Roles in Multicultural Ecosystems
With regard to their ecological niches within a multicultural ecosystem, hard cultures can largely be thought of as being dominating, symbiotic, isolationist, or terraforming.
Dominating Cultivars
Dominating cultivars are usually defined by a belief that anyone can join their culture and anyone who does not ascribe to their theology and cultural practices will undergo some immense hardship after death. This creates a moral mandate within these cultures to do whatever it takes to eventually wrest control of local governing institutions and create pressures that encourage conversions to their culture.
While people often frame the aggressive conversion mindset of dominating cultivars negatively, it would ultimately be intensely immoral for someone to believe others faced eternal damnation and torment should they fail to convert and to not try to convert them. Cultural domination is a perfectly reasonable and good long-term goal for anyone who holds this mindset, even if achieving this domination causes short-term suffering. We are consistently shocked when people complain about being subjected to proselytization—it’s like: “Bro, that person isn’t getting paid. They are going out of their way and risking ridicule in an attempt to help prevent you from getting hurt.”
When dominating cultivars make up minority populations in a geography, they typically claim, even internally, that their goal is not to create a theocracy. In addition, dominating cultures are very likely to play the victim card when they are in the minority (think: dominating Christian cultivars living in largely non-Christian areas making claims about the “war on Christmas”).
When a cultivar expects total control over its environment, any lack of control can feel like oppression. Consider the cries of oppression on Twitter from journalists, the inquisitorial class of the superviruses,[[123]](#_ftn123) after Elon Musk took it private and they started getting banned for breaking rules that had existed for years.[[124]](#_ftn124) Consider the accusations of oppression from people who grew up in extremist conservative cultivars and find themselves obligated to work side-by-side with women.[[125]](#_ftn125) Equality feels like oppression to any cultivar that frames the perspectives of other groups as intrinsically inferior.
This dynamic flips once dominating cultures become the dominant force in the population—suddenly, theocracy becomes imperative. Theocratic rule by a dominating culture doesn’t always look like a Church literally running the state. Decentralized cultures, for example, typically impose theocratic control by translating their religious laws into state laws.
Symbiotic Cultivars
Symbiotic cultivars are cultures capable of living within a multicultural ecosystem without a mandate or even motivation to eventually dominate that ecosystem. Sometimes symbiotic cultivars achieve this by not believing in any sort of differentially worse afterlife for non-believers but more often than not they don’t feel obligated to convert outsiders because they don’t believe everyone is meant to be a member.
Cultures that don’t see conversion of others as a mandate include those which tie member qualification to some level of heritability, like the Parsi and some Orthodox Jewish cultivars. Groups with weird theological structures, like Calvinists, who don’t believe everyone is destined for salvation, also experience little motivation to win others over to their beliefs. It is somewhat ironic that the exclusionary—some might say “elitist”—nature of most symbiotic cultivars is what makes them uniquely compatible with other cultures.
A shift from a symbiotic culture to a dominating one among a nation’s politicians will radically change its political mandates. America was primarily founded by people adhering to symbiotic forms of Christianity (between 55% and 75% of white citizens and even more within elite circles were Calvinist at the time of the nation’s founding).[[126]](#_ftn126) However, fairly recently in the history of the country, the American Christian landscape has become increasingly dominated by Pentecostal Arminianism (a dominating culture). This shift caused Christian groups in America to fight harder to incorporate religious rules into government in an effort to spare U.S. citizens from eternal suffering. Had Arminianism been a dominant branch of Christianity at the nation’s founding, the United States would be quite different, especially when it comes to the separation of Church and State.
An interesting quirk of most symbiotic cultures is that, because they specialize in living in multicultural ecosystems, they often evolve to fill specific social niches, becoming massively over-represented in specific careers and industries. Dominating cultures cannot afford this luxury, as their mandate to govern their entire society means members of that group must be able to fulfill all roles within a society. This can produce rather humorous results when a symbiotic culture that evolved to only fill only a handful of fairly specific cultural niches is forced to fill all the niches in a cultural ecosystem (e.g., As happened with Israel—more on this next).
Isolationist Cultivars
Isolationist cultivars thrive most when isolated from other cultures. While they can live peacefully next to other cultures, there is generally very little intermixing between them and their neighbors—either in commerce or cultural ideas. Like symbiotic cultures, they do not have a mandate to convert people. Unlike symbiotic cultures, they evolved to be complete economic ecosystems capable of functioning in isolation. A great modern example of an isolationist culture is the Amish, but we have seen isolationist cultures throughout human history, with a well-studied historic example being the Jewish splinter group known as the Yahad (the community from which the Dead Sea Scrolls hail).
Isolationist cultivars are at present the most successful of all cultural groups at resisting collapses in birth rate. As such, we should expect them to soon become major players in geopolitics in a way that is hard to fathom today. To understand just how quickly they are able to grow, consider the Hutterites (another anabaptist cultivar, like the Amish), which grew from just 400 members in one settlement to around 50,000 in just 140 years.
Isolationist cultures are among the few that have been capable of weathering the cultural mass extinction event threatening most other extant cultures today because they are able to “air gap” their nodal networks, which prevents memetic infection by threats like the supervirus. An air gap is a form of cyber defense whereby you simply do not plug a piece of technology into the network (e.g., You prevent your nuclear reactor from being hacked by not giving it an internet connection). However, we suspect the robustness of isolationist cultivars in the face of demographic collapse is due to more than just cultural separation.
