Cultural Motivators
While cultures use a myriad of tools—which we’ll call “cultural motivators”—to incentivize behavior in line with their values, the tools themselves are difficult to parse out and research.
What makes cultural motivators so hard to research is that they are not systematically recorded outside of pop cultural stereotypes. For example, if stereotypes are to be believed, maternal guilt is a prominent motivational tool in families that are culturally Jewish and Greek.[[170]](#_ftn170) Presumably, when mothers on television act in this stereotypical fashion, audiences laugh because it rings true to them in some way. Is this cultural stereotype accurate? We have no idea but it differs radically from my family’s parenting practices.
Rather than guilt me, my (Malcolm’s) mother attempted to motivate me by claiming my actions would have an effect on me in the future: “If don’t learn to fix your lisp, you will sound effeminate and even fat chicks won’t fuck you,” she’d say—or “If you don’t improve your grades, you won’t be able to get a real job and no one will respect you.”
Why does a cultivar evolve one reward mechanism, such as guilt, over another, such logical self-interest, and what positive and negative effects do contrasting systems produce? Honestly, it is hard to construct theories based only on cultural stereotypes. While we can draw meaningful inferences from stories and worship patterns when exploring how a culture sees truth, it’s incredibly difficult to gather representative data on subtle ways in which cultural members—be they parents and children, preachers and parishioners, or fellow members—interact. As such, we will narrow our focus to possible cultural motivators we believe we have seen in the wild.
Group Exclusion
Group exclusion (outside of just murder, which is fairly rare these days in developed countries) is the nuclear variant of cultural motivators. Contrary to other punishment options, once excluded, the punished individual will rarely rejoin the group. The prospect of exclusion is meant to exist, primarily, as a threat.
Group exclusion is used by most hard cultures including Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientologists, Mormons, and Swartzentruber Amish. Cutting someone off from their family and friends can be a powerful motivator to fall in line when an individual has been socialized in a culture that is different enough from the surrounding society that they will have trouble fitting in. Exclusion from Amish and Jehovah’s Witness communities has an added sting as these cultures systematically dissuade adherents from getting higher education, making it difficult to achieve financial self-sufficiency on the outside.
Exclusion as a cultural enforcement mechanism evolved in a time when the societies that surrounded these groups offered poorer social safety nets than those which exist today. With the rise of the internet, where even the weirdest of freaks can find a welcoming community, this mechanism has become increasingly ineffective. This is favorable development; exclusion strikes us as a uniquely cruel and unethical tactic.
Maternal Guilt
This mechanism appears frequently among cultures in which the family unit plays a major role in one’s self conception. It appears to be a mechanism to allow for maternal control of the family unit while also allowing that control to be exercised in a way that emphasizes traditional concepts of femininity (e.g., without heavy-handed dominance).
Maternal guilt is useful if you wish to develop a culture with tight-knit family units in which women are powerful but nevertheless traditionally feminine. Notable downsides of maternal guilt-tripping include its emotionally taxing nature, its potential for modeling toxic behavior if excessively used or misused, and its tendency to be abused by narcissists.
Shame/Guilt
Shame/guilt-motivating cultivars operate by implying that an unrealistic expectation is realistic and suggesting members should feel bad when failing to meet it. Achievable goals are rarely the focus of shame-based tactics. Just search online for “high expectations Asian father” memes—common punchlines involve comically unrealistic expectations: “You’re five years old? When I was your age, I was six.” The point of this shame is to drive members of the culture as close to a perfect ideal as possible, even if true perfection is unachievable.
In addition to being common among Quaker and non-Calvinist Evangelical Protestant groups (Calvinist traditions see shame as prioritizing the subjective emotional state of the individual and thus as indulgent), shame/guilt is heavily leveraged by the cultural supervirus.
It’s ironic that shame/guilt is so commonly used by cultivars as a motivational device seeing as it is quite often counterproductive. In The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, we highlight statistics showing a high correlation between porn-shaming and porn consumption by region—at a ratio of almost one to one.
Shame/guilt culture spreads not because it is effective but because shaming is emotionally rewarding, great at non-violently sorting dominance hierarchies, and making cultural adherents feel indebted to their culture for accepting them despite their apparent unworthiness.
Note: An entire cottage industry has emerged around hair splitting between shame and guilt cultures, but we see the difference as trivial in function.
Logical Self-Interest
Cultures motivate adherents with logical self-interest by highlighting the consequences of various actions in an honest and rational manner. Though biased in its favor, we would say this tactic is healthy and effective when deployed well—but expert deployment requires understanding what the target actually wants.
For example, here is an email Simone and I received from my mom a few days ago in response to our being in the press again for our pronatalist and education reform advocacy:
“I can’t believe you are wasting time with such a STUPID subject. I could care less what happens in the future.
