Starting and Managing a House
We researched and wrote The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance to create a truly robust governance structure for our own family’s House. No matter how simple you want your House’s governing structure to be, you may find the guide helpful as it highlights shortcomings and hazards associated with most major (and plenty of obscure) governing models. If you would like a free copy, please email us at Hello@Pragmatist.Guide to request one.
We encourage you to think through your cultivar’s values and how the governance structure you create embodies them. If, for example, your culture respects elders, the way you elect the individual who votes on your behalf in the Index may entail selecting the oldest person or using sortition (basically drawing a name from a hat) among the oldest five members of the House.
Governance aside, what does starting a House entail? We imagine most Houses will not be formed by outsiders looking to join the Index but instead by our own descendants marrying people who want to design and/or modify the cultural traditions by which they live. One of the core “problems” resulting from interfaith marriages is that they force future generations to awkwardly straddle each ancestor’s inherited traditions (producing kids with less allegiance to either) or, afraid of conflict, neither parent goes all in with their tradition, causing future generations to be raised within a very soft culture.
The House system empowers founding House members to intentionally select whatever inherited or observed traditions they think offer the most value and weave them into something whole and cohesive—all while enjoying membership in a broader community that recognizes their innovation as normal and regards them as kin. Better still, one of the core problems with a person’s teenage years (culturally speaking) is that they often want to reject their parents’ culture and belief systems. The Index grants rebellious adolescents the option to diverge in a way that forces them to be intentional and specific about the parts of their culture they want to change while also keeping them within a larger cultural institution that carries within it the “DNA” of their family’s culture.
In the rare instance an outside individual wants to join the Index as a new House, they register by codifying their House’s worldviews/philosophy, their values, and their traditions, and filing these details with the Index. All Houses within the Index have their values and traditions cataloged—along with some general statistics relative to each House’s members. This is so that Index members can see how different House traditions perform over time and compare and contrast traditions, values, and other practices. If, for example, it looks like Houses that maintain a certain tradition all have higher rates of some form of success among members (e.g., higher wealth, more children, etc.), other Houses may choose to incorporate that tradition into their cultivars as well.
One of the Index’s core goals is to accelerate cultural evolution while also capturing cultures before they go extinct, which will at least provide a snapshot of various cultural experiments to see what works and what fails. When our own descendants and those of others who join the Index break off and create new Houses, they will be better informed than we are.
While there are no fixed rules on the documentation you must provide about your House, we strongly suggest, at the very least, having House colors and a house crest so that you can be properly represented at inter-House events and build some “team-like” attachment to your House similar to what we see in the Contrade of Siena.
As to what traditions, values, and even metaphysical frameworks will be part of your House’s culture: This book should help you think through such details.