#3 Tribe, Culture and Games
I have a persistent thread of thought that I would like to untangle this week. It has to do with the variety of cultures and rules which we are born into. I haven’t completely clarified my ideas in this area yet but I’d like to just pull some of them out of my head.
Actions, Consequences, and the Social Contract
We, humans, are undoubtedly social beings. The very few of us who choose to live as hermits are exceptions that only prove the rule. Our enormous societies today have their origins in the humble family unit—a group of us who live, work and play together, connected by bonds of kinship. I often imagine that in such a family unit, we all played a key role in its survival and progression. One of the advantages of living in such a small unit was that our contribution to it was very visceral. Regardless of how we contributed, it was very clear who we toiled for and why we laboured. There was a palpable and reciprocal relationship between one’s input into the group and the consequences of that input.
Eventually, driven by our curiosity and innate desire to have dominion over our environment, we worked out that it was more beneficial to work together in bigger groups to achieve our goals. As anyone who has ever been part of a group, even if two people will tell you that when you are trying to achieve something collectively, part of our individual needs has to be set aside for the benefit of the collective. This is the general basis of the ‘social contract’, a philosophical theory with a long tradition that postulates the origins of societies. The basic premise is that we choose to live in societies in accordance with an agreement or pact that governs our political or moral obligations. We frequently are expected to modify our behaviour in some way to act in accordance with the needs of society and, in return, society is meant to nourish us with stability, security and progress.
Since living in tribal bands of less than 100 members, we have grown to societies of billions. Despite the covid-19 pandemic, our world is still interconnected in ways that aren’t visible to us. I used to imagine how great it would be if humans could be like ants, working together with a hive mind. I now realise that we are more like ants than ants. Ants cannot cooperate outside of their hives but we have managed to overcome an impressive amount of biological and cultural barriers to form a largely functional global community of almost eight billion people.
The Fulfillment Paradox
As a collective, our species has been incredibly good at breaking barriers and innovating new rules that suit the changing times. I would have imagined that with all the material progress, we would all feel personally more fulfilled. This has not turned out to be the case. In his book Factfulness, Hans Rosling outlines countless ways our societies are materially better than they were and yet, many of us don’t feel that way. The conclusion seems to be that the world is getting better on most developmental metrics but we are all collectively feeling worse about it. Although we are living longer, more educated and far less conflict-prone, our emotional well-being is going the other way.
I think much of our modern emotional disconnectedness comes from a problem of scale. We are educated to consider the entire world as our own tribe. As an individual in a world of billions, the impact of our labour becomes almost anonymous. The once-simple and essential relationship between input and the consequences of that input has become diluted and divergent. Instead of bonds of kinship or community, our labour is rewarded in something cold but scalable—money. We are performing tasks at such a trickled down level that our biological feedback mechanisms do not recognise this contribution and doesn’t reward us directly for it. Our world might be global but our experience is still local.
I feel it would be unjust not to mention that I have been an immense benefactor of this globalised tribe. Without it, I would not have had the experiences, opportunities and friends that I have today. However, many people haven’t been so lucky. The dizzying pace at which our societies are growing has disrupted countless ways our species traditionally derived its fulfillment. There are more of us but we are feeling more isolated than ever. We have billions of tribesmen but most of them are invisible.
With that in mind, I want to share some personal feelings about the nature of our societies and delve deeper into our laboured pursuit of fulfillment.
The Game of Life
For a quick prologue—my early childhood was characterised by change. Within the decade from my birth, our family had moved at least 7 times—starting from my grandparent’s attic in rural Shanghai, and ending in a small rented apartment in Sydney, Australia. Due to various factors, between the age of 2 and 9, I was a boarding student at 4 different childcare centres and schools. The constantly changing physical environment made me experience our world a little differently than your average child.
I came to see my surroundings not as a fixed set of rules, but as an ever-changing one. I’m not sure how many other people see their society as a set of rules but that’s how I’ve come to understand it. Each of our human societies is governed by a different set of social contracts, derived from its unique trajectory in history. Since my childhood, I’ve also had the immense privilege of travelling to almost every corner of the world. The culmination of these experiences has cemented one important realisation - that a ‘good life’ comes in all shapes and sizes. There is simply no archetype for what a fulfilling life looks like. Most of us just happen to choose a path that is closest to us because we were born into it. I have come to understand that we humans are exceptionally good at adapting to our circumstances and we do this by learning the rules and playing the games around us in the best ways we can. I don’t use the word ‘game’ to trivialize these rule-sets, I am deeply aware that many of them are a matter of life and death. I mean ‘games’ as in there are rules in each society set by generations of people who came before us and if we act in certain ways and pursue certain things, we will be elevated in that particular society. This is what we would normally call social status. Society and culture isn’t just food or any of the other external displays. At its core, it is a set of rules that govern individual conduct by assigning punishment and reward. It tells its members what is good, desirable or bad and undesirable.
The expansion and blending of societies have resulted in endless games that we find ourselves in. Unlike recreational games we play, life doesn’t seem to have a discernible objective goal, I happen to think there isn’t an overarching one outside of survival of the species. There are in fact countless cultural games that our ape ancestors first started playing for a multitude of reasons and now we are many generations down the line playing new machinations of these games. What people generally term ‘success’ is simply someone who consistently played one of these cultural games exceptionally well. It might have started as a curiosity and became an obsession and we weighed that game more importantly over other games we could have played. The personal takeaway is, if success is what I am after, then I have to best pick a game as early as I can and hope that I have the physical, mental and emotional attributes to play it longer and better than other players in that game. If we despise the particular game we’re playing, it is probably a good sign that we either need to pick a different game to play, create our own game or find a culture that has a game better suited to us.
I am conscious of the fact that the word ‘games’ seem vague to describe everything that humans do and not all games are in the same category, played on the same level and many are connected and interdependent. For this particular thread of thought, I am just referring to any human social engagement that has an explicit or implicit ruleset that governs how that engagement should take place.
The Ossification Problem
An interesting feature of our cultural rules is that they all tend to harden and become dogmatic and unsuited to perform their functions over time. Ossification of culture is an issue common across all structures and games created by humans. I believe the issue stems from the fact that as soon as we create rules, they become fixed and limited by our language. It becomes rigid and non-exhaustive. We cannot possibly agree on rules in a way that completely covers every single situation, there are always holes. We typically solve this by having a human interpret a set of actions to align whatever situation with the original intent but this is problematic as well. Any human must interpret the meaning of the original intent and must also make a decision on whether to defend the old rules to their letter or reinterpret them for the changing environment. We see this tension play out in politics, religion, sports, essentially anywhere that we have tried to impose a ruleset on. We even use the term ‘game the system’ because there are always opportunities to engineer some way of achieving a goal that is not consistent with the genuine intention of the ruleset. Ossification refers to a hardening of bones and when it comes to organisations, it means that the players in that organisation game the system over time, little by little until that organisation morphs into something that doesn’t at all serve its created purpose.
All of these rules that govern our lives and our institutions are not static. They are moving and transforming in ways that are not immediately observable. Much of what we consider fixed is actually flexible, to varying degrees. Many things considered impossible is only so because most of us have never thought about challenging the status quo. When one of us achieves the ‘impossible’, we are collectively in awe because up until that point, we considered that limitation as a matter of physics.
What then is the antidote to all of this? I have absolutely no clue. I do know that I feel better when I shrink my world down and spend time with the people I like. So I am going to do just that.
