Macro Cultural Debt

The personal lives of Olympic medalists seem overwhelmingly devoted to practicing their sport; a dreary life. In contrast, prestigious firms today have norms that discourage such complete career devotion:

Employers have little patience with candidates who didn’t pick the most prestigious possible college or job, but were swayed by other considerations. Such as topics of interest, limited money, or the needs of a spouse or family. A “serious” person always picks max prestige. Always.

Yet for extracurriculars, you are not supposed to connect those to your career plans, as “nerds” do. You must instead do something with no practical value, but that is prestigious. Like varsity athletes in lacrosse or crew, sports that are too expensive for ordinary folks to pursue. Excess interest in ideas marks you as a “boring” “tool”. (More)

We can see this as elites using norms to coordinate to prevent their lives being totally filled with career competition. Yes, they also compete in non-career activities, but at least they get a change of pace. Common norms among elites through history can be seen as similarly trying to limit how people could achieve high status. To limit which sorts of people could compete, which activities they would do, and how much of their time would be spent on those.

This is how I now think about this key modern change:

Early in the Industrial Revolution, many noted the great productivity that resulted from very regimented and organized workplaces like shipyards and factories. They then expected and feared that such regimentation would spread to all the rest of their lives, including their food, clothes, homes, friends, lovers, and parenting. Novels like Pictures of a Socialist Future and We warned of this coming totalitarianism.

But what happened instead is that we have spent most of our increased wealth on not regimenting our non-work lives. Instead of such things being arranged and regimented efficiently by big orgs, as in our work lives, we instead each make pretty autonomous and artisanal choices. For example, instead of wearing standard uniforms, living in dorms with shared bathrooms, and eating at cafeterias, we each vary and duplicate all this at great expense. (More)

Though we allowed big competitive orgs to achieve high levels of efficiency and innovation in many key areas, we have so far coordinated to discourage people from using such orgs to achieve max competitive advantage in their non-work lives.

How could this have worked? Imagine you sold a big fraction of your future income to a for-profit “style agent” org, to which you gave the power to substantially influence where you live, what car you drive, what clothes you wear, how you do your hair and face, and what are your hobbies. They would do this in consultation with you, to best complement your abilities and ambitions, but also to max your career income, so they can max their cut of it.

Such firms would plausibly produce max income people, except that such folks’ status would fall too far when others learned that their lives had been managed this way. As we made strong norms ridiculing such regimented and managed lives. So while modern rates of cultural evolution have greatly increased in areas where we’ve allowed strong selection, we’ve prevented such strong selection in other areas.

The modern world thus has a big split, variously described as STEM vs humanities, quantitative vs qualitative, competition vs cooperation, profane vs sacred, and work vs. leisure. I’ll call them “system” vs “soul”. In the system areas, people and orgs frequently choose according to a low dimensional set of concrete metrics, driving big competitive orgs that used modern systems of concepts, analysis, and organization to make those “numbers go up”. Like how phone companies compete to make their phones cheap, light, long-lasting, wide-ranged, big-screened, and high computing.

In the remaining soul areas, in contrast, choices are made mostly by individuals pressured to use vibes to express their individuality, creativity, and authenticity. Like in friendship, love, parenting, art, entertainment, prestige, community, and voting. Or by folks who defer to specialists who aren’t monitored well enough to drive them to complete strongly to produce or innovate in either the soul or system areas where they claim expertise. Like priests who claim to produce religious soul, or education and medicine experts who claim to produce income or health.

Long ago both system and soul areas changed slowly together, such change being driven mainly by simple adaptive cultural evolution. And there was enormous variety in such things around the world. But then a few centuries ago system areas developed much stronger ways to select for adaptive change. Which greatly increased our long distance interaction via more talk, travel, and trade. Which caused a global convergence in all areas of culture.

At first, soul areas of culture tried to make minimal adjustments to accommodate system changes, but then around 1900, at the “modernism” transition, soul area folk decided that the one thing they agreed on was that prior soul styles were no good. So they switched to eagerly seeking change, via exploring many possibilities and following cultural activists supported by youth movements.

A rationale for this was to help soul areas adapt to fast changing system areas. And some soul changes did do this. But most were not tracking adaptive pressures, and so overall this change has led to our soul culture drifting to into increasing maladaption. Which is the key problem that will cause our civ to fall, and future civs that replace us to also fall, until we either slow system evolution way down, or find ways to induce fast adaptive soul changes.

Financial debt is money you must repay, and technical debt is accumulated when insufficient maintenance costs are paid counter the usual tendencies of complex systems like software to rot. Let me now use the term “macro cultural debt” to describe the costs that cultures that must eventually repay when key parts of them decay into maladaption. Like the “org culture debt” from the org culture literature. For over a century now we have been accumulating big cultural debt in our soul areas.

Maybe we could invent new ways to drive strong cultural evolution in soul areas. I’ve been exploring how futarchy might help. But until we find new better methods, the obvious solution is to allow the proven metric-driven for-profit orgs that have done so well in system areas to take more control over soul areas, such as via for-profit orgs that manage governance, parenting, and style (as outlined above). Early visions expressed in novels like Pictures of a Socialist Future and We may well be have been surprisingly prescient.

I get that I’m not painting a pretty or inspiring picture here. But my first allegiance is to tell the truth. If you don’t want descendant cultures to be as different from us today as we are from most random past cultures, but instead want some precious parts of our present soul culture to last far into the future, then we will need to find a way to package such precious parts with an overall adaptive cultural package. So we will need to somehow induce sufficient adaptive cultural evolution in most parts of soul culture.