Designing a Governance Bomb
To create a family-office-based governance bomb strong enough to shape the nature of future societies, you must overcome at least four major threats:
- Growth
- Fidelity of information transfer
- Resistance to bad actors
- Dilution
Our rule of thumb for addressing these risks involves incentivizing stakeholders in a manner that serves the institution’s purpose. How does this work?
Side note: Dilution is a massively underrated threat to governance bombs that act through families. Historically, most (noble) family units had the explicit goal of increasing their power within the larger social hierarchy and eventually getting their hands on their society’s wider governing systems (like any good governance bomb should). The downfall of this system involved a rise in expectations around family equity. When the British first conquered Ireland, they imposed one of the harshest punishments possible on its powerful families, banning primogeniture and forcing them to split their inheritance equally among their children. This diluted their power, leaving them spent and irrelevant within just a few generations. Now almost all wealthy families—except for the old ones of Europe—are subject to this curse people used to go to war to avoid.
A Governance Bomb Demonstration
We’ll present our family office as an example (this is the organization known as “House Collins” in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion—though the Index uses a model derived from this one). Participants in three separate branches elect a Procurator—one for each branch—to represent them. These three elected Procurators then have a closed-door meeting in which they choose an overall leader for the organization, called an Executor, who runs the organization under the guidance of the previous two Executors.
Internal Bodies
The three branches are the Department of Industry, the Department of the Future, and the Department of the Past.
The Department of Industry
Voting power within the Department of Industry is determined by the amount of money an individual has personally contributed to the organization. This is slightly scaled for wealth (but nothing as extreme as quadratic voting) and has limiters preventing any one individual or organization from controlling more than 49% of the vote.
This is designed to encourage ongoing contribution to the organization and ensure that those with a mind for finance always have some power. The Department of Industry also reduces some risk of bribery and corruption by providing a legitimate outlet for using money to influence the system’s operation. When you make bribes legal and directly beneficial to an organization, you reduce participants’ power to corrupt it. In addition, by establishing financial contributions as a clear pathway to influence within an organization, you shore up the organization’s financial sustainability while also giving power to those who have made personal sacrifices for the system.
The Department of the Future
Voting power in the Department of the Future is determined by the number of active members a person has contributed to the organization, either in the form of new entrants who joined and attributed a particular person as inspiring them to do so or in the form of children over five who have chosen to participate in the organization of their own volition.
Active adult converts earn participants one vote with the Department of the Future, whereas each active child or grandchild participant yields one vote after the age of five and two votes after the age of 15 if they are still participating.
Children and grandchildren of adult converts also count toward votes for the individual who recruited the adult converts, which encourages House members to help new converts start and raise successful families. House members furthermore earn quarter votes for every successful spouse they helped to match with a member, to encourage matchmaking among prospective parents.
These voting rights ensure that those with the most vested interest in the future of the organization have a say in its current operations. Finally, rewarding House members for both children and grandchildren encourages them to be focused on the long term. “Winning” as a cultural unit does not mean raising happy, successful kids; it means raising people who in turn have and raise happy, successful kids.
Childbearing may seem like an overly slow driver of growth, but even a few families having seven kids each generation for a dozen generations can lead to a billion participants. As we argue in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion, we don’t believe it is possible to open the minds of adults—only previously-unaffiliated people who are already aligned with our mission will become new, adult members of this organization.
Growth through high birth rates is the only realistic path to expansion available to governance bombs that don’t want to prey on our lowest and most basal impulses. That said, the system does reward participants for bringing in adults, which should help to both increase short-term growth rates and bring in already-productive adults who can immediately contribute value to the system (it takes a while for a child to reach a point at which they contribute money and human capital rather than technically drain organizational resources).
It may seem odd to allow other individuals into a “family office,” but we have always found the extant system to feel kind of racist—or at least unproductively chauvinistic. Only allowing individuals into one’s family because of their genetics can lead to a system that emboldens ideologies around genetic supremacy. In addition, it conveys to individuals that they are “owed” something because of their birth circumstances, which is a very toxic mindset. Through making participation in the family something that can be earned rather than an expectation, we signal that the core of the family is our culture and our ambition, not just our genes. So long as someone is culturally aligned and fighting for the same goals, who are we to not join forces with them?
Finally, population growth created by a system like this would be a great boon to a world at the precipice of unprecedented demographic collapse—one of the greatest threats our species and ecosystem currently faces (despite what you’ll hear from anti-natalist interest groups, who have done very shallow research on the implications of plummeting human populations). If you are unfamiliar with the data around worldwide plummeting birth rates, visit Pronatalist.org.
The Department of the Past
This body is made up of all living past Executors and is designed to prevent radical change within the system while maximizing follow-through on previous generations’ plans, which may take centuries to fully execute. The Department of the Past is also meant to give those who have lived with the burden of leadership an opportunity to influence the choice of the next leader—plus help them navigate typically unforeseen complications and roadblocks.
Much like the Supreme Court, this is the final body of the organization that can shift and change policy and by far the most powerful of the three branches, as it does more than just elect the next executor (more on these powers later). It is trusted with this power because every member in it will have been elected to run the House’s office at some point in the past, meaning they have all the advantages of having been carefully chosen by the larger mechanism of the governing structure without the risk of extremist positioning that comes from being a single Executor.
