Emotion and Mental Landscape
One of the ways hard cultures “win” is by increasing adherents’ mental fitness. A culture with clear-headed people and lower rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse is going to outcompete a community that does not have social technology assisting in these areas (all other things being equal). This is why people who follow hard cultures typically have better mental health than those who don’t.[[1]](#_ftn1)
In contrast, a key mechanism pop cultures use to seduce people out of their birth cultivars is to push them to indulge in ways that are deleterious to their mental health, which creates dependency while making the individual unstable and enough of a burden that they are pushed out of their birth community. Durable hard cultures must have protective mechanisms that shield members from these forms of seduction.
One of our goals with this book is to see if we can isolate the exact mechanisms and social technologies hard cultures are using to benefit individual mental health and handpick them to construct a superior—if artificial—culture.