Beyond W.E.I.R.D.

Principles for an ultra high trust society

Joseph Henrich’s book “The WEIRDest People in the World” highlighted how truly strange the cultural norms of western civilisation are compared to the majority of people alive today. His catchy acronym highlighted that Westerners are Educated, Industrialised (though same say Individualistic), Rich and Democratic. In addition they are self-obsessed, control oriented, non-conformist, analytical and value personal attributes and accomplishments over relationships and social roles.

The root of this divergence has been traced to the lack of kin-based clans in the west. This otherwise common social structure was dissolved in the west when the Christian church banned cousin marriages in order to cement its own central power. There is however much evidence that the reproductive patterns in western Europe were unusual long before the rise of Christianity. Even the Romans commented that the people of Britain marry and have children very late in life, after a prolonged period of separation from their birth family. This tendency may be due to the unusually high genetic contributions from Yamnaya steppe horsemen in the populations of north-west Europe, themselves derived from a mixture of European hunter gatherer populations and farmers from the Levant and Anatolia. The much later impact of the Protestant reformation is therefore a reflection of this underlying genetic and temperamental difference between northern and southern Europe which is more dominated by early European farmers.

From this unusual foundation the people and cultures of north-west Europe developed a strange dynamic. The management of reproduction shrank from the family clan to the pair bonded couple, later typified by the nuclear family found in modern suburbia. In parallel, individuals began spending more time and energy outside the home, where they cooperated to create a vast array of large-scale public institutions. All of this relied on the creation of a high trust society where interpersonal violence was minimised and agreements between individuals were enforced. Under these conditions the necessary cultural and technological innovations accumulated until the industrial revolution was triggered, spilling out across the entire planet (though not automatically replacing the predominant clan based social structure elsewhere, a major blind spot for those with a western mindset). The early farmer populations likely failed to dominate north-west Europe since their subtropical crops took centuries to adapt to the cold and wet climate. By contrast the livestock-based agriculture of the Yamnaya more readily adapted for those conditions, especially when turbocharged by dairy production.

The WEIRD strategy which was so successful for so long is hitting major obstacles. The fossil fuel resource base which made industrial civilisation possible is being steadily degraded, depleting the vigour of our global economy. The market-based system is sacrificing the economic security of younger generations to keep the machine running a little longer. The needs of mega-institutions are trumping those of nuclear families. As a result many young adults are delaying reproduction to the point that demographics are collapsing. The nuclear family, the foundation upon which WEIRD society rests, is broken. Without innovation the most likely result is a return to clan based social dynamics, where a rigid structure of blood relatives provide the security necessary for young adults to reproduce. Going down this route would be a huge tragedy, setting humanity on a stagnant and unimaginative path.

I am proposing something different.

What if, instead of retreating out of fear, we pushed beyond W.E.I.R.D.?

Imagine a future society which fully liberates the individual while creating an ultra-high trust collective at the same time? Individualism and collectivism are not opposite poles of a simple one-dimensional spectrum. They are complementary qualities which interact at all levels of society. You can have some forms of freedom, and some of security at the same time under the right circumstances.

Humans regularly try to create break away societies. The modern industrial monoculture is obsessed with the most dysfunctional examples of these and calls them cults. You have probably been trained to fear and mock them, and not entirely without good reason. Groups of humans reinforce each other’s beliefs. The behavioural norms of isolated groups can radically diverge to the point of being baffling and terrifying to others. Cults also typically coalesce around charismatic leaders who master the techniques of group manipulation. The concentration of such power usually results in abuses and exploitation. Our own industrial culture is saturated with psychological manipulation, and its participants are arguably exploited from cradle to grave, but it is difficult to see this from inside the system. The whole point of a cult is that you cannot see the madness and absurdities from the inside. That is what makes it almost impossible to escape.

In the field of engineering a design must be evaluated for failure modes. How will this bridge or wheel wear out and collapse? What are the consequences for people when it happens? The same should apply for social engineering. When a charismatic cult leader (or monarch in the past) died or otherwise failed in their duties the surrounding structure usually underwent a spectacular collapse or prolonged power struggle. Strict hierarchies are efficient until they need to be rebuilt. Multicellular organisms solve this problem elegantly- every instance has a predetermined expiry date, and mechanism to create copies of itself. Give these copies minor variations on the original and you begin evolution. Allow copies to exchange useful heritable information and you turbocharge adaptation.

I don’t claim the ability to design a precise replacement to the nuclear family, but I believe a society is both possible and desirable where individuals are free from any permanent familial or romantic bonds but in which human reproduction is not just possible but enhanced compared to our historic norms. There are a few principles which can help humanity discover this new dynamic.

1. Human groups operate most efficiently at a scale of 3-12 people. This allows people to rapidly establish trust, to coordinate activities without excessive bureaucracy, and to hold individuals accountable for undesirable behaviour. The number 8 falls in the middle of this range and has some advantageous mathematical properties. This is the size where economies of scale are maximised for providing everyday necessities. Existing infrastructure can be easily adapted for this group size.

2. Groups take time to become accustomed to each other, but then accumulate interpersonal conflicts over time. This suggests there is an optimum life span for every group, though it likely varies considerably with circumstances. Remaining in one group also carries an opportunity cost for missed chances to interact with others outside the group. A culture which can master selecting, forming, running and terminating human groups can find the optimum balance of these factors.

