes produced by different Houses’ traditions (e.g., the mental health of their offspring, their kids’ level of education, etc.). The Index also yields immediate tactical benefit by providing scaffolding that makes it easier for individuals practicing small, heterodox cultures to engage in cultural exchange with others in ways that facilitate shared goods like dating markets and childcare.
Note: We expect most Index Houses will come from our children and their families. As we have stated before, cultural conversion is extremely costly and not usually worth the effort. That said, it is still worth having systems in place on the off-chance someone wants to join—and please know that if you are reading this book, planning to design or refurbish a cultivar of your own, and willing to join the Index, we would love to have you.
How will the Index itself be governed? The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance details our thoughts on the “why” it is structured in certain ways in great detail, but broadly speaking:[[15]](#_ftn15)
- The Index is controlled by a single Governor whose decisions can be overturned by the combined votes of the Index’s previous two Governors.[[16]](#_ftn16)
- The Governor is chosen every five years based on the unanimous decision of three representatives, who are in turn elected by three distinct voting pools:
- The Vote of Continuity: Imagine a branch of the U.S. government through which only former presidents could vote. The Vote of Continuity essentially provides this dynamic: All past Governors vote to elect a representative. Their influence is intended to prevent the wild fluctuations between parties representing different extremes and allow for the continued work on multi-generational projects (consider how NASA seldom gets anything done these days because their agenda gets reset with every new president while most of their projects would take three or four presidents to complete).[[17]](#_ftn17) [[18]](#_ftn18)
- The Vote of the Future: All Houses choose an elector through whatever means they see fit (similar to how states select senators to represent them in the nation’s capital or how unions select representatives to negotiate with company owners). This elector’s voting power is modified by their House’s production of future generations.[[19]](#_ftn19) This vote is designed to represent the future ambition of the organization and modify each House’s vote based on how “meaningfully populated they are” (a House with a ton of members, none of whom have kids, will not have many concerns relevant to the Index and can focus on managing itself).[[20]](#_ftn20)
- The Vote of Sacrifice: All Houses choose an elector (who may or may not be the same House representative chosen for the Vote of the Future) whose vote is weighted by the amount of wealth their House has donated to the Index. This is designed to reconcentrate wealth intergenerationally while rewarding Houses that produce more successful members (by the rules of society at least).[[21]](#_ftn21)
The above model is designed to structurally reward Houses that contribute population to—and concentrate wealth within—the Index while maintaining a sense of continuity.
The only real power the Index has is:
- Over the money that is invested in it by its Houses
- As a public representative of the collective Houses
- Deciding the governing structure of an unaffiliated House (these are Houses made up of people who joined the Index without joining an existing House or having a family—think of them as being similar to Singles Wards in the LDS Church)
Other than that, everything the Index does could theoretically be done more proficiently by an individual House (matchmaking services for singles, for example). Most importantly, the Index lacks the ability to tell a House to do anything—and the worst punishment it can dole out entails removing a House from the Index (which presumably would not be that much of a punishment to a House already at odds with the Index). In addition, if the Index ever really became corrupted, it would be fairly easy for a group of Houses to break off and create a new Index that used separate governance rules.