Cultural Infrastructure
Some cultures maintain something like a central governance structure that monitors and guides them while others have no governance structure at all and a few have a system, rules, or hierarchy that can serve a role similar to a governance system without technically being one.
We have already addressed more straightforward central governance models practiced by groups like the LDS and Catholic churches. When we say these models are straightforward, we do not mean they are simple governance structures; we mean they are “generic” governance structures that you could construct without any unique cultural considerations after reading The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance. Functionally, they do not operate that differently from a state government.
Speaking of state governments: One model of cultural structure we recommend strictly avoiding is a culture that is either tied to the state or has aspirations of controlling the state infrastructure. Aspirations for controlling state infrastructure, without founding a new colony, will put a target on your culture’s back—and for what? Running the state as a culture is not as great as one might imagine.
When your culture runs the state, overthrowing the state begins to necessitate overthrowing your culture as well. And what if the state gets taken over by an external force which in turn manipulates your culture? This was seen repeatedly in the history of the Catholic tradition (with Vatican City always being a target and many countries trying to create pretender Popes, which fractured the faith). Fortunately, the unique multistate structure of Catholicism protected it from being completely destroyed by these hazards, but would your culture be so well-positioned?
The Russian Orthodox church patriarch’s obligation to kowtow to Putin and promote whatever he wants exemplifies how a religion can be compromised by melding with state infrastructure. That said, state control can be great in the short term and you can transition out of it. This can be seen in both the LDS Church and Islam which both experienced periods where all their branches were part of a single state under their control, both have evolved past that. Generally, however, state control is worth neither the risk nor the effort.
Cultural governance gets really interesting when it invokes organic or unique components that make it function wildly differently than any state governance could. As we mentioned, Jewish culture presents an example of this, given its organically constructed hierarchy in which one’s position is either determined by one’s skill in legalistic argumentation, one’s philosophical acumen, or the size of one’s following.
This organic hierarchy allows individuals from unique Jewish factions to have a voice within the larger Jewish ecosystem and organically cross-pollinate different Jewish sub-branches (it facilitates much more theologically focused communication between factions than you get in groups like Protestants, which cross-denominationally interact more like Italian city-states from the Renaissance period). The emphasis on mastery of legalistic argumentation, while pedantic for our taste, leads to something of a filter within leadership for some level of general intelligence. Prioritizing legalistic argumentation over divine word (as can be seen from the Oven of Akhnai story, which we cited earlier) prevents any one individual within the hierarchy from asserting absolute dominance over others (e.g., by claiming that God spoke directly to them and so they must listen to everything they say).
Jewish culture doesn’t hold a monopoly on cool, organic cultural governing systems. Academia presents another great example of the model. While academia lacks a central hierarchy, its model of peer-reviewed publications—and the way academics gain status by accumulating more citations on their research—is, on paper, intriguing. Academia’s tenure model also seems great on paper.
As you may know from The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance, we believe that academia has almost entirely failed as a system. It is so thoroughly infected by the cultural supervirus that it has become reminiscent of a caterpillar filled by parasitoid worms that have already hollowed out its insides and can be seen crawling just under its skin. Academia demonstrates that while some structures of organic organization have withstood the test of time (Judaism being a case in point), not all structures of organic organization will. More importantly, academia demonstrates how organic cultural governing systems are uniquely prone to infection by especially virulent brands of pop culture.
Many recently constructed cultures rely on online discussion groups and voting as core elements of cultural consensus building, as can be seen in movements such as the Less Wrong/Rationality and Effective Altruism movements. These systems seem great in theory but almost always produce a form of governance failure we call the “tyranny of the unemployed,” which we discuss in detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance. Essentially, these systems empower individuals with nothing else going on in their lives while lowering the influence of members who are successful outside of said culture.
The Tyranny of the Unemployed: Given that more competent individuals typically have more competing interests vying for their personal time, systems that allow a person to spend time and emotional effort to influence the direction of a culture will always trend toward those cultures’ lesser instincts.
Cultures with open meritocratic hierarchies (e.g., those based on getting upvotes in online forums) typically facilitate the rise of a small handful of genuinely substantive intellectuals only to become impenetrable to new entrants who weren’t in the foundational cohort and have some level of success in the “outside world.” After the initial group of intellectuals dies off, these communities often devolve into dogmatic, bureaucratic, and ineffective dominance hierarchy fights, with an increasing focus on gatekeeping and in-group language checks.