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We can define two competing modes within groups and cultures of all sizes: an implosive mode, built on mimesis, and an explosive mode, built on rejection. Both are subject to drift, and both have certain failure modes and risks.
In an implosive (or conservative) cultural mode, individuals behave in the same way as they believe their peers behave. In an explosive (or expansive) cultural mode, individuals behave in ways that they believe their peers do not behave.
The implosive mode may be justified on a rational basis — chesterson’s fence and the precautionary principle describe elements of an implosive mode — but at best the implosive mode keeps a group stuck at a local optimum along all valuable metrics; a conservative society will never grow substantially happier or more effective than it once was. Meanwhile, while the explosive mode can be justified rationally in terms of current action — the idea that “anywhere must be better than here, and anything must be better than this” — even when an explosive society is at peak performance it has a large number of spectacular individual failures. Neither of these modes operate primarily through rational means.
Implosive societies are more vulnerable to external changes — after all, a society whose only mode of norm construction is copying previous norms cannot invent new norms to adapt to rapid changes in material or social conditions. They are also uniquely vulnerable to the deleterious social effects of parasociality: an outsider can…