I care deeply about you having the brilliant success you were raised for.
And, you are wasting your most valuable years on bullshit.”
Anyone who knows us understands that a shot at improving humanity’s future is more important to us than fame or fortune. If my mother understood that, she would be much better able to model our behavior and convince us to do what she wants.
What does it look like when this is used successfully? Here is a series of texts from my mom trying to get us to buy nicer things for our kids:
“It’s all about the mean girls on social media. And about exclusion.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my study of sociology. It is that the number one greatest fear and devastation of all humans is being excluded from the group.
Banishment is worse than death, going, broke, disease, or any other thing you could think of.
And to be 14 or 15 years old and be “excluded“ from the cool group would be absolutely awful.
That’s why the suicide rates are so very high these days.
And especially high for boys.
“Fitting in” is the most important thing for prepubescent and teenagers.
They all dressed, the same, they all have the same haircut and such. And that’s as it should be, because they’re bonding with her peers and detaching from their parents.
It’s important that they have the sneakers that are as nice as their friends’ sneakers, the backpack sitter is nice, the summer vacations that are is nice… And so forth.”
This second chain did model our perspective well enough to get us to change our minds on the way we were attempting to do some things with our daughter.
Group Pride and Honor
This motivator holds that one gains “honor” or some analogous concept by upholding group morals. Japanese culture presents a classic example of this, though honor as an incentive crops up across cultures. Most people who have a connection to their birth culture feel this to some extent. While in harder cultures, honor codes are clearly communicated and universally agreed upon, soft culture adherents are typically obligated to “make up” a code of honor and conflicting codes can dilute overall feelings of group pride.
Honor is one of the most useful cultural motivators. In addition to sustainably motivating actions in line with a culture’s values, codes of honor make it easier to broadcast cultural values to outsiders. If a particular culture is good at ensuring its members live by its code of honor, they may find it easier to get jobs after positive stereotypes around that honor code spread throughout wider society.
Group pride increases the more special it feels to be a member of a group. Orthodox Jewish culture is great at boosting pride by making it extremely hard to convert through practices like triple rejection of attempted converts. Perhaps we will develop a similar mechanism around joining the Index.
Personal Pride and Self Sufficiency
This motivator leverages a dual belief that one can choose to be—and is expected to choose to choose to be—genuinely unique and superior to other people, implying an obligation to act in a manner deserving of such superiority (similar to noblesse oblige but not necessarily tied to wealth).
It is very different from the superficially similar group pride cultural motivator in that each child raised within a culture that cultivates personal pride is convinced that they, personally—not because of their group membership—can choose to be better than other people and are destined for greatness if they do so. Personal pride often correlates with beliefs that the average person is uniquely wretched, generally lazy, and untrustworthy, which incentivizes self-sufficiency.
The biggest downside to this motivator is that it drives those who are not objectively successful in the traditional sense or who do not command respect to back out of society (often to adopt a rural lifestyle or take jobs far away from others, like fire watch stations). It is very difficult for people raised in these cultivars to live around others who are inarguably more successful than them along every metric. This view is furthermore only compatible with worldviews that expect varying levels of integrity and competence from different people, which is a non-starter for many who see all people as absolutely equal regardless of their life choices. In addition, this view can bestow those who hold it with an air of snobbish elitism that grates on members of other cultures.
This belief in inequality is not racist in nature among personal-pride-motivated groups (and these are often some of the least racist of all groups). Why? Because they think they are better than other people due to who they have chosen to be, not due to any cultural or ethnic affiliation. As such, anyone else can also choose to be better. However, this belief is in some ways more dehumanizing than racism; at least racists think the people they look down upon had no choice in their inferior status. Those with strong senses of personal pride and self-sufficiency have trouble regarding those who only expect from themselves what society expects from them as equals.
In the same breath, people in these groups typically see anyone who chooses to hold themselves to higher standards than others as kin regardless of their ideology or group affiliation. The kinship these groups feel with even members of groups in direct ideological opposition to them can cause suspicion in allies from different cultural groups.
Despite these drawbacks, personal pride is one of the predominant cultural motivators with which I (Malcolm) was raised and it plays a key role in our House’s “descendant worship” theological structure. We chose it because its negative effects disproportionately burden its least productive members while its positive effects increase the likelihood that a culture’s most promising members achieve outsized success.
If you could make a cultural choice that increased the productivity of your most productive cultural members by X% but also decreased the productivity of your least productive members by the same X%, taking that choice would dramatically increase the total output of your culture. In addition, it lowers the risk of a culture attempting truly immoral action through not framing the people arrayed against it as threats that must be wiped out but rather as petulant children who need to be helped—a useful feature in a culture that values diverse societies.
