“There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.” – Margaret J. Wheatley

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Disclaimer:

This is a collection of theses based on my observations and patterns from data collected in my journal and Obsidian over a period of 5 years running two hostels and LIVING WITH over 1700 people from 63 countries. As yet, this does not involve scientific rigour. 

My diary has actions/anecdotes from so many people that patterns emerged organically. Just like biological evolution was observation at first, I think I will soon fund and/or conduct a study on values across cultures and geographies. For now, bear with these theses. Feel free to rip them apart. It will add more nuance.

Having said that, I have implemented my core thesis in multiple communities and it does work, practically.

Why are we here?

• To make our values & beliefs tangible
• Define culture and how values fit in
• To create a personal trust network – an antidote to the ‘loneliness epidemic’

History – Tribal Codependence

Throughout human history, we’ve lived in tribes, and codependence has always been needed.

Human beings, on their own, possess very little physical, intellectual, or spiritual power to impact our environment. But when we coordinate, like ants, nothing is impossible.

This presents a coordination problem. Who makes decisions, what roles are to be played, by whom, how are resources to be split, and what are the coordination rules?

The higher the consensus on more tribal decisions, the better coordinated the tribe is. These decisions need to be reinforced through symbols and rituals. 

What we call culture is just consensus on various cultural pegs.

The most important consensus is on who is an insider, who is an outsider, and what the parameters of success in the tribe are. 

A community is essentially the boundary between people we trust and those we don’t. 

The primary job of a community leader is to obtain resources from outsiders and distribute them among deserving insiders. Second most important job is to maintain internal consensus / cohesion.

Community may be how we coordinate to gather resources and ward off threats, but there are other reasons we need communities.

• the need for belongingness is so embedded in our biology that we feel anxious without it. Community is the feeling of safety
• helps us with the specialisation of labour, where each person in each role can do their job much better than if everyone was doing everything. 
• because most of our learning is memetic, it is important to have good culture for a prosperous next generation

Throughout history, we’ve lived in such small tribes. But the last few centuries have seen technology make us significantly more mobile and information flow rapidly.

This allowed us to be free of our “inherited culture.” We can see a variety of cultures on Netflix or by taking a flight to Japan. The last hundred years have been amazing for diversity. 

A couple of hundred years ago, if an Indian guy showed up in a Costa Rican village without context or references, I would have to win everyone’s trust even before visiting the chief of the Chortega tribe. In rural Texas, I would probably have a hard time just surviving without anyone to vouch for me.

We went from extreme tribalism to extreme universalism in a blip.

This presents us with a unique problem. Although we’ve successfully developed systems like Uber, rental apartments, casual dating via apps, and friends via hobby clubs, building deeper trust with people with unknown values is incredibly hard.

If we can’t build trust easily, there is no organic culture to align with.

This, I believe, is the cause of what VCs call the loneliness epidemic.

This problem is aggravated by the fact that ad-driven “social networks” like Instagram or Twitter have an incentive to polarize the masses to get “engagement”.

It is a self-sustaining vicious cycle that is fundamentally flawed. Like a black mirror episode.

The good news is there is hope. 

Because we understand the fundamental levers of humans and our culture, we can do it the right way. We discuss how to move to a more || aligned world, but the outcome is clear: “Help everyone build trusted relationships and find their tribe”.

Let’s start from the beginning.

Human decision-making stack

Every day, we are presented with thousands of decisions, each one with limited information, a bunch of choices, limited time, and no way to know whether the decision was optimal, even in hindsight. From which hand to use to brush your teeth to choosing Uber or Lyft for a ride to how to react when your boss is not in the best of moods, our minds are constantly making decisions.

There are so many decisions that our conscious mind’s processing power falls short. Are you consciously thinking about which hand to use to brush your teeth? No. What our brain does is, for a large part of decisions, it creates small software programs that execute on triggers.

These decisions are run by programs with patterns. These patterns are what we call personality.

They are also motivators for our expression and actions.

There is a stack of such programs in all our minds. Just like a computer Operating System is a set of decisions on Assembly Language and consumer applications are a set of decisions on the OS, we have categories of software programs in our subconscious mind.

Values are the base programs that drive all of our behaviour. Most of our decisions are constrained by them. It takes extra energy to make decisions outside these values. 

Values then translate into specifics in the form of beliefs.

Everything we call culture is a derivation of these. Habits, rituals, symbols, music, literature, food, clothing, and memes are derivatives of our beliefs. Bumper stickers of our minds.

