Retaining Teens Through Rebellion
As mentioned earlier, what we call “evanescent youth cultures,” like goth culture, punk culture, or e-girl/e-boy culture, are unique in that they do not pass between generations and are essentially specialized memetic packages that evolved to spread among teenagers when their rebellious instincts are highest. While people rarely participate in these cultures beyond adolescence, evanescent youth cultures often trigger permanent breaks from their birth cultures.
To stay strong, cultures need mechanisms that either (1) shield youth from this special category of pop culture or (2) embrace evanescent youth cultures but contextualize them as temporary. If you are constructing a culture, the manner in which that culture relates to evanescent youth cultures will play a critical role in determining its bleed rate.
One reason humans likely evolved adolescent rebelliousness is that it encourages young people to detach from their parents in time to find mates and build family units of their own. This rebelliousness is deeply set and often hard to ignore. For example, I—Simone—remember how I felt when my parents attended gatherings around other people my age. I felt like everything they did was utterly humiliating, even if they were just cheering me on at a swim meet. I found this disgust perplexing, as I was fully aware that my parents were only present to support me.
As with any psychological phenomenon, not every person experiences a strong teen rebellion phase. That said, the population of rebellious teens is sufficient to fuel the development, evolution, and spread of cultures that almost exclusively prey on teenage audiences and their unique emotional sets. For example, adolescent humans’ brains become uniquely attuned to social cues and peer acceptance, hence evanescent youth cultures often leverage this heightened sensitivity (along with vulnerabilities related to awakening sexuality, tendencies to see parents and authority figures as oppressors of one’s true self, and desires to see oneself as somehow special and unique).
Evanescent youth cultures are unique in that they rarely hold on to adherents for long and evolve very quickly (usually not maintaining a consistent form for more than half a decade).
They commonly spread by:
- Appealing to rebelliousness and helping adherents see themselves as independent individuals
- Facilitating status upgrades within local social hierarchies (e.g., helping adherents become popular or noticed within a social group)
- Helping adherents acquire non-reproductive sexual partners
- Helping adherents see themselves as powerful or deep thinkers with access to a special perspective on reality
- Allowing adherents to roleplay a new identity (e.g., a vampire, witch, or furry)
Sometimes evanescent youth cultures adapt bastardized iterations of core cultures that seem exotic. For example, when we were young, a sort of high school version of Buddhism spread, which combined superficial elements of Buddhist stereotypes with a surface-level understanding of the religion to produce a culture primarily designed to help teen adherents feel “deep” and secure casual sex. This bastardization process becomes highly amusing when youth cultures pull from more bizarre sources, such as fetish cultures (as can be seen in high school furry communities).
We wonder if some subcategory of a larger culture could be intentionally designed to draw in teens during this period of their lives. Teen Buddhism organically evolved to fill this role to an extent, with some individuals who adopted the superficial Westernized iteration later educating themselves and attempting to adopt a more authentic version of the culture and passing it on to their kids.
I, Simone, grew up with parents like this. They rebelled against their religious heritage growing up during the hippie days in the San Francisco Bay Area, explored a broad variety of new age and spiritual evanescent youth cultures, studied Aikido in Japan under a soon-to-retire grand master, and planned on studying Tai Chi in China (my unexpected birth derailed these plans), only to eventually became self-described “Born Again Buddhists” attending a very mainstream local Mahayana Buddhist temple.
People who appreciate the strict structure of more extreme evanescent youth cultures frequently end up joining more socially-mainstream but nevertheless highly structured cultures in adulthood. This may present an opportunity for some cultures to set themselves up as uniquely appealing landing strips for young adults transitioning out of their unsustainable youth cultures and explains why cults often target people in this age range. While my born-again-Buddhist parents took me to a Buddhist temple as a kid and maintained a very loose family culture, one of my cousins grew up with a more strict Christian family culture—something her parents had created after a youth spent with the Rajneesh movement in India (name changes and all).
When reviewing research demonstrating how much of our sociological profile is inherited[[35]](#_ftn35) I, Malcolm, worry about the cultural bleed our family will suffer as a product of teenage rebellion. Adding Simone’s ancestral rebellious nature to mine feels like a disaster waiting to happen. My “rebel” instinct as a teen was incredibly strong—to the extent that rarely a month passed in which I did not spend at least one day in the principal’s office, getting in a fight, or being chased by police (though, spending a big chunk of my early childhood in adolescent prison alternatives probably didn’t help).
How can we, as people who want to design durable cultures that endure across generations, protect future descendants from losing their way? Let’s consider what some other cultures do.
