Exploring this intuition more deeply: Successful communities are known to do community stuff like sing together and have secret handshakes. If a person in a fledgling community proposes doing something this for the first time, people in our culture are apt to shut them down by saying it’s weird or (if done for the explicit purpose of community-building) inauthentic. The skeptics miss the fact that the weirdness is a feature, not a bug. Doing weird stuff with other people builds deep friendships, in the same way sharing private thoughts and fears builds deep friendships. Then somewhere along the line the weird stuff starts to become a tradition, and the fact that it’s a tradition builds group cohesion in a different way.
Hypothesis for why the antibodies exist: People noticed that there were standard methods for creating in-group identification, and these methods were exploited by con artists, advertisers, managers trying to get their employees to work harder, teachers trying to get their students to behave, etc. Antibodies formed in response.
Hypothesis for why the antibodies exist: People noticed that there were standard methods for creating in-group identification, and these methods were exploited by con artists, advertisers, managers trying to get their employees to work harder, teachers trying to get their students to behave, etc. Antibodies formed in response.
Given that the standard response to “weird” groups that demand cohesion/commitment seems to be “that sounds like a cult”, it feels like these antibodies could have developed after the cult scares, which Wikipedia tells me showed up seriously in the 1970s.
Wasn’t “Generation X” supposed to have been really cynical compared to the generations that preceded it? When I search for “cynical generation” on Google I get a bunch of results about how Millennials are really cynical too. So maybe it was a permanent shift.
Exploring this intuition more deeply: Successful communities are known to do community stuff like sing together and have secret handshakes. If a person in a fledgling community proposes doing something this for the first time, people in our culture are apt to shut them down by saying it’s weird or (if done for the explicit purpose of community-building) inauthentic. The skeptics miss the fact that the weirdness is a feature, not a bug. Doing weird stuff with other people builds deep friendships, in the same way sharing private thoughts and fears builds deep friendships. Then somewhere along the line the weird stuff starts to become a tradition, and the fact that it’s a tradition builds group cohesion in a different way.
Hypothesis for why the antibodies exist: People noticed that there were standard methods for creating in-group identification, and these methods were exploited by con artists, advertisers, managers trying to get their employees to work harder, teachers trying to get their students to behave, etc. Antibodies formed in response.
Given that the standard response to “weird” groups that demand cohesion/commitment seems to be “that sounds like a cult”, it feels like these antibodies could have developed after the cult scares, which Wikipedia tells me showed up seriously in the 1970s.
Yeah, this is my hypothesis. Vietnam and Watergate probably seriously contributed to a general erosion of trust in authorities as well.
Wasn’t “Generation X” supposed to have been really cynical compared to the generations that preceded it? When I search for “cynical generation” on Google I get a bunch of results about how Millennials are really cynical too. So maybe it was a permanent shift.
I like both of these posts a lot. Thanks for adding them—they helped me make explicit something implicit that I felt very strongly.