The Committee of Public Safety

Culture is the white filling

Culture is the highest layer of the CPSOT stack:

1. Culture: divides priority between desires.
2. Politics: divides power between desires.
3. Strategy: reconciles desire and power.
4. Operations: arranges desire and power in time and space.
5. Tactics: directs the interaction of desire and power with external forces.

Culture is an OODA loop. It is a learning machine focused on surviving/thriving in the face of changing external conditions. The secret to this survival and prosperity is adaption. Cultural adaption operates through the division of priority between desires. Each desire is a meme, a discrete unit of culture that seeks priority for itself at the expense of other memes. Each priority is a hypothesis, proposed by culture and disposed by the changing environment:

1. Decision proposes the priority and makes a prediction about its success.
2. Action tests the prediction by submitting it to external testing.
3. Observation receives feedback on the outside world’s score.
4. Orientation determines whether the priority should be called to action or be subjected to further decision.

If a priority adapts to current conditions in the outside world, it gains priority. If it is found wanting, it loses priority. This is the mechanism of cultural adaption.The coin in which gains or losses in priority are measured is power. The instrument that culture uses to divide priority between desires is politics, the division of power between desires. Power makes a desire achievable. Desire is a wish acted upon and power is prerequisite for action. Without power, desire loses priority. It becomes nothing more than a wish, fragile and transient.

As a tool, politics is mostly at the beck and call of culture. However, while culture decisively shapes politics, its influence is not inescapable. For politics, culture is like a gravity well: escape is possible with enough velocity. Imbalances that emerge between how priority is divided and how power is divided can be exploited by politics to shape culture.

Culture is habit, the enduring pattern of human behavior. It doesn’t linger in consciousness but soaks in deeper to shape consciousness beyond awareness. Culture is the art of the unspoken assumption, the invisible hand of adaption. We can dimly perceive its leading edge rising above the dark waters but the real behemoth lies beneath, its bulk lost in the mists. Culture is the oxygen of society, pervasive and all-encompassing yet invisible.

Culture is the fuel that powers human evolution. The human body, the hardware layer of mankind, evolves over eons. Culture evolves over centuries, providing instant adaption (on the scale of geological time). Acquired and even designed attributes can be passed on to future generations through cultural evolution (as opposed to passing on random accumulations of mutations in biological evolution). This paved the way for the spectacular evolutionary success of the human species.

Culture is not instantly subject to conscious human design. It’s plastic, able to bend but only with effort. This plasticity is a result of culture being tightly intertwined with instinct, the inherited mental hardware of man. Instinct only changes through biological evolution over the ages of the Earth. This makes it hard to change culture, which is a hybrid of hardware and software. Culture can change but the process is long, arduous, and only happens over extended periods of time.

Once cultural priorities are set, dominant desires frame all other desires. Culture creates a dominant framework of priorities. This framing is largely internal but, as a meme, it seeks to subvert and replace external frameworks. This makes battles between cultures battles between frameworks as one culture attempts to impose its framing on the others. This is the most difficult and power intensive of all conflicts, requiring one culture to push completely through another culture’s tactical, operational, strategic, and political layers to its tasty cultural filling. Culture is the core of a cosmic Twinkie.

Culture is quirky, resisting rational and predictable outcomes. Strange, unseen inputs flow in and strange, unseen outputs flow out. Culture is ultimately an adaption to the outside world but its intermediate stages of development take on curious and tortured forms. That is the curse and the glory of culture.