(2022-08-10) Alexander A Cyclic Theory Of Subcultures

Scott Alexander: A Cyclic Theory Of Subcultures. David Chapman’s (2015-05-29) Chapman Geeks MOPs And Sociopaths In Subculture Evolution is rightfully a classic, but it doesn’t match my own experience. Either through good luck or poor observational skills, I’ve never seen a lot of sociopath takeovers. Instead, I’ve seen a gradual process of declining asabiyyah

I find Peter Turchin’s theories of civilizational cycles oddly helpful here, maybe moreso than for civilizations themselves. Riffing off his phase structure:

Phase 1: Precycle

People start a movement around a weird thing, with no hope of payoff, for sheer love of the thing.

Phase 2: Growth

The zeitgeist changes. The thing catches on. Because it’s so new, there is a vast frontier, waiting to be explored. Anyone willing to work hard can go to some virgin tract of ideaspace and start mining it for status. The returns on talent are high. During this phase, the movement grows in three ways.

Forward: People do more of the thing, better

Upward: People build infrastructure for the movement

Outward: All subcultures are, in a sense, status Ponzi schemes.

The key to this phase is that no member of the movement has an incentive to compete with any other member. There’s so much open frontier that it would be stupid to waste time backstabbing someone else instead of going off and grabbing the free status lying all around you.

Phase 3: Involution

Thanks to the Chinese for teaching me this lovely word, which I think works better than Turchin’s term “stagflation” in this context.

During this phase, a talented status-hungry young person who joins the movement is likely to expect status but not get it. The frontier is closed; there’s no virgin territory to go homesteading in. The only source of status is to seize someone else’s - ie to start a fight. (cf Elite Overproduction)

But the wider effect is fragmentation. During Involution phase, many counterelites are trying to slice off adherents and resources at the same time

Phase 4: Postcycle

At some point, everyone realizes you can’t get easy status from the subculture anymore. The people who want easy status stop joining, and the movement stabilizes in a low-growth state.

One way for this to happen is institutionalization

These institutions have stopped being social Ponzi schemes. You join them as a day job.

No Sociopaths Required

I think during the Involution phase, each faction might well think that the subculture must have been taken over by sociopaths (ie all the other factions). After all, everything used to be so nice and friendly, and now it’s full of people attacking each other for personal gain. But this doesn’t require that the new people be any different in ethics or commitment from the old people. Just more desperate.