Concept: Edward T. Hall’s Iceberg Model of Culture

Values

(Heavy thesis time!) I believe there are 7 to 15 fundamental value spectrums that apply to each human being. Most values—like Freedom, tradition, or Justice—are derivatives of these fundamental spectrums. I don’t know what these are, but enough data about values and talking to people help me narrow it down. It is a 5-year exercise, I think, but we will get there.

But there are properties of these values that we should discuss.

• each value is on a spectrum. For example, Freedom stands for a dislike of constraints. Some people operate better without structure. Opposite end is people who like structure. Such people are more likely to hold Discipline as a value. Each of us lives at one point on these spectrums.
• most values are derivatives of Base Spectrums. 

(I am still collecting data points to derive all the fundamental value spectrums – Base Spectrums. One of the main reasons for building this app is to get a large enough dataset to determine these value spectrums scientifically. Ideally, ValuesDAO will fund the largest study of human values globally.)

• Values do evolve over time but gradually: Values are so integrated with our external environment that they are relatively rigid.
• Cost of trust building: The more aligned two people’s values are, the less the cost of building and maintaining trust. This is the most important reason to have value-alignment
• Compounding trust: Value alignment between two people means the trust in that relationship compounds with each additional unit of effort. When you meet your school friend after a decade, you still feel an increased affinity even though all you know about them is from Instagram. Maybe we need to say that we are very aligned with who we spend our childhoods with.
• No moral judgement here. Tribes on either ends of a spectrum may see the other as enemy and “wrong”, but it is not so. Culture is largely a response to the external environment. This is about the efficiency of trust building.

By now, a common question is: Should we live in a bubble surrounded by people just like us? We will discuss how this intersects with diversity later. But for now, I can tell you that diversity is better when conscious. If both of us have conflicting values, we should be aware of that rather than blind to the fact.

After dissecting human beings at work, let us see how it connects to communities.

Culture

Do you know there is no first principles definition of culture? Popular dictionaries define it as a sum of its parts. That is equivalent to defining a dog as four legs, two eyes, etc.

(I know it is a big claim. Saving you a search. But do tell me if i’m wrong)

We will define this today. 

We saw how one human being makes decisions. Just like one computer talks to others over a ‘protocol’, how would two or a group of human beings align their decisions without having to reach a consensus on every little decision? That capability to coordinate is so essential to our survival, it is hard coded in our biology.

For the largest amount of time in human history, religion of some form provided guidelines to align such decisions. However, I see religions and every community as just bundles of philosophies, values, and beliefs. Every tribe has a shared understanding of the world and a consensus on how tribe members should act. The universalism has led us to move away from these identities and the constraints that come with them. 

This is good for individual freedom, creativity and innovation. But it causes highly inefficient trust-building at best and a loneliness epidemic at worst.

Culture is essentially a tribal consensus on each cultural pegs from the iceberg.

When a tribe

• agrees on a set of values, beliefs and philosophy
• uses symbols, rituals and other cultural pegs to embody and reinforce the consensus,
• culture emerges

Culture is largely arbitrary and often a response to geographical and environmental constraints. Why does one colour have some meaning in one tribe and something completely opposite in another? Because they’re responses, almost always.

As long as there is consensus among a large portion of a tribe, there is cohesiveness. 

I call it affinity. We will look into that later.

I’ve observed that consensus is largely implicit in most long-standing cultures. And of course, it evolves as it interacts with the external environment as well as swings on the pendulum for each cultural peg within its own boundaries.

Actors in a tribe

Every tribe will have conservatives who want to protect the status quo and rebels who want to change the consensus. 

Conservatives are mostly people who have a good amount of resources or are benefitting from the status quo while rebels are those who feel they are being undervalued.

Tradeoff between their ability to get external resources & their ability to maintain consensus is a big factor in whether a tribe grows or shrinks over generations.

A community leader assures this by ensuring those aligned with the tribe’s values and beliefs thrive while those with conflicting values are slashed metaphorically and practically.

A Community member should be aware of their personal values, and whether they align with the community’s. Imagine a socialist being a part of a golf club. It would be very costly to build trust and be the first on the chopping block should something go wrong.

The cultural iceberg is formed of thousands of cultural pegs.

Deep pegs like values and beliefs are drivers, while shallow pegs like music and literature are ‘reinforcing pegs’. Every culture needs both.

Cultural pegs also provide a sense of identity. In fact, identity is usually comprised of cultural pegs. It reinforces itself.

If done right, a cohesive culture can create a strong community that grows organically. Next, we look at how culture translates into cohesiveness: affinity.

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Recap time: for now, we know:

• more alignment = less cost of building trust.

• aligned relationship’s compound naturally
• a cohesive tribe is a feeling of safety, built on culture – a consensus on cultural pegs

Affinity

Right now we measure communities by their engagement metrics. I think it is a false metric adopted because Facebook and other ad-driven “social networks” optimised for that.

