This is part of a series of thought experiments regarding the creation of an endogamous community. Endogamous does not mean inbred, although the community would need to be fairly large to prevent such a thing.
The way this whole entreprise holds up is through cooperation: people stay in it, and participate in it, because they get something out of it. That’s the idea, anyways.
Cooperation arises when is it useful, and when trust is established. Establishing trust can be done on a local level through regular interaction in a small community, and on a larger scale through punishments and rewards.
What are punishments and rewards? They are crude tools: emotional stimuli used for banning or promoting certain kinds of behaviour. As already discussed, as a nascent community, we cannot and should not use violence. The punishments other successful communities use are shaming (status hit) and shunning (taking away cooperation), and those are sufficient because communities can rely on the state for enforcing basic things like the ban on interpersonal violence. That is important: in a modern western state, the existence of a police force and judiciary system means we can have a high level of trust for non-impulsive people. We can already trust each other rather well not to settle problems with violence, or not to steal each other’s credit card numbers.
The kind of trust we need to enforce (through shaming and shunning) in a large-scale community is similar to that of a large cousinhood. You want people in your community to be safe to approach with business ideas, honorable in dealings, honest about their intentions, clear about their personal values. Existing communities achieve this with the following rules:
- Omertà / taboo on snitching.
- Personal honor / promises are made in front of witnesses. (or God)
- Common values (religion)
The way we can achieve this in our community is similar. We can have an omertà culture, it arises naturally in small communities and scales up nicely. It doesn’t need to be as intense as that of the sicilian mafia to work, but we shouldn’t be too open about it. We can have a cultural practice of making sparingly used honor-binding promises in front of witnesses. This kind of oral contract is very effective for agreements that don’t require a written contract. We can select people on the basis of common values (reproduction and sustainability, which can be derived from one another anyways), and teach those to the next generation – not as a religion, but as a cultural package and a way of life, a bit like nationalism or humanism. Ours can be a lot better than either of those, since it will not break down easily upon examination – and indeed examination of it can be encouraged.
As a side note, shaming is a bottom-up process that is done by individuals, while shunning is more top-down since it requires a uniform response. Both should be used sparingly. You don’t want to have too many shaming-enforced rules, lest nobody knows exactly what they are and the culture spirals into a shaming-based status competition. You don’t want to shun too many people, lest they create their own community with an adversarial mindset towards the existing one.
The first generation problem
The most significant benefits of being a part of a community in modern society are as follows:
- Job-finding
- Recruitment
- Tontines / collective investment schemes
- Mate-finding
- Child care assistance
- Positive social pressure (self-improvement)
- Social security
Therein lies the problem: all of these things require a fully set up community. The first generation will not benefit much from it. The second generation might benefit some, but not fully. Point is, there is a gap to bridge in the meanwhile, and for however long it takes to get the ball rolling, we need to be clear that this is something we’re building for our descendants to take advantage of – not ourselves.
It’s worth mentioning that because the first generation will not immediately benefit from this, building the community should be a secondary pursuit for individual members. The most important thing for the first generation is to get their individual act together: skills, work, family, property. For one thing, because someone who can’t do that is effectively self-destructing no matter how worthy the cause, but also because it’s hardly possible to engage in fruitful cooperation if you’ve got nothing to bring to the table.
This means the community will have to be bootstrapped on a more flimsy basis at the beginning. Cooperative work, such as joint publishing, joint investment, can be a good basis, and so can be community building at the extended family level, as long as it happens without reducing requirements for joining: values, understanding of the project, willingness to be a part of it.
Brittonic memetics 