Cultural Identifiers
Almost all hard cultures feature some form of cultural identifier that, in addition to signaling membership, serves as a form of emotional armor, reminding adherents of who they are while setting them apart when they interact with “normal” society.
While some cultural identifiers are extremely obvious (consider the dress and styling of Hasidic Jews), others may only be easy to spot when you are moderately informed about a culture. Ritual undergarments worn by those endowed in the LDS Church, for example, require a minimum level of outer dress that can often make a Mormon identifiable to people who know what subtle cues to look for, but most won’t notice a difference.
Cultural identifiers can range from clothing and grooming styles to accents, language, and even home construction, as is the case with Swartzentruber Amish, who see porches as sinful luxuries.
While these differentiators can be beneficial to a culture’s members by, for example, making it easy to spot a friendly face and helping members see themselves as distinct from broader society, they are also often viewed as costly sacrifices that remind adherents, on a day-to-day basis, that membership in their culture comes at a cost. This perceived cost reinforces culture adherents’ sunk cost fallacy, sucking them further in and creating cognitive dissonance when they act in a manner incongruent with their culture.
Though typically hard cultures represent all extremes when it comes to cultural features, evanescent youth cultures demonstrate an exception to this rule when it comes to cultural identifiers, with evanescent youth culture adherents almost always exhibiting even more extreme cultural identifiers than members of hard cultures. This happens because dressing in a way that makes you unacceptable to mainstream society or expressing views no sane person would seriously hold are the two primary mechanisms an individual can use to show commitment to evanescent teen groups, leading these displays of commitment to become more extreme over time until they become untenable to new members and the subculture dissolves.
Take goth culture as an example: Goths need to make more and more “costly signals” to show dedication to the group in something of a Red Queen’s race of tattoos, expensive clothing, and face piercings until the culture gets so ridiculous no one wants to join anymore and it dies out (perhaps to be revived later on down the line).
We don’t think it’s possible for a group like the Index or our House to push strong identifiers given how much we advocate for whatever course of action is pragmatically most efficacious in any individual circumstance. To that end, the closest thing we would have to an advised cultural signal is the model of building an outward-facing character described in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life.
Essentially this model recommends that you design your public persona in a way that is easy for others to digest, allowing you to fit snugly in their minds. An optimal public persona is simple and predictable—the caricature of a “real person.” While everyone is the protagonist of their own story, they are also a side character in everyone else’s. This means you will be more compelling to people if you portray or create a simplistic stereotype that makes sense and is internally consistent given their worldview.
All that said, should our House become a large cultural group that regularly uses aggressive gene editing, it might make sense to add a permanent “ethnic” cultural identifier (for example, by introducing a new skin or eye color). We discuss this idea and why you might do it in the chapter “Medicine and Technology.”