But it is so far removed from reality. Best communities in the world are still religions, and I may not go to my temple or pray every day, but I’m bound, a part of it. I will contribute in whatever little way, and if something or someone threatens it, I will do everything I can to protect it.

I may not even believe in the God inside, but I’m doing it for all the childhood memories, the festivals, and friendships. I can justify it with logic or theories but in reality, strong affinity exists.

This is the purpose of culture. To create affinity.

Usual question by now: How do we measure affinity? What is its unit of measurement? 

I don’t know what the markers for affinity are. This is one rabbit hole that I’ve been in for a while. Hopefully, in a year or so.

However, the reason I introduced this concept was to show that communities don’t scale very well because it is hard to scale culture to a large population without having forks.

And if culture forks, the affinity is split, usually leading to a retaliation cycle.

‘Dunbar Limit’ are the dreaded words no one wants to discuss. But no one can deny a limit exists.

Again, good news is that we can scale culture. With technologies like internet and blockchain, i think we can scale culture almost organically.

Scaling Culture

Communities are a mesh of many-to-many relationships—trusted relationships tied by similar identities and reinforced by culture.

Dunbar’s number theorises that we cannot scale a community beyond 150 people. Although the number is debatable, it is essential to note that trust-building takes time and requires maintenance.

Add these factors:

• it takes a lot of time and energy to know anyone’s values or beliefs in this diverse world.
• there are too many cultures around us
• all the cultural pegs have been scrambled when we went from tribalism to universalism. (Like a kid throwing a fit, i have to say, humanity went from ‘engagement ring means an intention to marry’ to a diverse range of options for one simple symbol. How do we align with each other in such a world of protocols being scrambled?

Makes me wonder, the number of trusted relationships a modern person has must be much lower than what our grandparents had. And a lower sense of belongingness to any of the tribes we interact with.

Why Scale Culture?

In the age of universalism, we need to scale culture.

My grandfather would ask all my school friends their native village’s names. A few generations ago, your tribe, geography, religion, race determined your values. Culture was hyper-localised. It wasn’t nearly as portablepotable. We could barely transact or communicate with someone from a different culture. Building trust with such a person was very costly and hard.

In the modern world, we attempted to replace this with credentials and the markers became more individualistic than collective. My last name hardly matters today. While the credential system works well for transactional relationships, it fails miserably when it comes to long-term tribe-building. 

A Harvard hoodie was a poor replacement for traditional clothing in terms of being identifiers of values. We compromised our relationship with ‘inherited culture’ to gain exposure to other cultures. 

But it is a false dichotomy. We can have both.

Think of each human being as part of one culture, their inherited culture.

For some people, this is too frustrating, and they feel undervalued. So, we move to cities and multi-national workplaces and are exposed to different values.

That mobility + a rise in universalism led to a unique problem. We have never seen anything like a loneliness epidemic in human history. It was just not possible. You would die or be killed alone. But now I can rent an Airbnb in Alaska and Papua New Guinea in two subsequent months. The problem here is that everyone is their individual self. So it is hard to find a clear overlap in rituals, symbols and stories.

How lonely would it be to be surrounded by everyone holding their own flags? That is the state of a lot of “developed” worlds and the “developing” world is moving towards that future, too.

Good news: Each of these flags, yours and everyone else’s, is made of the same base elements that are a part of your psychological makeup.

Even in the most diverse group of people, one can always find a few who align with their values and beliefs.

This changes the picture.

We should bypass the shallow cultural pegs like clothing, skin color, language, food, books, etc., and focus on basic legos of values and beliefs.

Identify our own values. Find people who have a high-alignment. And that would be the most efficient way to build trust while maintaining the universal inclusivity. It keeps the fabric of society from breaking because of random diversity.

Once a few of you get together, the group has a choice of inheriting some common culture or designing a new one.

This is how we scale culture consciously.

This leads us right into the diversity question. Let’s go!

Conscious Diversity

Cultural diversity is very much like genetic diversity. If the culture is too restrictive of interacting with other tribes and cultures, it stagnates and dies.

While diversity is desirable, mindless mixing of random cultures is a recipe for disaster. Just like inserting random genes in your DNA is not a great idea.

Some values are conflicting. Imagine if we insert a hippie into a hedge fund team on Wall St. Both the fund and the team member would be unhappy.

As we saw before, values are spectrums. So, knowing where you fall on the spectrum will help you find aligned people and interact consciously with people who hold conflicting values. 

Generally, I will be careful if I am at one extreme and the person I am interacting with is on the other extreme. To learn about diverse perspectives, I would talk to someone close to the centre.