Imagine society as a building made of clay. To keep the building stable, an internal wire structure is necessary. This wire frame is society’s culture and religious infrastructure. The industrial revolution generated pressures which rapidly and dramatically changed the shape of society—that building made of clay—to the extent that not only is the wire frame unable to support the new shape (hence we see collapsing birth rates and other problems), but huge portions of the wire frame are now exposed to the elements and rusting. While this book attempts to resolve the situation by designing novel wire infrastructure to fit society’s new shape, some cultures have avoided this mess by creating pre-industrial environments in which they can thrive, effectively preventing their clay buildings from changing shape in the first place.
There are two ways to address problems caused by changes to your society’s “clay building” without building new supportive wire framing. The first is what isolationist cultivars like the Amish do: They create a pre-industrial bubble around their communities, like an alien wearing a helmet full of methane to be able to breathe on earth. This has allowed their culture to stay healthy, resist viral infection, and maintain a high birth rate. The second way cultures create a pre-industrial environment that effectively protects them from obsolescence is more insidious: Instead of putting on a helmet full of methane, they set up methane generators which inundate the environment with the gas so essential to them and toxic to most. These are what we call terraforming cultures.
Terraforming Cultivars
Terraforming cultures thrive by transforming the social and economic fabric of the multicultural ecosystems they infest to pre-industrial levels. They treat women as second-class citizens, hold blood feuds, and kill LGBT individuals. They create environments that are hell to live in, but that lead to high birth rates. While, like dominating cultures, terraforming cultivars typically plan to eventually control an entire society, the way they spread is very different.
Dominating cultures typically use their control of a society to generate a high quality of life and wealth (though the quality of life produced by dominating cultures is typically a bit lower than that enjoyed in truly multicultural ecosystems). They then use the wealth they’ve generated to send out missionaries to new geographies (these missionaries are usually on temporary trips with only the goal of converting people).
In contrast, terraforming cultures primarily spread not through missionaries but by hobbling their host government and economy. Essentially, once a terraforming culture reaches a certain population threshold its surrounding local economy and social infrastructure will collapse and conditions begin to mimic pre-industrial environments, which causes birth rates to shoot up. This high birth rate combined with low quality of life drives at least some residents to flee from this environment, and like osmosis they move through a semipermeable membrane between their society and a more wealthy one. Once those who left the old region reach a certain population threshold in a new region (assuming they maintain the original culture rather than adopt the culture of their new homeland), they collapse that new region’s local economy and repeat the cycle.
Now you might be thinking: “Ahhh—I get it, he is dog whistling about Muslim Immigrants” … and you would be wrong. White nationalist groups sometimes push a narrative similar to this, but the truth about U.S. Muslim immigrants is that their fertility rate is almost below replacement rate, they are just as educated as the average American, and they don’t earn particularly less.[[127]](#_ftn127) The vast majority of U.S. Muslim immigrants come from normal dominating cultivars that fill an ecological niche similar to the nation’s dominant Christian groups, not terraforming ones. That is not to say that there are not terraforming Muslim cultivars (ISIS for example), but terraforming cultivars have independently evolved from Christianity, Islam, Pagan beliefs, and surely at least a dozen other larger cultural genus, so despite what some might have you believe, there is nothing uniquely Muslim about this strategy. The U.S. has been fortunate enough to have (thus far) avoided large incursions from a terraforming cultivar. Historically, terraforming cultivars really only had success moving from incredibly underdeveloped countries to geographically adjacent developing countries.
Nothing malicious is happening in this process; there is no intentionality whereby people of terraforming cultures wake up one day and say: “Let’s move to another country and trash their economy.” It was just an evolutionarily successful cultural strategy. The only way to stop it is to make the strategy evolutionarily nonviable. The good news is the cultural supervirus kind of already did that: The supervirus requires a certain level of wealth and education in a region to spread effectively, meaning it has, at least in the short run, evolutionarily outclassed the traditional terraforming cultures (the tables may turn over the long run if the supervirus effectively sterilizes enough groups).
Despite popular narratives among conservative groups, terraforming cultures—just like their dominating culture kin—are in the process of dying as a cultural strategy. Huge campaigns to raise the level of female education coming out of wealthy countries, combined with the cultural supervirus’s effectiveness at transmitting through the internet, has crashed the birth rates of many terraforming cultures. Female education and internet access are like salt on a snail for terraforming cultures.
There currently is no obvious scary terraforming culture out there to sit up at night worrying about. But … the supervirus has only just recently begun to beat them. That means it is very likely that a few exceptionally virulent iterations of terraforming culture with stronger internal immune systems currently exist in very small pockets, like a few cells of antibiotic-resistant bacteria hiding on an agar plate after it was dusted with antibiotics. Specifically, if we see a highly technophobic iteration of one of the old terraforming cultures evolve that explicitly prohibits women from getting educated by either threatening them or keeping them in the house, we should be very, very worried.
As a final note, we advise against thinking of any culture itself as an “enemy.” While this cultural strategy is at odds with the Index’s values, all cultures have something of value that can be harvested given their unique perspectives. The more differentiated a culture is from your own, the more likely it is to see things in your cultural blind spots.
Instead, it is useful to think of cultures as existing in two categories: Cultures that can’t coexist with others in a multicultural ecosystem with those that can. Cultures capable of coexisting with others in multicultural ecosystems can be further subdivided into permanent allies who can be wholly trusted (symbiotic hard cultivars whose interests align with yours) and only temporary allies who cannot be trusted (dominating cultivars whose interests only temporarily align with yours).