Secret Societies: Rediscovering a Cultural Technology
Through various professional circumstances in which we’ve found ourselves, we’ve been obligated to think about the current and past secret society landscape way more than a sane, productive person should have (and to clarify, when we say “secret society,” we are generally referring to invitation-only social groups that employ Chatham House rules, meaning you cannot talk about what happens within them in a manner that identifies people).
Successful, long-lived secret societies can largely be divided into three categories. The first category is almost entirely extinct but was critically important to the social fabric of our society and we lost a great deal when it went extinct. This category is what we will call “social capital banks.”
In the medieval period, if you were wealthy and wanted to travel between two distant areas, you were often in a very sticky situation. If you loaded all your wealth in the form of gold or other valuables into a cart, you placed a huge target on your back that was likely to get you killed. One way people dealt with this liability entailed secretive orders (the biggest being the Knights Templar) who would take people’s gold in one city and allow them to withdraw it from another branch of the order in its corresponding city. Before this social technology was created, it was very hard to functionally travel while enjoying life as a medium-to-high-wealth person across large swaths of land (this would mean that, outside of the very wealthiest people, your status and wealth were geographically locked to a large extent). A model analogous to this but focused on social capital instead of wealth was common up until just this last century and included groups like the Rotary Club, the Lions Club, the Freemasons, and the Society of Odd Fellows.
Organizations in this category typically feature “levels” of membership between which members can progress, as well as mystical rituals (mostly present for aesthetic purposes). The real advantage of this system was that in an age before the internet, a member who gained a certain rank and title with his local Masonic Temple or Rotary Club and lived in New York City could bring a certain amount of social capital with him when moving to Chicago or Los Angeles. People in these new cities would know you were a person of X-level caliber by the rank you had within their organization and trust you with jobs of X level while inviting you to the types of parties people of X-level social status get invited to. These types of ranks were even taken into account when approving people for bank loans.
While these organizations still exist, they are mostly just a few old men clinging to a dead way of life mostly devoid of actual “high class/caliber/prestige.” Their job of credentialing individuals has been replaced by the modern university system, which now has a near monopoly on this social technology (to the detriment of society), with the social circles you get let into at the entry-level in most cities being largely influenced by the level and source of your academic degree.
The academic takeover of this “social credit” version of secret societies will at least help most readers understand what it feels like to leverage its currency. Intuitively, most of us understand that someone with a Ph.D. from Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, or MIT is going to be seen very differently by the average American citizen than someone with a Ph.D. from … less prestigious universities—let alone someone who didn’t finish college or didn’t attend at all. Such people will be invited to different parties, welcomed into different social circles, and considered for different job positions. When these secret societies still were kicking about, there were multiple parallel paths for achieving this kind of social credit (though it was largely only exchangeable with people also in your network—e.g., Lions Club status was only good as a currency with other Lions Club members).
The presence of parallel systems for climbing in social status dramatically increased social mobility. If you wanted to move up in the world and missed the boat on a prestigious university, you could try your hand at the local Freemason Temple and, if that didn’t work, go to your local Lions Club. One of our pet projects has been trying to rebuild one of these networks and plumb it into our school to create something we call “democratized nepotism” for our students. Essentially, we want to see if we can root our best students into prestigious jobs around the university system’s monopoly on credentialing and status.
Another category of secret societies are “aligned incentive clubs.” They often exist within an industry or university for people who have aligned social or career interests and resemble regular clubs and fraternities—but with prestige branding. The biggest of these is YPO, the members of which (all CEOs) represent something like 13% of the world’s GDP.
While YPO is a great organization, its large size has made it necessary to adopt extremely formalized entrance requirements around being the CEO of a company of a certain size, which limits the organization’s potential. This blind litmus test filters out a lot of interesting and impactful people that most other secret societies would consider their highest-value members (like astronauts, scientists, famous artists, authors, philosophers, politicians, etc.) while not filtering out dullards who just inherited their companies (which most societies do these days). That said, YPO is without any shadow of a doubt (collectively) the world’s most powerful secret society and has been moving from strength to strength—even if it is a little dull compared to the more dynamic and action-oriented ones.
