Why Is Pursuit of Pleasure a "Third Rail" in Central Authoritarian Agricultural Societies?

A friend related the following to me. While she was an undergraduate, her grandparents came to visit and took her out to lunch. At the time she was dating a man of Middle Eastern descent. During the meal it became clear that her grandparents' true mission was not to buy her lunch, but to warn her about Middle Eastern men. They didn’t seem to be disturbed by her being with a non-Christian or ethnically different partner, so much as they were worried about her being in danger of abduction. "You know, when you get married and go back to their countries with them, you have no rights," her grandfather said. "Oh Grandpa," my friend responded somewhat innocently, "I really have no intention of marrying this guy." Her grandparents’ faces drained of color, and the conversation ended, and the rest of the meal was spent in icy silence.

To put it plainly: they were horrified that their granddaughter basically just told them that she was in this relationship for the sex, with no intention of commitment to marriage or reproduction. For them, this was far more serious than the prospect that she would be kidnapped and effectively enslaved! Why? Because she was acknowledging that she was making decisions in the pursuit of sexual pleasure. Of course in American culture and in most places, there is a double standard between men and women, but men are not immune to such attitudes either, though the social consequences are rarely as severe.

This may be part of why homosexual relationships have produced negative reactions across so many cultures - certainly not in all, but in enough for it to be a pattern. At least as often as they are accepted, they are either ignored or reviled. Why? Because gay sex can only result in pleasure. By these standards, an abomination if ever there was one!

But it's not just sex; it's the discussion of pursuit of pleasure in general. In very formal settings, any acknowledgement that you do something just because you like it feels very inappropriate. At a morbidity and mortality conference (where surgical residents stand up and accept blame for bad outcomes of cases - few settings are more formal or tense) I noted with some surprise that a physician even noting that he enjoyed his breakfast was met with uncomfortable laughter, eye-rolling or shifting in seats. The acknowledgement of enjoying any sort of physical pleasure seems to decrease, the more formal the setting, and this was an excellent example.[1] This is so basic to social reality that we don't notice or question it. Why is this?

Allan Tate said that civilization is an agreement to ignore the abyss. This is actually too limited. More to the point, civilization is an agreement to ignore affect - to ignore the primary drives in our basic animal code, and the reactions they cause in us, and the abyss causes anxiety. So it's not just the pursuit of pleasure we avoid, but the recognition of and response to affect in general - because affect can be dangerous. In social animals, affect is contagious, which is very effective for cohesion in hunter-gatherer groups below the Dunbar number (150 people.) But in any large civilization where we're constantly interacting with strangers in (necessarily) formalized settings, paying attention to and reacting to the affect on others' faces would seem to be inherently destabilizing. Try it when you go for a walk in a busy city some time - at best, you'll quickly be exhausted, and at worst you'll get into fights. And constantly talking about your pursuit of pleasure with strangers can make people resent you, or compete with you, or avoid you, and in general is a ticket to negative affect. The higher the stakes, the less we do it. In therapy training, we're "de-programmed" so that we don't just notice, but pursue affect, even when it flashes across faces for only a moment, and this de-programming is very difficult.

If this theory is correct, there should be other trends of affect-generating cultural practices that differ between hunter-gatherer and centralized agricultural societies, and that are at their most intense in the oldest longest-centrally-organized agricultural society (i.e. China and East Asia); and that are at their most intense in formal settings, like religion and many high-prestige professions.[2] To this end:

• I have found qualitative assertions (but not quantitative studies) that homosexuality is more tolerated in more traditional societies, often with specific institutionalized roles.
  
  
• Gender roles in general become more rigid in the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural.
  
  
• There is a trend toward brighter colors in the art and clothing of cultures that more recently converted from hunter-gatherer to agricultural (or "small-village" agricultural to nation-state.) Yes, bright colors are often used in nation-states - in specific settings (religious displays, holidays, weddings.)
  
  
• Drums tend to disappear as a central musical instrument in this transition as well, only to have re-appeared recently in the West in rock and hip-hop - possibly because, ironically, our wealth has allowed us to ignore social restrictions and revert back to our "native state" as hunter-gatherers, as in Hanson's theory of farmers vs foragers.
  