3. Evolution relies on the accumulation of heritable information over time. As such these groups need an cross compatible operating system (a set of rules, plus cultural padding), similar to how shared religious texts create a kind of large scale cultural interoperability. The history of the bible is illustrative. The tradition began among fringe mystics, proliferated among a patchwork of early churches who swapped stories and cultural norms to compete for followers, then this collection of texts was standardised at the council of Nicaea to allow uniform mass adoption. The rigidity of this tradition later led to schisms in the church which catalysed major conflicts between different sides.
By contrast the operating system of this new culture needs to be decentralised and flexible. A group of people coming together must smoothly negotiate which specific version they will be using during their limited time together. A universal modular common structure could facilitate this process, much like how the influenza virus genome is composed of interchangeable segments. Once committed to a group, the consequences of those rules plays out. Individuals who find themselves at odds with the operating system can either wait for the end of the group cycle, or defect early. Real life experiences from living under that operating system informs the selection of rules for future groups. Wild social experiments usually fail and are contained, but occasionally new approaches are stumbled onto then shared widely.

4. High trust societies rely on mechanisms to identify and counteract selfish or damaging behaviour. In a society of transient groups of unrelated individuals this is critical. Currently governments and corporations are leveraging new digital technologies of mass surveillance of the global population for precisely this purpose. China’s social credit score system is an honest parallel to the hidden systems in the West (briefly exposed by Edward Snowden and others). Centralisation of this capacity will necessarily lead to abuses and systematic instability, not least when the technology powering the system degrades and disappears as resource limits bite.
An alternative system must rely on a decentralised culture of reputation management. In the short term something like a hybrid of bitcoin blockchain and the CCP’s social credit score might be feasible. Rather than the “proof of work” behind bitcoin you could have something like “proof of virtue”. Imagine this: individuals begin wearing a personal voice recorder as they enter adulthood. Every night they upload the raw audiofiles and use AI to convert them to more compact text transcripts. Today an entire lifetime of raw audio (~10 TB) could fit on a few hard drives. In text form that would become around 650 GB, a large thumbnail drive. This data set could remain the private property of the individual, but limited access could be granted to others who wish to evaluate their suitability for inclusion in a new group. LLMs are powerful tools for analysing this kind of data. Faking these rich data sets would be difficult, and key events would be cross correlated with the personal data sets of other individuals. A semi-automated system of cross correlation could be used to verify personal data (like listing past job references in a resume). These rich data sets could be analysed to improve the design of the cultural operating system in a way few human minds could contemplate.

5. This culture should aim to leverage digital technology while it exists, but create a tradition that can function well without it. For example the core operating manuals should be limited in size, such that they can be copied by hand by a single person in a day (around 20-40 thousand words) and read in a few hours. Adoption of shorthand writing methods can dramatically improve compression of information in text. Digital surveillance could be replaced with distributed systems of human powered accountability in time.

6. The culture should explore various growth modes. A batch type system would bring together unconnected individuals to form a new group, then break apart at some point in the future. This approach could be coordinated so multiple groups undergo reformation in a synchronised fashion, increasing the pool of potential applicants for each cycle. By contrast a flow type system would steadily replace one member at a time, and may be more advantageous for groups which conduct complex business where skills and resources must be accumulated to operate. Another option is a binary fission growth mode, imitating bacterial life cycles. An initial group of 4 established members can gradually add one new member to give them time to acclimate to the group culture. When the group reaches a maximum size of 8 the group can split into two smaller groups of 4 to restart the cycle. This strategy could be advantageous to spread the culture to new members.

Rather than carry on about abstract principles, I want to finish up by painting a picture about what life in this system might look like in its earliest iterations.

I was halfway through my accounting degree when the economy shat itself again. Without my part time jobs there was no way I could pay the rent and eat properly. A friend of mine had joined this weird AI pod share house thing where they packed twice as many people in a house and all wore voice recorders. It sounded straight out of black mirror, until one of my dodgy housemates stole all our phones and fucked us over. So I got an invite through my friend and gave it a go. It took me a few weeks to get used to it. Having minimal belongings made me nervous but meant I could leave on a whim if I wanted. Also nobody got permanent room allocations. It was 2-3 of us in each bedroom, and we were provided bedrolls which were actually pretty comfortable. The household chore schedule was straight out of boot camp, but nobody had a chance to shirk their responsibilities (the AI system kicked someone out who shirked their responsibilities and it was such a relief). The kitchen churned out basic, healthy food from bulk ingredients. My living expenses more than halved. Housemates were always coming and going, but I never worried about who they were since the screening and monitoring was so tight. I finished my degree and somehow landed an entry level job (don’t ask me how) and moved into my own apartment. Thought I had finally made it in life. But I hated it- coming home to an empty shoebox too exhausted to cook a crappy dinner alone. So I sold it and found another pod closer to work and cut my commute in half. Met some nice people, then moved again a few months later. When a job offer across the country came up it was easy to take it since I just slotted into another pod. It took me an hour to pack. My personal data set was big enough by then that they had no problems accepting me. Sometimes I use an LLM to analyse all my recorded conversations and it has helped me figure out a few things about myself. I’ve saved up enough that I could easily pod hop around the planet for the next few years without worrying. I’ve always wanted to experience Argentina, and their economy is booming at the moment. Some pods have even started sharing child birth, though I’d rather wait for the first groups to experiment and refine the model first. But maybe soon. There’s really nothing stopping me.