Voting Power and Influence
One interesting innovation within this system you may have noticed is that a person can be an important and valued member of the family and have almost no voting power. The system is not designed to give every valued member equal power, but to elect Executors who have a long-term view and strong reasons to support the organization’s mission and values.
This governance bomb is markedly not designed to be fair. For example, a person could be born infertile, which would make it harder for them to gain a vote within the House of the Future than someone who could easily have kids. That sucks, but their not voting isn’t going to make the system particularly more likely to turn into an evil dictatorship, whereas a bunch of people who have no interest in how the organization is doing in 200 years might.
Each branch’s elected representatives (the Procurators) maintain their positions for five years or until 1% of the voting body signs a petition to elect a replacement, which can happen once every two years (this would be a vanishingly rare event as the only power Procurators have after they choose the Executor—the organization’s leader—is the power to recall the Executor).
Each Executor is elected for a single five-year term. During that term, they are responsible for all final decisions within the organization, the structure of its operations, and everything else—except for the process that elects future Executors. While Executors are responsible for the day-to-day operation of the organization, any of their decisions can be overturned by the combined will of the past two Executors, called Conservators when acting in this role. In ideal scenarios, Conservators mostly act in an advisory capacity and almost never exercise veto power. Essentially, one triumvirate system (the three Procurators) elects the newest member of a second triumvirate system (consisting of one Executor and two Conservators).
There are a number of reasons for setting up the system in this fashion and not just giving the Executor total control:
- **Sanity checking:** Rule by a triumvirate ensures that one suddenly-unstable or stupid leader cannot severely damage the organization. Conservators’ veto power adds a backup control method, beyond Procurator recall, should the leadership of any given Executor go off the rails.
- **Power transfer:** The gradual transfer of power away from a daily operational role to a more prestigious advisory role slowly loosens leaders’ hands on power while settling former Executors into a unique branch of government after this (the Department of the Past), which is a lifetime position that cannot be stripped from the individual (unless they are recalled during their term).
- The NASA problem: If an Executor launches an initiative that will take longer than one term to execute, it will be harder for their successor to drop it and take things in a totally different direction. (We call this the NASA problem, as any large space mission requires at least a few presidential administrations to accomplish, thus major missions often get scrapped upon the arrival of a new administration.)
- Animosity check: Such a system makes it very difficult for political factions with ill will toward other groups to achieve their goals.
Finally, changes to the way the voting system itself works are made by the Department of the Past, (e.g., does an AI count towards a vote if it has human level intelligence and joins?). Essentially, changes to the voting system can be proposed in a white paper by the Procurator, Executor, or Conservator and that white paper then gets voted on by the Department of the Past—if it receives more than 60% of the vote, it passes.
Resource Allocation
What will the money the organization collects be used for?
- Funding startups, initiatives, and sister organizations founded by members: Whether this funding takes the place of equity, debt, or donations, it can only act as a match to other sources of financing and is deployed on equal terms to said institutional financing (i.e. if a member-founded startup raises $1,000,000 from outside investors, then the organization may contribute up to $1,000,000 itself—but no more). This is to make it easier for organization members to build wealth themselves while not allowing for unwise deployment of capital.
- Education and childcare for members: Fidelity of information transfer is one of the most difficult challenges faced by multigenerational organizations. Encouraging the evolution of ideas while also ensuring that values and important ideas transfer from one generation to the next is not easy. We believe the only way to strike this balance is by securing a top-tier education for all members that imparts practical skills, equips members with emotional control, and instills a culture of self-examination.
Many more cult-like religious organizations shoot themselves in the foot by either creating negative childhood experiences (which increases attrition) or leaving members’ kids without a competitive edge in larger society (which reduces their ability to contribute wealth and resources to the organization once grown). Institutionally, anything that grants kids a great childhood, pride in their culture, and a competitive edge in modern markets should be considered a priority.
- Fertility Support and Matchmaking Markets: Given that a core focus of the organization is the production of new children, the organization will both fund things like IVF, the creation of children through artificial wombs, and matchmaking markets to help people find spouses.
Critically, the organization will never fund things like general healthcare or broadly charitable efforts. Healthcare is an endless pit for a family office once someone is terminally ill but one that always feels justifiable in the moment—you can burn through fortunes just trying to give one person a few years more of life. In addition, broadly charitable efforts can be used by individuals to raise their personal status within a community and burn through money with remarkable speed given they provide exogenous (to the betterment of the family) reasons to spend money.
Management
In its first years, we expect our family-office-turned-governance-bomb to run off of a Chinese-room-style architecture, but we have the mental clarity to recognize that even though this is the most effective current system and one we invented, it is still just a management system. Transcribing it into the code of a government would be as silly as transcribing SCRUM or waterfall product management techniques into a government structure—these things are temporary and will be improved with future generations.
Also, this is all crazy talk—the odds of our governance bomb actually working past our generation are extremely low unless we give our kids the greatest and best childhood possible while also preparing them to be successful adults (with success defined by metrics they choose for themselves). Even then, the odds are low. (Because we want to try anyway, our next book will be on not fucking that up.)