  
• In the hunter-gatherer to centralized agricultural authority transition, hallucinogens become restricted (often to religious ceremonies) or outright banned.
  
  
• There are exceptions to these rules, in the sense that these things which disappear in the transition still do appear under closed settings controlled by and useful to central authority - war chants, group initiations, religious artifacts and ceremonies, and team sports with big audiences.
  
  
• Bright colors, rhythmic music, hallucinogens, the spread of gender equality and tolerance of sexual minorities, and sex-openly-for-pleasure all reappeared in the West as we transitioned from agricultural back to hunter-gatherer values in the late 20th century, as per Hanson's theory.

These affect-restricting cultural practices can be thought of as a Dunbar's number multiplier, by decreasing the frequency of group fission events. Others are exapting family psychology to the state (leader as father figure, fellow soldiers as brothers) and organizing society into stable hierarchies (family, village, ethnic group, state.) If we assume that agricultural states ultimately win out over foragers - which they consistently have since the Great Stand on the Ugra and the fall of the Yuan Dynasty - then there is a form of selection for groups which develop such multipliers.[3]

A major cultural technology and Dunbar's multiplier is controlled tolerance. It is difficult for people with different moral systems to closely co-exist. The Ottomans had the millet system, China and the Mongols had a theocratically laissez faire approach, and in the modern West many countries build freedom of conscience into the law, though avoiding leg-breaking and pocket-picking by neighbors with different convictions was realistically much easier in Jefferson's wide-open agrarian utopia.


FOOTNOTES

[1] Psychiatrists are less formal than surgeons in our meetings and I am pleased to report much more comfortable talking about food.

[2] Americans in particular might object that there are many high-status arenas in the U.S. which are now fairly informal, for instance technology, the entertainment industry, or academia. I would argue that apparently informal, high-prestige professions are actually formal in a more complex way. This is clearest in academia, but true for the others, that this apparent informality is not so much superficial as an another layer of complexity to let the ambitious signal that they can maneuver even under the paradox of forced "relaxed collegiality." Sure someone can wear jeans to work and set their own hours - but come back in 15 years and see who's setting budgets, and it probably won't be them.

[3] The current greatest combination of Dunbar's number multipliers remains China at about 9.2 million.

Dunbar's Number and Startup Companies, Part 2

More on the Dunbar number transition in startups from Ribbonfarm.

Many people have noted and describe the culture shift that occurs at startup companies - curiously, usually at a headcount right around Dunbar's number. Of course, differences occur over the causes.

One explanation from personal experience as a consultant at multiple companies (full post here) is that the influx during this growth phase consists mostly of people who are middle- or lower-tier contributors, whose strategy is primarily that of seeking a stable institution and burrowing in. This is a rational strategy for these folks, because as the company grows, the individual's contribution (especially the lower-level, later hires) is less important to the company's health and therefore feeds back less to the individual's fortune. There's no reason to knock yourself out, if you know it won't make much difference to your future well-being, and you don't have confidence in your talents anyway.

(When aggressive young managers talk to these people, it sometimes feels like you're playing two different games on the same field. Manager is rewarded by scoring. S/he wants to perform, and wants others to perform, so risk-taking and occasional annoying of others with non-company-aligned-goals is worth it. Late-comer wants to keep a low profile and not rock the boat and often seems frankly confused at any suggestion that they should take a risk to accomplish something, but of course s/he can't say this out loud. Or sometimes, they actually do. I once had an employee, a recent college grad, who looked at me with surprise at the start of such a meeting and said, "This isn't me, this job isn't what I really do." I was grateful for this honesty because it saved time. Not in the way that I think this employee was expecting.)

Netflix has a set of slides that's been making the rounds in the Valley recently, with a different (though not necessarily conflicting) explanation. This explains the dilution of high performers as an efflux of talent (driven out by bureaucratic process sclerosis) rather than the influx of low performers. This certainly occurs as well though in my experience, it's a much slower process, as people tend to stay at a company they believe in with colleagues they enjoy even as administrative annoyances accumulate.

