2091 sats \ 0 replies \ @Coyote_Cosmico 25 Dec 2023 \ on: How to change culture? culture
Are there other non-market inputs to culture we might be able to use to change it?
First thing that comes to my mind is old fashioned grassroots organization and community building, for heavier stuff, civil disobedience/ protest.
There are well researched phenomena of social tipping points, where a passionate and determined minority catalyzes a major shift in the collective. I've read this number can be as low as 3.5% of a population, and on the higher end if 25% of people favor shifting a cultural norm it's essentially inevitable.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014893118
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aas8827
The protest focused movements seem a bit out of fashion now, and political culture in Western democracies has been so perverted that people feel they need to pick a side as soon as they first encounter or notice one - or determine "are these people like me, are they in my tribe?" Instead of looking at merits of what is being argued.
But to my mind, at least thus far, most major societal shifts occured this way. Many things we take for granted like 40 hour workweek, unleaded gasoline etc. came from a very small and very vocal group of advocates.
I was recently reading a book called Rise and Fall by John Michael Greer where he mentioned how big a deal the local fraternal orders were in American society .. they were a much larger cultural force than I had ever realized and were essentially non partisan social change incubators and training grounds for the type of collective organization needed to affect big change. Often this was specifically non-political in nature, and a very bottom-up idea of "let's get together and solve problem X ourselves."
From the book:
In 1920, for example, something like 3,500 different fraternal orders existed in the United States, and around 50 percent of the country’s adult population — counting both genders and all ethnic groups, by the way — belonged to at least one of them.
When the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville toured the newly founded American republic in the early years of the nineteenth century, he encountered plenty of things that left him scratching his head. The national obsession with making money, the atrocious food, and the weird way that high culture found its way into the most isolated backwoods settings — “There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare,” he wrote. “I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin” — all intrigued him, and found their way into the pages of his remarkable book Democracy in America.
Still, one of the things de Tocqueville found most astonishing bears directly on the theme of this chapter. The Americans of his time, when they wanted to make something happen, didn’t march around with placards or write their legislators demanding that the government do it. Instead, far more often than not, they simply put together a private association for the purpose, and did it themselves.
De Tocqueville wrote: “The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found institutions for education, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, and to send missionaries to the antipodes; and in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it be proposed to advance some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they found a society. Whenever, at the head of some new undertaking, you find the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you are sure to find an association. I met with several kinds of association in America of which I confess I had no previous notion; and I have often admired the extreme skill with which the inhabitants of the United States succeed in proposing a common object to the exertions of a great many men, and getting them voluntarily to pursue it.”
Seth Godin's book on tribes and others like it have interesting frameworks for thinking about in-group/ out-group dynamics which seem to be hard wired into humans. If I was trying to initiate a cultural shift I would start by trying to engineer a dynamic like that where people can quickly grok that "people like us do things like this."
One of the more powerful forces I've observed in these tribal dynamics is an in-group language. Bitcoiners are an obvious example of this.
My last thought here is that sometimes a culture shifting movement doesn't need market integration, and that type of fertilizer will kill it while it's young. Maybe more often it needs to be actually protected and insulated from the market.
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
Apologies this is a bit all over the map, I could go on and on about this fascinating topic! Hope this adds some ideas worth pondering.
write
preview