In France, food norms are powerful and cohesive forces, while in the US food is simply a whirlwind of chaos.

hen there is a decrease in government stability, there is an increase in religiosity in both Eastern and Western cultures.

people who leave organized religion quickly become eager to replace the void with another system of meaning—a dimension most atheist groups have failed to consider.

Relationships and dating, wellness, and media are also categories where we see the same thing—a loss of trust in institutions that leads to a newfound looseness. In some cases things may not be loose enough yet. In other cases, the looseness is already beginning to feel uncomfortable.

Tight brands like the ones we’ve surveyed here raise the emotional stakes for their users. They create emotionally provocative norms so that we don’t just know the rules, but feel them deep in our bones.

Tighten the vice so people feel snug, not strangled. Find ways, either through context, belief systems or vision to tether all of the chaos down to something that makes sense of the world, that creates tension against the looseness.

Every culture falls on the spectrum from tight to loose: from highly structured and normative to loosely held and evolving. When a culture veers too far in one direction, there is often a reaction in the opposite direction.

Tight brands like Greenpeace, Trumpism or the modern Académie Française may appear like anomalies, but they are in fact deeply human—and highly predictable—reactions to loose cultures. The people in these groups felt destabilized by evaporating social codes, and in that mental state, welcomed in the strong voice of certainty. Where there is chaos,

According to him, the word “natural” has become a “sort of a secular stand-in for a generalized understanding of goodness, which in religion you’d call holiness, or purity, or something like that. “Nature,” with a capital N, [has taken] the place of God. In a secular society, we don’t look to religions to tell us what to eat or how to heal