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In a negatively charged culture, the Primitive Mind is on its home turf. Conversations are pettier, values are more superficial, conformity beats individuality, and things tend to feel a lot like middle school. A culture like this speaks directly to the Primitive Minds in the heads of its members, continually stoking their fires and forcing their m... See more

So far, we’ve been focusing on the relationship between culture and individuals. In that realm, culture functions as the rules of engagement. But when we move up to higher levels of emergence, where groups of people function like giant organisms, a group’s culture becomes the giant’s personality.

In higher-minded culture, the pervading values are Higher-Mind driven, making it a positively charged culture that exerts an upward pull on the psyches of their members. The behavior rewarded or zapped by the culture align more with the Higher Mind’s values, and interactions carry a generally high-minded tone, which empowers the Higher Minds of the... See more

The same goes for understanding individuals. The people within our 500-person community don’t exist as isolated minds. Each person is an individual organism, an “organ” in the mini giant of their family, a piece of tissue in the larger giant of their small community, a cell in the 500-person community giant, and an organelle, molecule, atom, and su... See more

To make sense of all this, we need to discuss the critical, invisible force that ties all of the loaf’s slices together: culture.

But human thinking, like all things human, happens up and down Emergence Tower—in 3D. Where we are on the Thinking Ladder at any given moment is affected by what’s happening on the emergence slices above us—by the giants we’re a part of, and where they are on the Thinking Ladder.

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.

Culture, in 3D

This is our full “loaf” of human thinking and behavior. And like a loaf of bread, we can cut it into slices.

Most immediate to each of us are the micro-cultures of our immediate family, closest friends, and romantic relationships. Going against the current of all the larger communities combined tends to be easier than violating the unwritten rules of the most intimate mini cultures in someone’s life.