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Culture 🕌

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Culture can be defined as all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation.1

While economic systems determine incentive mechanisms in a society, our culture defines how we interact with one another and the environment around us. Culture is also responsible for setting up mechanisms through which we pass down our behavioral patterns from generation to generation. Even if we as a society manage to become prosperous in all its aspects, our culture would determine if we can persist prosperity across generations.

Culture can be understood by segregating it into various aspects:

  1. Social Dynamics captures our behavior towards each other as individuals and also as a group.

  2. Design of Institutions that we as a society use to govern ourselves and propagate values across generations.

  3. Our shared sense of Beliefs and Identity that forms the foundation of our participation in Social Dynamics and Institutions.

Social Dynamics​

All of us have certain inner motivations that control our behavior towards other individuals and together as a group. Some of these motives come from immediate needs like hunger, material greed or have their origin in perennial needs like one’s sense of ethics or aesthetics.

Basic Motives​

All of us have certain needs stemming out of our existence as biological beings. This takes the form of hunger, material needs, sexual desires, etc. These are temporal (short-lived), in a state of constant flux and often link themselves to some form of scarcity. Scarcity leads to a sense of insecurity that often manifests in the form of fear, anger, greed, lust, and hatred. Any group dynamic built on basic motives is quick to gain traction but is often short-lived and unable to scale beyond a certain limit due to the nature of these motives. Most economic and political movements today are built on basic motives. This leads to a highly polarized and competitive world.

Higher Motives​

There are certain needs that push us beyond our biological nature. These are perennial, often originating from our shared sense of beauty (i.e. aesthetics) and righteousness (i.e. ethics). Love, compassion, empathy, sense of purpose are some of the ways in which higher motives manifest. These emotions have an aspect of abundance to them. Any group dynamic built on higher motives requires a much stronger alignment amongst individuals and is initially slow to build. But once built these group dynamics are fast to gain traction and have no limits to their scale. Any social movement, art, literature, or science stemming out of higher motives outlives its creators and is unshaken by time.

Most group dynamics be it Religious, Political, or Economic have elements of both basic and higher motives in them. For any healthy culture to flourish it must anchor itself on higher motives. This happens only when institutions and individuals shaping a culture foster healthy integration of higher motives and basic motives.

Design of Institutions​

Culture often spreads through a society and propagates across generations via institutions that represent it. Institutions enforce governance mechanisms to maintain order in a society and reinforce its higher motives using soft power. Soft power is grown by encouraging the development and spread of arts, literature and sciences. It is therefore important for us to design our institutions correctly. Despite living in the 21st century most of us are still governed by institutions designed towards the end of the feudal era (14th Century) during Church-State separation.

Overcoming Outdated Institutions​

Historically institutions often start with the right intent but decline over time. While bad leadership is one of the reasons for decline, they often deteriorate due to rusty bureaucracy that fails to catch up with rapidly changing environments. Bureaucratic inertia finds its roots in democracy, regionality, and subsequent centralization. Consequently, a lot of irrelevant organizational inertia propagates across time as dogmas and outdated policies. This is how values are lost across generations. Values are not destroyed but often fail to reinvent with times. We live in a time where we can use our technological and social progress to redesign our institutions. Network States and DAOs provide a good design inspiration for new-age institutions.

Belief and Identity​

We often start connecting with certain ideas and identities even before we fully understand them. If an individual believes in certain higher motivations they will also gradually start embodying them.

Providing belief-based pathways that enable individuals to go deeper within themselves to expand their identities is integral to building an inclusive and expansive culture. That is often how belief translates into knowing and why culture has a huge impact on the mass populace. We use this to align them with higher motivations beneath a culture.

Fostering group dynamics through events, workshops, and seminars is a great way to enable individuals to strengthen their belief in higher motivations into knowing. This also helps build a good culture by setting the stage for the right kind of social dynamics.

Evolved Humans for an Evolved Society​

An evolved society needs equally aware and conscious individuals to participate and build the society, define it's culture and drive it's economics.

People who have gone through a personal transformative Journey of Self-Discovery and therefore have Self-Love can be the only individuals capable of Authentic Self-Expression in harmony with the collective and in service of the collective society.

Personal and Emotional Development needs to be part of our incentive system and external supportive services to be easily accessible.

Putting Things Together​

To bring prosperity, the New Gaia State (NGS) aims to build a new culture and a new economy "New Gaia Economy" that places emotional development at its core and works on abundance. In doing so we:

  1. Ensure each of NGC’s member satisfy their own needs around growth and survival to feel fulfilled both economically and emotionally. The expansion of an ecosystem should never come at the cost of one’s health and values.

  2. Utilize Creative Economy as a framework to build new political economies that can measure and incentivize emotional development alongside material progress.

  3. Provide the necessary infrastructure (Technology, Economy, and Culture) for multiple sub-societies to emerge within NGS and operate on their specialized domain of creative assets.

Footnotes​

  1. https://sites.google.com/thehayfieldschool.co.uk/characterandculture-equali-tea/home/our-cultural-capital/what-is-culture ↩