This is a really insightful post. I think we spend a lot of time reinventing things that have been working for humans for hundreds and thousands of years. And I wonder if the weakening of the "original institution" family is the real cause of loss of faith in all our larger institutions.
On a microscale, I'm on the HOA board of our neighborhood so I get to hear the complaints from anyone who's upset. The most frustrated people are the ones who don't know their neighbors: they've never met their next door neighbors, so they're suspicious of their intentions, angry about what it looks like is going on over there, afraid of what might happen. They want the HOA to step in as an institution and fix all their neighbors. As soon as you meet who lives in the house, you realize they don't mow as often as you'd like because they have a new baby, they didn't know that overgrown bush blocks your view but they're happy to trim it when you say something, their teens are really very nice and are more likely to bring you cookies than egg your house.
That's a long way of saying that when people are losing faith in institutions, the real problem is likely down at the level of their immediate relationships - they're missing the village that makes the larger world navigable. And as you've argued throughout this project, the strongest personal relationships are in families.
That's super interesting to hear about the HOA, and to think about it in the context of these other waning institutions. Going down the rabbit hole a bit, my impression is that HOAs are nearly ubiquitous in newer neighborhoods, and as someone who doesn't have an HOA I've always wondered why so many people are willing to cede control of their homes in that way. But it makes so much more sense when you think about it in the context of other institutions becoming weaker. I'm going to be chewing on this idea for a long time ha!
But your point about knowing people definitely rings true for me. I find that the conflicts in my neighborhood, no HOA notwithstanding, are very often between people who don't know each other.
I fully agree with your thesis that "clans" are likely a substantial part of the future of restoring psychologically-nurturing "villages" in our atomized world, though I think more thought needs to be put into mechanisms for reinforcing trust (and related sacrifice) within them.
My kids are still young, but I toy with the prospect of, when they're older, having a "clan" tax. Like everyone agrees to put in X% of income into an account that serves as a safety net and also a way to fund large family vacations.
Separately, I think part of what's needed is a post-enlightenment, post-secularization variant of religion. I see a lot of secularization as a kind of adolescent "throwing the baby out with the bathwater." Religion isn't just theology. It's millennia-tested communal psychology. See "How God Works" by David DeSteno.
What moderns need is some way of translating traditional religious wisdom for the modern "educated" mind and sensibility, coupled with the kinds of loyalty-mechanisms that ensure it isn't just a gym membership. It's hard, but a worthwhile project. In the meantime, I've found a workable home among colorado lutherans. Not too stuffy, not too loosey-goosey either.
Great stuff here. I think the idea of a clan tax is really interesting. Every so often I'll write a post here arguing that intermingled finances is one way to strengthen intergenerational bonds, but it's really hard to do if you don't have some sort of intergenerational business, or just a lot of money to invest with. Some collective pot money though could be any size, and wouldn't require everyone to give up their careers. (Watch, in six months l'll be proposing this to my extended family ha!)
And I agree about the need for something to fill the void that religion is leaving. I'm just not sure what it would be.
I am surrounded by many functional, intact families and while they do tremendous good they are still, by and large, isolated from any meaningful social organization. Their kids will grow up and become atomic individuals like everyone else. The village requires more coordination than almost anyone is comfortable with.
Yeah, that's in line with what I see as well. My thought is that while the nuclear family is a vital building block, it's not enough. The village is fundamentally an intergenerational institution and cannot exist at the single-unit level. One of the reasons I started this blog was to look for ways to bind multiple generations together into a cohesive group. The post in the "most popular" list about a family compound strikes me as one (though I'm sure there are many others). Basically, the idea is how to prevent the level of atomization that is common today.
One thought that comes to mind here is the idea of an "intact" family. That word is usually used to refer to a family with two parents and kids. But perhaps the definition should be — at least in the context of this blog ha — is a family that has involved grandparents, aunts and uncles, etc etc. In other words, may be a nuclear family is not by itself "intact." I'm just sort of thinking out loud, but it's something I hadn't considered until this comment.
At the end of the day, I think you're right that most people aren't interested in this. You basically need a "godfather" type figure to rule over the village (though hopefully that person isn't a mobster ha! And I don't see why it couldn't be anyone in the family, or even a group.) But I do think the minority of families that find a way to make it work gradually pull ahead. I'm reminded of the Hanna family, of Howard Hanna Real Estate, which I profiled a couple years ago. Their grandparents started with nothing, but the business is now run by the third generation, with the fourth coming up behind. Probably 90% of people I talk to about this say they'd never want to go into business with their families etc etc. But the people who make it work reap significant benefits, both professonally/financially and in terms of having a big interconnected family village.
Indeed, I think we've been successfully propagandized against doing business/working closely with family and friends in favor of trusting strangers. It's an odd dynamic when you think on it. Giving preference to honor from outsiders melts away a lot of the potential for intact multi-gen families. You grow to want to be perceived as an honorable individual among many, rather than maintaining honor as part of a group.