Anabaptist Rumspringa presents an archetypal model of one strategy. Amish Rumspringa typically starts from ages 14-16 while Mennonite Rumspringa starts between 17-20. Rumspringa is a period during which youth are offered the choice to baptize and join the community as adults—where they will have to spend the rest of their life living with severe technological limitation and strict self-control—or where they take a period away from the community to see how the English live (“the English” being a term sometimes used to describe outsiders because they speak English, whereas many Amish and Mennonites speak Pennsylvania Dutch). During the two-year Rumspringa, young adherents are allowed to holistically indulge in rebellion—ranging from premarital sex to drugs and alcohol. (Though most Anabaptist kids don’t go all the way with Rumspringa and just use it as an opportunity to be out from under their parents’ control on weekends or buy a courting buggy.)
Rumspringa is the cultural version of making your kid smoke the whole pack of cigarettes in front of you after catching them smoking—and it’s kind of genius. By encouraging rebellious youth to fully lean into the most overhyped aspects of pop culture in a way that can’t possibly be genuinely satisfying, a culture can essentially inoculate its youth against viral cultural influences. After all, pop and soft cultures are not typically cultures that people dive into enthusiastically; they’re what people slouch into when refusing to put effort or focus into anything else. In other words, pop/soft cultures sneak up on their prey and smother them in their sleep, but are fairly harmless when tackled head on.
What’s more, any culture that welcomes post-rebellion adherents back with open arms is somewhat inherently immune to rebellion, as it’s hard to rebel against a culture that looks rebellion in the face and says: “Sure, kid. Go for it. We’re not going to hold you back.”
It is furthermore quite clever for a culture to give lifelong adherents a taste of what life is like without its beneficial amenities and community support. Imagine growing up your entire life with the level of community support the Amish have (pretty-much-guaranteed healthcare, housing, a spouse, and a job) then getting to try things like sex and drinking in the context of having that support withdrawn from you. Honestly, the game is ingeniously rigged against any kid wanting to leave. It is no wonder to us that the Anabaptists have the lowest bleed rate of any cultivar in the world (on which we can find data), with a full 80-95% who engage in Rumspringa returning to the community for baptism.
Compare the Amish 20-25% bleed rate to Mormon and Evangelical Protestant bleed, which stand at 35% and 33% respectively. Mormon approaches to rebellion are almost the mirror opposite of Rumspringa, as rather than getting a free pass to go out and rebel, Mormon youth are encouraged to go on a mission trip, leaving their family to spend in-depth time diving deep into the religion and being paired with another devotee 24/7. Essentially, the LDS Church deals with this period of cultural danger by removing the young adults from unsupervised contact with non-Mormon peer groups and placing them under constant supervision. The cultural bleed differentiation between the two groups highlights how ineffective these kinds of ultra-controlling tactics are in an age of cell phones and social media.
As much as we respect the Anabaptist tradition of Rumspringa, we find another cultural tradition that tackles youthful rebellion even more compelling: That of the Spartan Krypteia.[[36]](#_ftn36)
During Krypteia, young Spartan men left the confines of their strict culture and support network, just like the Amish do on Rumspringa, but instead of integrating with society, they were challenged to survive by the most ruthless means possible. Plato held that during this rite of passage, Spartan youth were not allowed to wear footwear or sleep in shelters, even in the dead of winter, or even work for their food. Instead, they had to hide among the local serf population (Helots) and feed themselves by stealing food from them without ever being seen. Plutarch furthermore described men on Krypteia as terrorizing Helots, killing men they found on highways at night and sometimes murdering Helots as they worked in fields. While it is unclear whether this rite of passage always or ever involved systematic murder, common themes in historical accounts include harsh living away from home, lots of solitude, and a fair amount of danger.
While we don’t know if modified (read: non-murdery) versions of either Krypteia or Rumspringa would work for our family culture, our fears about these traditions deviate from concerns typically surfaced by those familiar with them.
For example, we trust our descendants to know better than to experiment and rebel in ways that cause non-reversible harm to themselves and others (e.g. getting someone pregnant, experimenting with highly-addictive drugs, and making non-reversible body modifications). What worries us is that our Calvinist-derived family culture lacks some of the amenities rebellious youth will miss most when exploring the outside world. Both Amish and Spartan cultures offer(ed) notable levels of social support, whereas our culture regards social support networks that protect people from their mistakes rather than empower the capable as being intrinsically evil.
