Memetic Maladaption

How good times create weak men and what to do about it.

Source: Midjourney¹

There are already tons of social cycle theories - relevantly, Strauss-Howe, Hopf’s “hard times” quote, and Dalio’s debt cycle - but I’m going to offer another one anyway: the Memetic Maladaption cycle.

It doesn’t refute any of these other ideas. Rather, the goal is to offer some tentative answers to questions generated by them and provide a dose of optimism.

The memetic maladaption cycle is:

• Material Wealth

• Insulated Indulgence

• Dominant Indulgence

• Cultural Insolvency & Collapse

Two concepts that underpin this are memetic Darwinism and “indulgence” as a cost-delayed pleasure.

Memetic Darwinism is the idea that the ideas themselves that make up cultures spread, compete, adapt, and die. Just as with animals, ideas can overadapt to anomalous conditions. In sheltered, over-protected conditions, cultures may acquire memetic “phenotypes” that will be their downfall later. Just as the dodo evolved a fatal fearlessness in the pristine Cook Islands, so too do bad ideas prosper in good times.

My use of “indulgence” is slightly different from the dictionary definition. In this context, I use the word to mean partaking in a pleasure for which the costs will be incurred later. The temporal mismatch between cost and benefit is important.

The cycle starts with the acquisition of widespread material wealth, e.g. the establishment of an empire².

Wealth enables indulgence. People engage in pleasurable activities with costs that will come later. They eat and drink away their health, engage in questionable sexual practices, or fail to tend to their families. When the costs come due, the wealth of the society insulates individuals. When their health fails, they pay for doctors. When there is no subsequent generation to care for them in old age, they pay for nursing homes.

This definition of indulgence is also wider than the common denotations for “decadence.” Military adventurism, abusive trade terms, bloated bureaucracies, corrupted education, misguided research, and captured markets are also indulgences in this context. Each imposes a cost on the society at some point in the future. As with individual indulgences, the costs of these indulgences can be papered over with wealth for a bit.

Without a padding of wealth, these costs quickly impose self-corrective behaviors. But as long as the costs can be covered, indulgence will rise in popularity. People like to do what they want. As long as indulgent ideas aren’t effectively punished, they will start to crowd out “old-fashioned” ideas like self-restraint. If the padding of wealth is large enough, indulgence will become the dominant meme in the culture.

Eventually, the bulk of the population goes about racking up future costs they may or may not be able to pay for. These costs are incurred in many currencies, not all of which can be paid for with money. Yes, some reduce the future cash flows of the economy. Some others reduce military strength. Some reduce the physical, intellectual, and spiritual health of the whole people. Good times create weak men.

The indulgent society sells out its future and is eventually caught between the rising tide of deferred costs and and the erosion of the abilities it uses to pay for them. When this happens, it becomes culturally insolvent. This insolvency may be financial, as the term is typically used, but can just as easily be something like an invasion or spontaneous collapse.

Cultural insolvency is essentially a Fourth Turning. In fact, so far, this is just a reskinned Strauss-Howe. Societies get rich and then forget how they got rich and that causes problems. So what? Well, Strauss-Howe theory doesn’t offer much in the way of thoughts on how some societies rally through their Fourth turnings and emerge stronger, while some wither away. And that is what I hope to contribute.

My suggestion is that by focusing on the quality and diversity of memetic stock, a society will have the best chance of navigating it’s Fourth Turning or cultural insolvency. Preserving the memory of traditional religions, social structures, values, etc. might provide the way forward from times of crisis. When something goes wrong, we can reset our cultural memetics to the prior version.

Many people understand this intuitively. Tradwave, neotraditionalism, BAP, and RETVRN are all having a moment for reasons that are deeper than simple nostalgia. After all, nobody is really all that nostalgic for dysentery and heatstroked summers on the farm. But people understand there is a break from how their ancestors lived. They feel, daily, the disconnect between their digitized self and their corporal one. So, they look to the past.

There is a risk, however, that we mistake form for function. Sharing a TradCath meme might be fun, but how many people in the American Christian church could summarize Samuel Adams’ theological grounding for freedom and rebellion? We love the paintings of nuclear (or nuclear+extended) families, but do we understand how to structure an economy to support it?

These questions and many more have been answered. But we have to work to keep them. It won’t be enough to just ape the style and rose-colored ideals of the past. We have to keep the ideas behind them alive.

Being old doesn’t necessarily make something good, true, but being old AND being remembered probably does. Much has already been made and forgotten. The stories, faiths, values, and even technologies that have been in use for one or two thousand years have probably been around that long for a reason.

How do we keep them in the memetic gene pool? Some starting places I’d suggest: Read old books. Practice an old religion. Learn why a fence was put up before taking it down. Learn an old hobby - playing music, drawing, writing, handmade crafts. I’d love to hear your suggestions in the comments.

Keeping these ideas alive will take effort. Many links in the chain are already broken, but my hope is that by thinking about our memetic gene pool intentionally, we can preserve the most important ideas, the ones we may need to re-introduce to the wild when an indulgent culture takes us sideways.

1. The irony of using an AI system that re-synthesizes inputs without understanding why, down to a fake watermark common in the inputs, to describe a culture that forgets why it’s doing anything isn’t lost on me.

2. You can see this cycle play out on shorter timeframes with some individuals, who become rich and then blow their health and/or fortunes.