Making values tangible is still the first step. In doing that, I am not proposing cultural incest of any kind. The core DNA has to be made of the same fundamental non-conflicting elements (values), and the skin could be any colour; the books can talk about everything from Odin to Taylor Swift.

Trust Circles

Now, on to the third part, building our personal trust circle.

My mission is to get the entire population to make their values tangible. The easiest way is to make everyone ‘feel’ value alignment.

First thing to do is to make you, an individual, experience the feeling of alignment and show you the mechanics to create your personal tribe.

I see this completely differently than Facebook’s ‘friend graph’. When we zoom out as a community leader/builder, it sure looks like a graph.

But it is not from an individual’s perspective. It looks like circles. 

The dotted line in the image below represents the invisible trust circles that we create in our minds. The circles are my school friend’s group, camping group, book club folks, temple-going friends, colleagues, etc.

Consider each little dense mesh as a circle. And the closer a mesh is to you, the more trust you have.

This perspective gave me the solution to the question: should I be a capitalist, socialist or communist?

My approach is to map it on my trust network. I will be a communist for my family, a socialist for closest friends and a capitalist for those outside my trust circle.

Visualising trust circles also helps me set boundaries and allocate time and energy. 

I consider my job to be adding value to my personal tribe, whether that is by improving coordination/motivation or by getting resources from outside and give it to the most-deserving ones in my trust circle. 

The more value I create, the more prosperous my tribe will be. This is the only way to be prosperous and stable. Grow with our tribes.

Civilisational Default

Our civilization could not handle the amount of diversity that technology has enabled. Most cultures are defaulting back to their last known configuration of values.

✗ countries elected right-wing leaders. Religion is making a comeback.

These are signs that the pendulum is moving towards tribalism again. It may move so fast, it will lead to dire consequences.

This decade, humans will search for and defend their identities and culture.

We can do better.

We should remember that this is not a conflict of countries or religions. It is a battle of values. 

We should wish the best values show themselves by winning. This thinking should help us remove morality from tribal conflicts and help us choose our values and tribes consciously.

Thank you.

What next?

Thank you for reading. I’ve been thinking and noting these theories for quite a few years now.

I would appreciate it if you drop your thoughts on DM / Twitter / Farcaster.

If you want to jam on your personal values or any of these ideas, please connect with me twitter.com/pareenl || warpcast.com/pareen 

What’s next?

Help 8 billion humans make their values tangible: app.valuesdao.io

• Cultural Darwin: Just like Darwin sat with a notebook to understand how species’ evolved, my aim is to conduct a large study of human values globally
• Vibe Mechanics: A course for community builders. Looking for sponsors, distribution partnerships, and a part-time contributor who can run the operations + content for this (budget: $1000 per month for the first 6 months. Self-funded, bootstrapped, not a billionaire, pls hold the hate comments i know the $/hour is too low here but that’s all i can spare for now. Post-sponsorship, we go to full crypto-market $/hour)
• Promote a developer ecosystem to use this data-layer

How can you help?

Communicate:

• Try the buggy app please: app.valuesdao.io
• Our Discord: https://discord.gg/zRbGmWe4xN 
• Telegram: https://t.me/valuesdao1 
• Our Events: https://lu.ma/values 

Loose:

• Drop your community’s values NFTs. I will do a zoom session to define your community’s values (with the founders) and our app will enable your members to claim those values as NFTs
• Discussion call: DM me to set up a call and we will jam on this

Tight:

• Integrate with your community’s profile
• Advice on whether it is possible to build this new social primitive without VC money?
• Sponsorship for the Community building course
• Consulting for your community building. Helps pay for this project and sustain myself (happy to share portfolio link for past PoW)

FAQs (wip)

• What if someone reports wrong values?
• How do you know these values are accurate?
• what will you do with values?
• what is making values tangible?

Thoughts:

• All social media is an access control problem

• Connect folks to the most-aligned people anywhere in the world
• From Travis’ convo: Implicit consensus vs Explicit consensus

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Other notes

Frame: Personal Tribe

This is a little tangent to help you see community building from a personal perspective before we see it from a community builder’s zoomed-out perspective.

It starts by identifying your core drivers – your values and beliefs. Then, you find other people whose core levers align with yours. This alignment means less loss of signal when you communicate and act. Do you know you just vibe with someone sometimes and then find a ton of commonalities in experiences? That’s what value-alignment feels like. 

When our values are aligned, the cost of building trust is low. If humility is a dear value, it will be very hard for me to be highly trusting of an egoistic person. That trust will require a lot of ‘maintenance’ or ‘reinforcement’ costs.