Unless we find new ways to drive adaptation besides mass death and fragmentation, our civilizations may keep falling and rising indefinitely. I see 3 new ways: let capitalism run most all life areas, run small groups by speculative market estimates of future group adaptive success, or run big groups by such price estimates of achieving big goals in conflict with civilization collapse. All three ways rely on strong selection among market traders creating information that lets groups stay adaptive without their death or division. (More)
Those are three plausible strategies to drive an effective governance process to promote cultural adaption. But effective processes must then induce the more specific activities and choices that would actually be effective at inducing healthy cultural evolution. And I haven’t said much about specifically what those would be. I’ve also suggested that a good preparation for any of these approaches would be to get good at managing corporate cultural change. But I also haven’t said how exactly we could do that. So let me now say more about these.
It seems pretty clear to me that actual processes that induce healthy cultural evolution must involve a lot of cultural experimentation. But instead of only random large variations characteristic of simple Darwinian evolution, I expect it to look more like the directed trials commonly done in agricultural, medical, and product innovation, and in venture capital.
In our capitalist world today, we do have many different products and services that just directly compete for customer allegiance in a mostly wild uncontrolled free-for-all. But those competing options were themselves usually generated and honed via more directed processes. For example, new product ideas often go through five stages of directed testing and trials: concept testing, prototype testing, product testing, field trials, and market trials. Ventures invest in those early stages out of hopes that they might lead to success versions in the final free-for-all contests.
As “cults” are relatively insular groups following deviant cultures, this may involve the promotion and testing of varied cults. And as norms and morals are a big part of culture, this also implies directed trials of different moral norms. Of course this usually wouldn’t allow moral deviants to be much excused on the grounds that they have contributed to cultural experimentation. But yes, there would be some element of that. When their deviations are aligned enough with interesting dimensions and experiments, yes moral deviants may well be credited for their assistance. Oh brave new world of moral experimentation.