Also, a paywall question since you understand that world: would news publications ever offer the option to buy a single article alongside the option to get a subscription? I'm only up for subscribing to one newspaper a year, but I'd totally make a one-off payment for an interesting piece, like your utopian experiments article.
You know, it's a great question. I haven't seen that deployed, which honestly I think might be due to a lack of technology (my company has never built a system to offer one off articles).
Thinking about the concept, I guess the argument against it would be that it'd be hard to price. Like, lets say a news publication charges $15 a month for a subscription, but offers individual articles for $1 a piece. I could see most readers deciding that they can live with fewer than 15 articles, so suddenly everyone is doing a la carte. So, in other words, I guess subscriptions make it possible to produce a breadth of articles without worrying too much about which ones specifically drive the most revenue. Whether that's good or bad idk, but I would suspect that's part of the logic here.
Fwiw, I actually hate paywalls. I just want people to be able to read what I write, and my current job is the first one that has had a paywall. But sadly that's the way the internet is going. But I'm with you, I can't subscribe to everything out there.
That makes sense. The economics of publishing is such a tricky problem.
A decade ago I was editing for an academic book publisher, and at that time all the big presses were switching over to a subscription model, selling entire collections to university libraries at institution prices. It helped stabilize the publishers' revenue stream, but I don't think it was good for individual readers, who were priced out of the market if they weren't tied to a university, or for the field, since the quantity of pieces in the collection came to matter a lot more than the quality of individual works.
Fledgling institutions are scattered about, but they will not benefit from an influx of new members, contrary to the desires of many involved, and would get instantly plagued like the faltering behemoths we are told to vacate. Their precarity is unattractive, and likely the only aspect keeping them solvent and out of sight of freeloaders. That they do, in fact, look primitive is due to the lack of supply chain access to our complex society, access that they expect many more people to lose, and not voluntarily. They need time. Looking at it the other way, compare to when children are young and there is both a present of limited responsibility and a future of ambiguity, but that does not mean they are failing to be human, merely that their stage of development is not suitable for the scope of actions expected of adults.
Institutions are built by people capable of making decisions. What families have is high levels of buy-in and control. We are in an age where buy-in is a precious commodity, and those at the reins do not appear in control.
I don't know where I would be without my church community. The average amount of kids each family has, has to be between 4-5. And that makes for a lot of young groups and homeschooling groups. We go to a Latin Mass Catholic Church. Outside our church, nearly everyone puts their kids in daycare/public school, so it'd be very lonely, unless you have a ton of kids. We should try to restore our institutions not make new ones. It's 2024, we are not going back to hunter gatherer.
This is a really insightful post. I think we spend a lot of time reinventing things that have been working for humans for hundreds and thousands of years. And I wonder if the weakening of the "original institution" family is the real cause of loss of faith in all our larger institutions.
On a microscale, I'm on the HOA board of our neighborhood so I get to hear the complaints from anyone who's upset. The most frustrated people are the ones who don't know their neighbors: they've never met their next door neighbors, so they're suspicious of their intentions, angry about what it looks like is going on over there, afraid of what might happen. They want the HOA to step in as an institution and fix all their neighbors. As soon as you meet who lives in the house, you realize they don't mow as often as you'd like because they have a new baby, they didn't know that overgrown bush blocks your view but they're happy to trim it when you say something, their teens are really very nice and are more likely to bring you cookies than egg your house.
That's a long way of saying that when people are losing faith in institutions, the real problem is likely down at the level of their immediate relationships - they're missing the village that makes the larger world navigable. And as you've argued throughout this project, the strongest personal relationships are in families.
That's super interesting to hear about the HOA, and to think about it in the context of these other waning institutions. Going down the rabbit hole a bit, my impression is that HOAs are nearly ubiquitous in newer neighborhoods, and as someone who doesn't have an HOA I've always wondered why so many people are willing to cede control of their homes in that way. But it makes so much more sense when you think about it in the context of other institutions becoming weaker. I'm going to be chewing on this idea for a long time ha!
But your point about knowing people definitely rings true for me. I find that the conflicts in my neighborhood, no HOA notwithstanding, are very often between people who don't know each other.
I fully agree with your thesis that "clans" are likely a substantial part of the future of restoring psychologically-nurturing "villages" in our atomized world, though I think more thought needs to be put into mechanisms for reinforcing trust (and related sacrifice) within them.
My kids are still young, but I toy with the prospect of, when they're older, having a "clan" tax. Like everyone agrees to put in X% of income into an account that serves as a safety net and also a way to fund large family vacations.
Separately, I think part of what's needed is a post-enlightenment, post-secularization variant of religion. I see a lot of secularization as a kind of adolescent "throwing the baby out with the bathwater." Religion isn't just theology. It's millennia-tested communal psychology. See "How God Works" by David DeSteno.
What moderns need is some way of translating traditional religious wisdom for the modern "educated" mind and sensibility, coupled with the kinds of loyalty-mechanisms that ensure it isn't just a gym membership. It's hard, but a worthwhile project. In the meantime, I've found a workable home among colorado lutherans. Not too stuffy, not too loosey-goosey either.
