I’m wondering how well I might organize my cultural drift messages around a few key slogans. Consider the following slogans as placeholders for better worded versions.
1. Adaptation Needs Variation, Selection, & a Stable World
Humanity’s superpower is cultural evolution. Such Darwinian evolution fails without sufficient variation or selection pressures, or if the context changes too fast. A few centuries ago we were fine; the world had 100Ks of peasant cultures, most facing frequent wars, pandemics, and famines, and the economy took a millennia to double. But then we merged peasants into a hundred or so national cultures, and then into just a few world cultures, all of which got so rich, healthy and peaceful that they almost never die. Also, the world economy now doubles every twenty years, fifty times faster than before. So now we are likely in trouble.
Every cultural feature has a min scale at which it can vary. We are doing fine re features that can vary at small scales, but in trouble re features that set game-theoretic equilibria, and so can only vary at large scales. Corporate culture features are small enough, but global features are not. Our actions are nested in goal hierarchies, and our most troubled features correspond to basic goals, near key values and morals, which are hard to vary locally as cultures punish moral deviants.
2. Change Hows, Not Whys
A reasonable response to cultural evolution failing re our more basic goals would be to get conservative about changing them. Allow changes to means, which can easily vary at small scales, but not to the ends which direct those means. That is, change hows but not whys. Alas, humanity moved the other way. At the dawn of “modernity”, the status jump that STEM (including business) fields had gained from innovating inspired non-STEM fields like art, religion, philosophy, politics, etc. to embrace innovation. Even though they mostly didn’t see enough data to pick adaptive changes.
Since then, our most celebrated heroes have been the cultural activists who causes the greatest changes to values and morals. As a result, we are decaying into maladaption far faster than we otherwise would. The clearest example of increasing maladaption is falling fertility; peak world babies/yr was in 2016, and world population will start to fall in ~30yrs, after which STEM innovation rates will grind to a halt.
3. When Icebergs Loom, Take the Ship Helm or a Lifeboat
The Amish and Haredim are now doubling their population every twenty years; the Amish have done so for over a century. Christians took over the Roman Empire by doubling every twenty years for three centuries, and these new insular religious subcultures seem similarly on track to replace our main world civilization. If you like what these subcultures stand for, and they let you join them, then yes you win. That is like folks on a ship heading for an iceberg, who get on a lifeboat. But the rest of us, in contrast, must try to turn the ship of world culture, or go down with that ship.
4. For What You Cherish To Last, It Must Fit What Survives
Thankfully, human extinction seems unlikely. But the world might lose key features of today’s world culture that were rare in prior cultures, like democracy, pacifism, gender equality, anti-kid-beating, and open intellectual inquiry. If you want such features to last long into the future, well past your lifetime, you’ll need to mix them into adaptive cultures. As only adaptive cultures last.
5. Let Bets Fail So We Don’t
Our civilization may fall so far as to fragment, and restart strong selection via big wars and pandemics. Which could restart adaptive evolution, allowing a new world civilization to rise. But unless we find new ways to drive adaptation besides mass death and fragmentation, civilizations may keep falling and rising indefinitely.
I see 3 new ways: let capitalism run most all life areas, run small groups by price estimates of future group adaptive success, or run big groups by price estimates of achieving big goals in conflict with civilization collapse. All three ways rely on strong selection among speculative market traders creating information that lets groups stay adaptive without their death or division. Yes this looks hard, but let’s start to try, maybe first by using such markets to guide corporate cultures away from maladaption.
Trump PAC founding guidelines, whatever they're called, were written so that any single donation over a specific amount -can't recall how much exactly, somewhere over $6k and below $8k- had to be spent on political campaigns and similar. Any single donation below that amount he could spend however he wanted, hookers, Mel's clothes, hair, make-up, plastic surgery, Diet Coke, abortions, whatever. Since most of his donations came in as $20 or less, he was sitting pretty and still is. There was a story from his first campaign about him attending a charity fundraising event. Even though he had donated nothing, he sat himself on the stage with the donors, taking the spot belonging to one of the donors who ended up sitting in the audience. Remember his refusing to attend the one debate in 2016, preferring to feature himself on stage and supposedly using that I love Me time as a fundraiser for military organizations? Haven't seen anything on a final outcome, but last I'd read, most of the money had never made it to the military organizations.