We, your authors, have become most involved with a final category of a secret society. These are “two-sided marketplace” societies, which typically focus on two (or more) categories of high-profile individuals who don’t normally gain exposure to each other and essentially “sell” (be it through fees or the time commitment needed to participate) access to one category to the other. The Bohemian Club (famous for its Bohemian Grove) exemplifies this model, with half the members being wealthy businesspeople (often with ties to the political sphere) and half being artists (musicians, playwrights, actors, etc.). In this instance, business and political heavy hitters get to interact with influential and famous artists and vice versa.
The key to building out these societies is to get enough super-interesting and controversial people—who pay little or nothing to participate—that a counter audience of wealthy and powerful people—who pay full price—will see the society as aspirational, join, and subsidize the attendance of their more interesting counterparts. Secret societies of this sort often don’t have a very long shelf life, in part because they are often launched on the foundation of a particularly famous person’s ”brand.” Take Renaissance Weekend as an example, which has really gone downhill since the Clintons were forced to leave due to public scrutiny. It is challenging, if not impossible, to start a new secret society without a lynchpin name like Peter Thiel, Eric Schmidt, the Clintons, etc. One could theoretically found a new two-sided marketplace secret society using the right sort of famous person as its patron saint, should they like the idea, but to make the society sustainable, it would be imperative that the lynchpin person’s reputation quickly be deemphasized in favor of a broad, balanced, and revolving portfolio of other blockbuster personalities to reduce key man risk and enable the society to endure well after any single famous person has to step back.
There are three more reasons these societies tend to collapse. The first is that they are burdened with archaic rulesets that limit who they can recruit. None of the past’s all-male societies have been able to maintain the prestige they once held, in part because up-and-coming public figures would not want to risk affiliation with a plausibly misogynistic organization. To some extent, this is what happened to Skull and Bones: While the group has admitted women since the 90s, they got stuck with the rule of only being able to accept Yalies, tying the group’s reputation to that of Yale University (which has somewhat declined). You can’t exactly frame yourself as having access to the next generation of the world’s elite when only 39% of students pick you over Harvard (contrast that with Stanford, which—around the time of this book’s publication—43% of students would choose over Harvard).[[34]](#_ftn34)
Something to note is that secret societies which have replaced Skull and Bones as the prestigious “kids to watch” often target dropouts from elite universities or people who haven’t gone yet (like the Atlas Fellowship and The Thiel Fellowship). We suppose that’s just a sign of the times, with universities more generally losing their utility.
A second major force driving the downfall of two-sided marketplace secret societies involves “degradation from the mean” (for clarification, this is not a type of “regression toward the mean” but a totally different phenomenon). When a society fails to balance each side of its marketplace and degrades into a generic society where high-profile people gather to be around other high-profile people, it will eventually fade into obsolescence. General “elite” societies only have value to people below the mean level of member prestige, thus on average, every new entrant will drag that mean down. Efforts to evade degradation to the mean explain in part why older secret societies used to have ranks as a method to attempt to maintain members who were higher profile than average. Furthermore, two-sided marketplace secret societies that openly acknowledge and even codify that two-sided element, like what the Bohemian Grove has done with influential businesspeople/politicians and artists, typically last longer than those that do not (many two-sided marketplace secret societies don’t even recognize this dynamic as their core value proposition).
Waitlists comprise the final major force commonly destroying two-sided marketplace societies. It used to be common for highly in-demand secret societies to have decades-long waitlists (the average at one was something like 20 years—can’t give a name here). In some cases, waitlists come to be used as a vanity signal alluding to the society’s prestige. While they may signal desirability, waitlists also can be deadly. Most people who hear about a society in a way that gets them in the front door will hear about it from their peers who are members, so if that next group of members has to wait 20 years to get in and, in turn, begin nominating new members, then the average age of a member will increase by almost 20 years with each “generation” of membership. It is, for this reason, the average age of people in some once-very-prestigious societies these days is between 70 and 80 years old.
Why bring all this up? Consider the old banking systems run by groups like the Knights Templar and the Freemasons, and consider how a secret society network can be combined with a cultivar. The approach would bring unique tactical utility to even a newly-founded cultivar should its initial membership base be well selected and distributed. If you can successfully offer the tangible benefits associated with popular forms of secret societies while avoiding their major pitfalls and incorporating fitness-imparting cultural values, traditions, and practices, you will have greater odds of accelerating the rise of a truly powerful movement.