Cultural Amenities
Appealing amenities are commonly leveraged by cultures to ensure high birth rates and reduce bleed.
Common cultural amenities include:
- Relationship Catalysts: When a person cannot find a partner, they do not breed. To prevent this, some cultures have adopted systematized dating markets—like Mormon singles wards—while others simply assign partners (this can be done either by parents or by some centralized authority).
- Relationship Norms: It is far easier to embark on a relationship that features shared expectations and norms (meaning partners are not obligated to navigate mismatched expectations). Shared relationship norms offered by some cultures are especially helpful to those who like to live life on default settings (and would therefore find negotiating every point of a social contract to be uniquely stressful).
- Status Mechanisms: People are often drawn to cultures and organizations that offer clear paths for advancement (i.e., Once you do X, you advance to stage Y). Many cultures therefore offer clear promises of higher status and/or power to adherents who invest a certain amount of time and/or resources in the culture.
- A Social Safety Net: Many cultures provide their members—or in some cases their wider community—with a social safety net. Some cultures, like the Sikhs, go so far as to offer free food, medical services, and even child care. Schwertantrooper Amish go even further, with churches maintaining medical insurance funds and putting out an open plea when costs go above what the individual church has saved—which is almost always met. (Calvinist culture is rare in being one of the only cultures we can think of that effectively sees social safety nets as immoral.)
- Psychological Support and Self-Narrative Writing: Many cultures offer some form of psychological support, often helping adherents overcome psychological struggles while reframing themselves as the only group capable of doing so. Scientology probably presents the most extreme example of this, but such practices are seen throughout any number of cultures, from Catholic confessionals to the roles some Rabbis play in their communities.
- Protection from Danger: Many cultures, through their prohibitions, shield adherents from major hazards, such as alcohol and gambling. Longstanding food prohibitions may also have featured protective properties, even if they no longer shield adherents from hazards in modern times.
- Unique Reputations: Some cultural traditions produce individuals with specialized social functions or reputations that offer advantages in job markets (e.g. “Oh, this guy will be great for the CIA—he is from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, so he’s clean-cut, devoted, and fluent in a foreign language from his mission”). While cultures evolve into these roles due to social pressures, once they have developed, they can serve as a sense of identity, decreasing cultural bleed and making it easier to get jobs.
- Unique Specializations: Some cultures go so far as to develop guilds or caste systems that fill multiple professional roles within society. Such structures are rare today but can be found among some legacy cultures (not to mention sci-fi cultures—like that presented in Brave New World).