Culture 3/11/25

In the Individual stage, culture is what I do.  (Individuality)

In the Family stage, culture is what we do.    (Relationship)

In the Tribe stage, culture is what they do.    (Conformity)

In the Nation stage, culture is whatever.        (Diversity)

-me

3/27/23 OVERVIEW

When two people form an adult partnership, they have to merge their Family of Origin (FOO) cultures to form a Family of Destination (FOD) culture. Ideally, they can benefit from the best from both cultures. That is why they call it the “power struggle.” 

In contemporary society we have retained the practice of women taking her husband's surname which signifies that the woman is joining the husband's family, not so much the other way around. That may be a left over from an older, accepted practice of stealing young women for wives from other tribes or families to bolster the gene pools. There was also a more brutal form of crossbreeding by raping the women of another society to spread a gene pool and demoralize opponents.

Each member of the partnership is instinctively driven to repeat their own FOO cultures. Part of the courting process is an attempt to find a partner with a fairly compatible FOO culture. The power struggle gives each partner a chance to audit their own FOO cultures as well as offering audit to each other. These audits offer a healing of neglected or broken FOO cultures. We naturally seek partners that allow us to reproduce our FOO culture that we support. Any aspect of our FOO culture that we oppose we will project onto our partner to continue to resolve conflicts and build boundaries that we could not as children. The partner becomes collateral damage to that process. Finding a partner with a similar flawed FOO culture intensifies the healing process and the conflict. Thus, the differences we perceive as least tolerable reveals what most needs to be healed but not how.

Raising a family is merging the FOO cultures and then raising the children in the FOD culture. Raising children has three major parts: making them, caring for them and training them.

Caring consists of food, clothing, shelter and safety. Training consists of passing a FOO culture (merger of the parents FOO cultures) and preparing them for participating in their society. Training prepares them to participate in the FOO culture and in their society cultures.

A good definition of a broken FOO culture is when a member of the family or the environment demands so much of the rest of the family that the training and even the care of the (other) children is neglected. A family in survival mode has not achieved a viable family culture yet or what they had was broken by demands. Children raised in a broken family culture don't have adequate training or even care which leaves them in survival modes carrying forward to adulthood and infecting their own FODs. Survival mode is a decomposition stage (discarding ineffective behaviors) and a composition stage (adding new, more appropriate behaviors). Composition (innovation) is in direct conflict with the tradition instincts. Innovation and lifelong dedicated conformity to FOO culture are completely in conflict. To a traditionalist, a diverse culture is a broken culture. To a traditionalist, an innovative failure is a broken culture. To an innovator, a failed experiment just a guide to the next experiment. Individual survival requires innovation. The survival of the group benefits from sustained behaviors. Perfecting sustained behaviors provides an escape from preoccupation with survival (dominance of survival efforts) but exposes the group to lethal obsolescence. 

There is specialization. Men are often seen as clueless because they are preoccupied processing their environment: threat detection; friend or foe; fight, challenge, avoid, submit; spend the day killing the neighbors and come home at night to make nice with the in-laws. Women don't have that inner conflict to deal with so they absorb much of the caring and have broader awareness. Men do have the job of teaching boys to manage their aggression. Raising children is a two person job. Women have the job of teaching girls to manage men. Fathers can teach their children more about their own FOO culture and mothers can do the same allowing the children to participate in the definition of their own FOO.

To fill in for imperfection in parenting and FOO cultures, children go through culture blending and also experimentation with their peers in adolescence. This continues to a lesser degree with adult peers. The diversity in FOO cultures requires public education to prepare children for participating in larger societies. This also brings conflicts between the diverse FOO culture education and public education. The attempt to placate the diverse FOO cultures yields a definition of the common culture. Once again what works for the Tribe stage does not for the Nation stage.

In the Nation stage there are four tiers of culture. There are the FOO cultures (both parents and sibling based). There are the cross family adolescent peer cultures (outgrowth of sibling culture). There are the formal education cultures. There are the remedial cultures of the legal system (a formalization of traditions).

3/11/25  SOCIAL ENGINEERING

Tradition is the institutionalization of group experience, past lessons learned. Tradition secures culture to the past. It is most effective when environmental changes are gradual. It is least effective dealing with changing environments. It is counter productive dealing with innovation. Shifting from the stability of the tradition based Tribe stage society to the innovation based Nation stage requires replacements for tradition. [Laws, regulations, police, judges] are a direct replacement for the role of traditions. What is needed is a culture to manage innovation based on ethics. We have let our culture of hunting and gathering be corrupted into an economy of greed. Greed is neither sustainable nor just. The answer lies in the practical science of engineering supported by ethics. However, Social Engineering has been branded with contempt and derision. Traditionalists abhor the process of experimentation because it is completely in conflict with Tribe stage societies. It is also our best method for developing new and evolving cultures. Traditional cultures are based on the premise that traditions are perfect and any change is heresy. Traditional societies have thrived because their tenets were oral and subject to collective adjustment. This is why modern societies are still so vulnerable to rumor and conformity. It is instinctive.

Enlightened cultures are based on conscious choice rather than genetic instincts. Conscious choice engages with innovation. Instincts reject it. To support a viable enlightened culture, we have to acknowledge our ancient instincts so that they can be managed, consciously. To guide an enlightened culture, we have to purse the practical science of Social Engineering.

It is clear evidence of the corruption in modern society when Socialism and Social Engineering are regarded with such disdain. If we eliminate socialism and social engineering, we are left with anarchy and stagnation. Tradition is an antidote to anarchy but an agent of stagnation. Socialism is society and Social Engineering is rational management of society.