Great stuff here. I think the idea of a clan tax is really interesting. Every so often I'll write a post here arguing that intermingled finances is one way to strengthen intergenerational bonds, but it's really hard to do if you don't have some sort of intergenerational business, or just a lot of money to invest with. Some collective pot money though could be any size, and wouldn't require everyone to give up their careers. (Watch, in six months l'll be proposing this to my extended family ha!)
And I agree about the need for something to fill the void that religion is leaving. I'm just not sure what it would be.
I am surrounded by many functional, intact families and while they do tremendous good they are still, by and large, isolated from any meaningful social organization. Their kids will grow up and become atomic individuals like everyone else. The village requires more coordination than almost anyone is comfortable with.
Yeah, that's in line with what I see as well. My thought is that while the nuclear family is a vital building block, it's not enough. The village is fundamentally an intergenerational institution and cannot exist at the single-unit level. One of the reasons I started this blog was to look for ways to bind multiple generations together into a cohesive group. The post in the "most popular" list about a family compound strikes me as one (though I'm sure there are many others). Basically, the idea is how to prevent the level of atomization that is common today.
One thought that comes to mind here is the idea of an "intact" family. That word is usually used to refer to a family with two parents and kids. But perhaps the definition should be — at least in the context of this blog ha — is a family that has involved grandparents, aunts and uncles, etc etc. In other words, may be a nuclear family is not by itself "intact." I'm just sort of thinking out loud, but it's something I hadn't considered until this comment.
At the end of the day, I think you're right that most people aren't interested in this. You basically need a "godfather" type figure to rule over the village (though hopefully that person isn't a mobster ha! And I don't see why it couldn't be anyone in the family, or even a group.) But I do think the minority of families that find a way to make it work gradually pull ahead. I'm reminded of the Hanna family, of Howard Hanna Real Estate, which I profiled a couple years ago. Their grandparents started with nothing, but the business is now run by the third generation, with the fourth coming up behind. Probably 90% of people I talk to about this say they'd never want to go into business with their families etc etc. But the people who make it work reap significant benefits, both professonally/financially and in terms of having a big interconnected family village.
Indeed, I think we've been successfully propagandized against doing business/working closely with family and friends in favor of trusting strangers. It's an odd dynamic when you think on it. Giving preference to honor from outsiders melts away a lot of the potential for intact multi-gen families. You grow to want to be perceived as an honorable individual among many, rather than maintaining honor as part of a group.
Also, a paywall question since you understand that world: would news publications ever offer the option to buy a single article alongside the option to get a subscription? I'm only up for subscribing to one newspaper a year, but I'd totally make a one-off payment for an interesting piece, like your utopian experiments article.
You know, it's a great question. I haven't seen that deployed, which honestly I think might be due to a lack of technology (my company has never built a system to offer one off articles).
Thinking about the concept, I guess the argument against it would be that it'd be hard to price. Like, lets say a news publication charges $15 a month for a subscription, but offers individual articles for $1 a piece. I could see most readers deciding that they can live with fewer than 15 articles, so suddenly everyone is doing a la carte. So, in other words, I guess subscriptions make it possible to produce a breadth of articles without worrying too much about which ones specifically drive the most revenue. Whether that's good or bad idk, but I would suspect that's part of the logic here.
Fwiw, I actually hate paywalls. I just want people to be able to read what I write, and my current job is the first one that has had a paywall. But sadly that's the way the internet is going. But I'm with you, I can't subscribe to everything out there.
That makes sense. The economics of publishing is such a tricky problem.
A decade ago I was editing for an academic book publisher, and at that time all the big presses were switching over to a subscription model, selling entire collections to university libraries at institution prices. It helped stabilize the publishers' revenue stream, but I don't think it was good for individual readers, who were priced out of the market if they weren't tied to a university, or for the field, since the quantity of pieces in the collection came to matter a lot more than the quality of individual works.
Fledgling institutions are scattered about, but they will not benefit from an influx of new members, contrary to the desires of many involved, and would get instantly plagued like the faltering behemoths we are told to vacate. Their precarity is unattractive, and likely the only aspect keeping them solvent and out of sight of freeloaders. That they do, in fact, look primitive is due to the lack of supply chain access to our complex society, access that they expect many more people to lose, and not voluntarily. They need time. Looking at it the other way, compare to when children are young and there is both a present of limited responsibility and a future of ambiguity, but that does not mean they are failing to be human, merely that their stage of development is not suitable for the scope of actions expected of adults.
Institutions are built by people capable of making decisions. What families have is high levels of buy-in and control. We are in an age where buy-in is a precious commodity, and those at the reins do not appear in control.
I don't know where I would be without my church community. The average amount of kids each family has, has to be between 4-5. And that makes for a lot of young groups and homeschooling groups. We go to a Latin Mass Catholic Church. Outside our church, nearly everyone puts their kids in daycare/public school, so it'd be very lonely, unless you have a ton of kids. We should try to restore our institutions not make new ones. It's 2024, we are not going back to hunter gatherer.