[Theme] On the Building of Culture

So I don't want to restart my political blog.

And I don't want to write about politics on my writing blog, but a few events have come together recently that I thought were worthy of consideration.

The first was that we are watching the show Connections (my wife and I), which looks at Change from a different point of view.

The second was a conversation I recently had with my friend Wayne, who has pointed out that China has been exploring how to have a stable society that isn't a democracy.  Note: I believe in Democracy and think it is a good idea

But this morning I couldn't help but think of this quote

Third - this quote

And then I remembered this seminal work by Thomas Piketty.

Thumb Nail version? The more stable a society is, the stratification takes place.  This is simply a matter of mathematics.  WWI and WWII shook things up, but if we have WWIII there might not be any more society to have...which creates stability, which creates stratification.

Fourth and final, I remembered this - The United States is an Oligarchy.  That isn't really news. It's scientifically proven.  Furthermore, the math of our constitution favors a two party system.  This is nothing new, people have been aware of it for a long time.

What I want to explore is that Democracy is the best form of government, but for WHO? Well ok so we want "democratic socialism" but HOW? And even if we got it, could we keep it?

These questions are not new.  You know that.  But they're actually VERY old.

Remember this guy?

Plato talks about the inherit instability of democracies or Republics in the Republic.  He knew it, but Piketty has gone and mathematically gone and proved it.

So say you GET Democratic Socialism? Say you GET a post scarcitity utopia...how do you KEEP it?

You can tinker with different ideas, but how can you be SURE?

We need a scientific answer.  We need a means and a discipline to be able to shape and create cultures.  We need Cultural Engineering.

This idea is also not knew.  I'm not proposing anything others having thought of.

Propaganda isn't new.  Once Psychology existed, people wanted to exploit it for the purpose of influencing the masses.

And boy can they.

Knowing HOW to manipulate the masses isn't really a question.  And we will keep coming up with ways to do it.

The missing equation isn't the HOW, it's the WHAT.

What the hell are you going to build? WHAT do you build to keep a society from going off the rails.  Even this question isn't new.

Progressives at the turn of the 20th century thought that government was the answer.

You could build it better, stronger faster, and government could be the solution.  Often, it can.  And something is better than nothing which is why government can work, but sometimes a government solution can be a bit of a hammer looking for a nail.

The counter argument was of course...

I'm not even going to talk about that argument.  Read the book if you like....

But as my friend Wayne also pointed out...that argument pretends that the Tragedy of the Commons is a Myth.

TLDR version?

Moving on.

I had long thought the solution lied in perhaps non government institutions, like the Red Cross.  And I will be exploring that in part, but its more than that.  We need something else.

Again, I'm not the only person asking this question.

1) One of the most rewarding experiences of my life was working with the Mythic Imagination Institute.

And for anyone exploring this question I cannot recommend reading their journal enough.  But for the purposes of what I'm seeking here, I'm not using the word they came up with "Applied Mythology" because that has some very specific ideas.  It basically involves using the Power of Myth to use meta story telling techniques to grant meaning and power to your life and to your community at large.

I do believe that many of the answers they found there apply to what I'm looking to do here.  But I don't think it has all the answers; and more importantly, they have their way of doing things that others are not going to want to use, both because they have a misunderstanding of the use of the term mythology and also because.....other reasons I might go into at some point.

But its powerful stuff, and I recommend learning about them and investigating them.  What's still there anyway.

2) Governments have been looking to do this for quite a while.  While doing research as Project Manager for Mythic, I found an interesting article which basically indicated that at one point DARPA was looking into story telling as a tool.  I've since had a hell of a time finding it.

I wonder if someone found it and made it disappear...

Maybe.  Or maybe it just is too obscure to remember.

Dunno.

Governments want to prune society like Bansai trees.  It helps keep things stable.

So knowing how to keep populations passive might work for governments....but does that help society?

Who should benefit in society? That's a philosophical question at the best of times, but in the question of this case, its very relevant, because a scientific or academic discipline that focuses on shaping culture should ideally have a philosophy behind it.  After all, one can have medical knowledge but to be a Doctor, as we understand it, one should understand the ethics that have been built up around the philosophy of First, Do No Harm.

This is powerful knowledge, and like bioethics and genetics it should have an understanding of who it is meant to serve.  Not the few, not the powerful, not any race creed religion or color but the idea of building societies and cultures by DESIGN rather than happenstance for the populace at large.

I will be writing Saturdays, but not every Saturday, exploring just that.  If I ever resurrect the podcast, I'll move this to Sundays.  I argue it is relevant to my writing blog because a) Writing Non Fiction is still writing and b) An understanding of what makes people tick and why they do is something every writer should know, because this relates directly to that message within the message that every writer looks for...Theme.

I'll do what to CALL it in the next entry.