We nevertheless think our House cultivar’s notable absence of any support network is the right call. For example, had someone come to rescue me, Malcolm, from the shitty situations I regularly dug myself into as a teen, and had I believed there was an “out” if things went terribly wrong, I can only imagine what sort of monster I might have become. Shielding teens from the consequences of their bad behavior and the risks they take only encourages them to double down in a way that will not serve them well in adulthood.
We also worry that cultures that are better-integrated with their broader surrounding cultures will not offer rebellion experiences to their adherents that are as salient as those undergoing something like Rumspringa or Krypteia. Anabaptists like the Amish and Mennonites—not to mention Spartans—are and were quite different from surrounding populations. Cultures that integrate more seamlessly with surrounding populations may not feel the same sense of contrast when venturing into the outer world.
This shortcoming could be addressed by creating rebellious rites of passage in which youth are sent to live in environments and cultures that differ radically from those to which they are accustomed.
I, Malcolm, spent a period of time as a teen supporting myself in and hitchhiking around a developing country. Something like this might work as a cultural ritual. It would certainly help to impart the value our particular culture places on self-sufficiency and stepping up to daunting challenges, however we shy away from it for two reasons:
- We would only feel comfortable offering it as an opt-in ritual.
- Even if they took on this rite of passage with a partner, we would not be comfortable sending our daughters or granddaughters on such an expedition (for obvious safety reasons). We hate the idea of a gender-specific coming-of-age ritual meant to demonstrate self-sufficiency, as it subtly signals that women can’t be as self-sufficient as men (when in reality, it just unfortunately happens that self-sufficient men and women need to navigate around different risks in the world).
A final interesting tradition used to address teenage rebellion, known as “sending out,” was widely used by Puritans (a branch of Calvinists) in Colonial America. “Sending out” involved arranging for young teens (though occasionally younger children as well) to live with another family for a period, often to learn an important trade or skill. The process is quite ingenious considering how teens’ biology seems to drive them to instinctually rebel against their parents, suggesting a teen may be significantly less likely to feel this when living with a host family. As an added bonus, sending out allows youth to learn from and borrow aspects of other families’ unique cultures. Should the network of Index families grow large, this might be a great practice to reinstate.
When I—Malcolm—was young, my parents occasionally had me live with families in other countries and even went so far as to offer me an opportunity to live at a Buddhist monastery in Cambodia for half a summer if I wanted to. I never felt like I got much out of these experiences, perhaps because they were more set up around “cultural exchange” and not around my learning some useful skill.
We theorize the best way to protect our kids from harmful forms of teenage rebellion doesn’t involve elaborate rituals but rather a cultural understanding of these life stages. More specifically, it seems wise to:
- Raise kids to expect their brains will be overwhelmed by hormones, specific emotions, and predictable sensitivities when they hit adolescence, and
- Make sure your culture’s goals for teens align well with teenage proclivities.
For detailed thoughts on how this might be achieved, see: “Life Stages” in the Appendix on page 739*. In this section, we discuss how we will structure life stages and expectations for the culture we create for our own kids, (e.g., between X age and Y age, focus on Z and expect W). Life is surprisingly short and if you want to effectively make use of it within the confines of how our culture defines a life well lived, you must be strategic and intentional about making the most of every single life stage. If you are young, we strongly recommend this Appendix chapter.*
The Index’s Role in Teen Rebellion
The Index was in no small part created to address problems resulting from teen rebellion and cultural reinvention. Calvinist culture failed, in part, because:
- It looks for truth and does not care much about tradition
- Is extremely rebellious and contrarian
As a result, it consistently fragments after a generation or two.
It would be folly to invent a theology and set of traditions, then tell a 50% genetically identical younger, better, iteration of yourself (i.e., one of your children) to bow to it. While we know our kids will rebel against anything we create, we also see the implications of major global trends: If a family can’t stick together and elevate its strongest members, it has no long-term future.
Our children will be just as driven to compete and prove their superiority as they will be to rebel. Just as capitalism harnesses human greed to foster innovation and industry, the Index is designed to harness the common desire to rebel against your family and prove you are better than them in a manner that ultimately strengthens your bonds. While our children will invent their own traditions and theologies, they will only leave the Index if they fear the accomplishments of any cultivar they create will not measure up. We wager that even four generations from now, they will have too much pride to do that. In addition, we are betting their own children will look to their grandparents’ beliefs for inspiration when they themselves rebel, just as we have. (Essentially, we have the Index record each generation’s traditions in part so that family traditions can cycle between two or three iterated-upon versions with kids regularly rebelling against their parents but looking to their grandparents for inspiration.)