Responsibility
Cultivars that wield responsibility as a cultural motivator constantly emphasize the idiocy and sloth of those in power (it is commonly used by cultivars that also leverage personal or group pride). They frame the world as going to shit and point out that no one is going to save it unless the cultivar’s adherents take personal responsibility. These cultures frequently feature a tinge of “prepperism,” especially among less successful members who don’t feel they have a shot at “saving the world” themselves—so they might as well prepare for social collapse.
This cultural motivator was big in my (Malcolm’s) family but is also fairly common across Pentecostal cultivars. While I am not sure how emotionally healthy it is, the more I meet those who actually run things, the more my family is vindicated. My family was not being arrogant when they told me very few people are competently working to fix things.
Because this cultural motivator leverages a truism about world leadership to motivate action while encouraging members to swing for the fences, we (my family) will continue to utilize it. As one of our favorite movies puts it: What differentiates a full member of their cultural group is that they have ”the courage to make the safety of the human race their personal responsibility.” (This might be similar to the Jewish concept of Tikkun olam but this concept appears to be slightly less elitist and disparaging of others than its secular Calvinist equivalent.)
Withholding Love and Support
This category of motivation is one of the most toxic—not because children should be unconditionally loved (an equally toxic concept) but because it gives kids the wrong idea about how love works (that it is earned).[[171]](#_ftn171)
There should always be acts that cause you to withdraw love from your kids. Someone who rewards a kid who puts cats in a microwave with love is going to create a serial killer. Plus, in the adult world, love is always conditional, so it is really toxic to teach kids to think love is something the world owes them.
It is equally toxic to teach a kid that there are actions they can take which inevitably lead to love. This is what leads to the stereotypical “nice guy” who does not understand why someone won’t date him after he does lots of “nice things” for them. Love (at least among romantic partners) is an evanescent emotion we cannot fully control, it is not owed to anyone and is never a reward for actions or who we choose to be. It is a reward that evolution gives us when we are living efficacious family lives.
Social Hierarchy
Some cultivars incentivize desired behaviors almost exclusively by promoting those who most strictly follow the culture’s ethical framework within its social hierarchy and demoting those who don’t. While successful hard cultures rarely wield social hierarchy as their primary motivator, almost all pop cultures do (this can be seen in pop cultures canceling people for the slightest infraction while a Pentecostal preacher may still have a large following after cheating on his wife). Intergenerational cultures don’t emphasize this tool because it is extremely toxic.
Why? Dangling social hierarchy as a reward tends to trigger purity spirals—or at least draw disproportionate focus around superficial (and thus quickly noticeable) signs of cultural value, like how “pretty” a person is or how “masculine” they are.
Rather than exemplifying the culture’s values, members of a culture motivated by social hierarchy are incentivized to point out how other members have failed to live up to the culture’s value set, as pointing out someone else’s mistakes is always easier than working to accomplish something good yourself.
Aesthetic Ideals
In my youth I (Malcolm) was non-ironically drawn to the theology of the Church of the SubGenius. In that organization, a core cultural motivator is the pursuit of “Slack.” Slack can best be described as the aesthetic of effortless success gained through cunning and sleight of hand/mind. Slack is the difference between running on ice and skating on ice (Jack Sparrow presents a good example of what Slack looks like).
Note: While Sugenius pretends that Slack is an indefinable concept in their text as part of a commentary on religion, it is very clearly meant to be the above.
The pursuit of an aesthetic ideal is an unusual but recurring cultural theme, with another solid example of it being Wu Wei. Wu Wei is a concept in Daoism which is fairly similar to the concept of Slack, but with implications of perfect energy economy as defined by effortless perfection rather than sly, cunning effortlessness. This can be seen in The Dexterous Butcher, the story of a butcher whose knives never dull because he cuts along the natural lines of the meat, forgetting his senses.
“Act, but as Wu Wei. Be active, but don’t let your conduct be intentional and deliberative.” Wu Wei is not about non-action but spontaneous action that lets go of your own self-interested concerns and guards against behavior that is too assertive. It’s about non-intervention where an action would interfere with the natural expression of things and their potential outcomes in accordance with the Dao. Actions should be naturally spontaneous and free of ingrained habits. An often-used illustration of this is the movement of water.
Not knowing of anyone who grew up Daoist (or stayed SubGenius as adults), we have little to go on when attempting to discern whether this motivator is beneficial. It seems like something that would be most appealing to teens who have an insatiable desire to build self-narratives. For our personal cultivar’s aesthetic ideal, we may borrow Simone’s motto, “repeated blunt force.” It serves as something of a perfect contrast to Slack or Wu Wei, implying that life should shatter upon your adamantine resolve.