There is a major cultural/psychological shift occurring.
We have violated core tenets of the way that civilization functions.
We are removing key cultural artifacts and changing how human beings engage with one another that have been established over hundreds of thousands of years. Think about the following changes:
- Harvest festivals have happened since the start of agriculture more than 10,000 years ago. Thanksgiving was canceled or limited. Christmas will also be deeply limited. What if the presents and the food is only a part of the value of the harvest festival? What if this was a key way to keep individuals on the periphery engaged in our society, or a critical way for information to jump across networks. We can’t possibly predict what happens if you stop celebrating these holidays.
- Smiling is a deeply rooted behavior to signal positive understanding of what is happening. My 4 month old can communicate vast amounts of information with a smile. Now we cannot smile, or even see other’s faces, we have lost most of how humans communicate, with facial language. What will happen to children that only learn to read the facial expressions of their parents, because all other faces are masked? What does this do to how our brains form, and how we communicate with one another?
- There is a moratorium on evicting tenants. When else in history have private property owners in the US been required to house people that don’t pay rent. This is a fundamental change to the value of private property and our system of justice. What happens when you break this social contract and don’t allow property owners the ability to manage what they own? What happens in the mind of a person that was about to pay rent and then they see that they don’t have to, does this create a moral hazard if the person has other needs they can afford because they don’t pay rent?
My concern is amplified by a mental model I learned many years ago called Pace Layering.
Pace layering is a mental model created by Stewart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalogue and The Long Now Foundation (@stewartbrand). He uses the model to describe the layers that comprise civilization and the speed at which each layer is capable of moving/changing.
The core is nature (The geology of earth, evolution of plants and animals, growth of ecosystems) at the base, it changes very slowly. Above it is culture (customs, economic systems, traditions, social norms, founding narratives) this moves faster than nature, but its rate is significantly slower than the layer of governance (how society enacts justice, property, marriage, social/political alliances). Governance is a reasonable way to keep time with the other layers because we can easily experience how quickly the layer of government changes during our lifetime.
Infrastructure rests between the slower moving layers and the faster layers above. Infrastructure describes how quickly a civilizations built environment can change (ports, bridges, roads, running water). These can be installed quickly during periods of growth but once installed do not often get updated.
The next layer is commerce (production of goods, means of exchange, technology) This layer moves dramatically faster than governance. If there is a way to profit from changing to become more efficient or productive there is an organizing incentive to move quickly to extract as much value as possible before there is competition. However, the fastest of all is fashion- but it is not straightforward change. Fashion is the way we think day to day, the clothes we wear, what foods are new to try. Things can become cool, hits and trends flare up, things go backwards and sideways as we thrust forward rapidly.
When I look at the Pace Layering mental model and think of the harvests celebrations canceled, the smiles forced behind masks and the new views on private property I think we are in a dangerous place.
Most people think these are surface changes that can both easily come back and are not more than a pleasurable social experience. But that view is incorrect. These are practices that are deep inside of civilization, we are throwing wrenches into gears in ways that no civilization has ever done.
I personally have started to look around for Lindy ways of living and thinking. How did the people before us handle problems, what were their lives like? While the situations are different I want to know how we compare, and to inquire if there is wisdom back there that we would do well to remember.
As I began to look, I saw that there are very interesting characters in the world right now publishing content that is pushing back on the dramatic changes to culture. In many ways they are pointing out how long the mentality of tolerance and the embrace of woke culture has been influencing how we think about things.
I am always looking for curious characters and I thought it was worth noting for the casual onlooker who these people are and
I found the very sharp Romanian economist Alex Kashuta with Tweets like these:
While the photo is provocative, her writing is even more so; but for the opposite reason that it would have been in the past. Alex is arguing that we should stigmatize sex work. I haven’t seen any arguments on that side of the fence outside of what most people would think of as some out of touch religious fanatic.
Just the idea that someone would publicly argue to stigmatize anyone for any reason is almost heretical in our society. Hell, the other day I went to CVS in the middle of the workday, and two grown adults were in the vestibule manning a table to get people to sign a pledge to stop bullying. We live in a world that wants everyone accepted and no one to be pushed out. That may come from a very good place, but this thinking is clearly wrong if you want to have standards in a society.
I also recently stumbled over what may well be GPT3 growing its own Twitter following, but the core of his philosophy appears to be that we have lost a sense of meaning, purpose and place because we have so fully adopted fashion level thinking- always being stimulated, always jumping around.
The entire feed is like this. Tweet after tweet about how to reflect on what is going on around you. A sense that the hyper hustle culture propagated by Tim Ferris and Gary V. Has left humans lacking a sense of wholeness. It works like a sort of calling to stop and think about the past, in a way that the fashion layer seems to want to stop.
I think @evan_ross Twitter feed will become a popular Twitter feed because he is concise, bold and with a set of values that can be understood. It is far easier to learn cultural values through the read-write back and forth with people pushing the boundaries, towards the old or the new.
Perhaps the most aware of this cultural shift is a man largely responsible for creating a gravity well of people questioning the value the direction towards Wokeness is Eric Weinstein. A name almost completely unknown in the mainstream world, but one of the first major figures with an Ivy League pedigree to start railing against mainstream order:
Eric Weinstein is a heretic. He is calling into question serious ideas in science and research. He is speaking about topics that are so on the edge, but with a level of familiarity and comfort that it seems like it was something that you always knew but couldn’t say. He is persuasive.
Eric Weinstein is a heretic. But so was Copernicus. 500 years later they dug him up and reburied him as a hero. “a gesture of reconciliation between science and faith,” The two must be reconciled because no matter what science tells us “is true” there is nothing about what we “ought” to do about that truth. That is where faith comes in. Without the two being reconciled the gears of civilization don’t work.
It is my sense that our government and many fellow countrymen don’t realize that in the last 9 months we have drilled all the way down to the cultural level. We are laying charges down there, blowing things up that we don’t fully understand, and have no way to predict the outcomes.
Catastrophes happen when layers either get stuck and things don’t change naturally or if they get sped up too fast and the layers start to erratically change. It is not clear that we need to slow everything down, perhaps major changes needed to happen and we are watching what happens if you don’t let certain layers run freely. But we are also radically changing layers, speeding them up, taking parts of them away. This is equally dangerous and we should be talking about the unintended consequences of not having a harvest festival, putting our faces behind masks and altering how we treat private property.
Ultimately, this realization about the radical changes to culture has prompted me to begin creating activities that I do because it is the holiday season. I am doing this in the hopes of creating traditions, or using the traditions of my family to keep the lives of everyone in my family in better time with the various pace layers. I think the only responsible thing that an individual can do is to conclude what of the past is worth preserving. Certainly change needs to happen and some things left behind, but it is good if you are making dramatic changes to how you celebrate the holidays this year, it is good to write down the traditions you used to have. If you are not actively preserving them they will go away and you will have no traditions and will be out of touch with the deep pace layers like culture.
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Originally published at https://articulate.ventures on December 22, 2020.
