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Culture, in 3D

This simple example reminds us how a 500-person community doesn’t just exist as a 500-person giant on the “hundreds of people” slice of the loaf—it permeates the entire part of the loaf below it.

Every human phenomenon becomes a little clearer when we look at it in 2D with the help of our Psych Spectrum. And things start to make even more sense when we also consider Emergence Tower. Seeing in 3D allows us to consider both of these ideas simultaneously.

And finally, those 20 communities are all part of the larger 500-person community.

In your head, your Higher Mind and Primitive Mind compete for control of your psychology. On the group level, the two minds jostle for control over the group’s culture. When people are around other people, their Primitive and Higher Minds band together with others of their kind in a group-wide power struggle. And like a human’s personality, a group... See more

Culture is the collection of unwritten rules, norms, and values around “how we do things here.” Every human environment—from the two-person couples to the 20-person classrooms to the 20,000-person companies—is embedded with its own culture. We can visualize a group’s culture as a kind of gas cloud that fills the room when the group is together.

Idea Labs and Echo Chambers.

And the thing is, every entity in the loaf—every couple, family, community, company, university, religious institution, political party, nation, even the species as a whole—is doing its own thing in the other two dimensions. Each of them moves around the first dimension—the What axis—as its thoughts and behavior shift and evolve. And each is in its... See more

Living simultaneously in multiple cultures is part of what makes being a human tricky. Do we keep our individual inner values to ourselves and just do our best to match our external behavior to whatever culture we’re currently in a room with? Or do we stay loyal to one particular culture and live by those rules everywhere, even at our social or pro... See more

And let’s say those 500 people are divided perfectly into 100 five-person families.