Culture from Reed Hastings

I also think that they're being too kind about the motivations behind the proliferation of bureaucratic rules, which they ascribe to well-meaning management trying to control the chaos at a company that's become too large and complex to run informally. I think there's a lot more conscious justifying-of-one's-own-existence processes that new administrators put in place, although I concede this is easier to do and probably happens more in my regulation-heavy world of biotechnology than in the tech world that the Netflix people know.

Loyalty, Optimization and Corporate Empires

Peter Turchin's War and Peace and War analyzes patterns of empires in history, extending the work of Gibbon's Roman history and especially the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, in particular his idea of asabiya, or solidarity. Turchin argues that everyone's recent favorite whipping boy, the rationalist concept of Homo economicus, cannot explain how states can fluorish or fall; that there has to be a social glue which is not simply aggregate self-optimization. This (Khaldun and Tuchin state) is asabiya. In a recent article he argues that this can also explain the decline and fall of corporate empires like Microsoft.

There are some problems with Turchin's very interesting book, and it's interesting to apply asabiya to corporations, but I think it's not needed to explain the free-rider problems of big companies. It's certainly true as Turchin says that small-ish companies, as they are making the transition to larger ones, often has plenty of knaves weaseling their way in. If you've ever been present during this transition you've no doubt seen this first-hand.

The problem here is that you can still explain this in terms of the behavior of Homo economicus. The founders and the few people who come after them understand what is needed for the company's success, act in plain view of all the other (few) employees with the risk of termination and a damaged reputation, and understand that their own behavior has a big impact on that success. That is to say, when even a rational low-asabiya individual comes into a small company, they know that if they free-ride, it will hurt the company badly and soon, and everyone will know it. As the company gets bigger, it gets easier for free-riders to hide, and their free-riding hurts the company less and over a longer-term.

It's also worth asking how there could be asabiya in an organization that just appeared? The closest thing to this is the camaraderie that emerges at small companies (which is not a bad thing) but that camaraderie is less about some abstract idea of the company and more about a social connection between the founding few individuals. And asabiya to the founders in place of the company as a whole can and does end up damaging the quality of decisions and therefore the fortunes of the company as a whole.

Dunbar's Number and Startup Adolescence

Dunbar's Number Part 2 can be found here.

Kevin Simler has written about a connection that I've also noticed, that between Dunbar's Number of 150 and startup organizations. He goes further and analyzes startups in terms of anthropology, which is excellent. Looking at it one way, all business analysis really is just a branch of anthropology that uses a scoring system, because the larger civilization these mini-tribes exist in have an agreement about the scores the mini-tribes have to achieve to continue getting the chief's approval to exist as such. (This is called accounting.)

I was often brought into biotech companies when they had stalled out at this number because of external constraints (failure of product in clinical trials) to try to accelerate the process or jump the track to a new indication for the drug. There are growing pains at and beyond this number that often significantly damage the company's prospects in its transition to being a larger organization.  What I noticed is that by the Dunbar Point:

1) Corporate culture, for better or worse, is set in stone. I suspect this actually occurs much earlier in growth than Dunbar's Number, resulting from the personalities of remaining founders and challenges the company encountered - likely in that order.

2) This seems to be an inflection point at which the free rider problem becomes much worse; non-productive people who want a stable income are hired, and, recognizing rationally that at this size firm or larger their own performance won't impact the future prospects of the institution, they often don't work too hard. They also recognize that in the presence of remaining founders, they're not going to climb the ladder far anyway. And finally, karma is no longer real at this stage. There are too many people for us each to keep score on the rest of the people in the organization. Bad deeds go unpunished and good deeds go down a black hole. Karma is only real when there are people who can remember the deeds that you're in frequent contact with and who will and act on them in the future.

3) Possibly because of #2 above, rules that don't make sense or don't seem to connect to the organization's purpose and means of self-perpetuation multiply and become entrenched. This occurs because the people enforcing them now justify their existence in the organization, and because as an organization grows there are more people between any individual and the customer and investors, i.e. the entities in the outside world that the organization needs to perpetuate itself. Consequently it's more important for an individual concerned about their future prospects to please other people inside the organization, regardless of how irrational the rules are with respect to the future prospects of the organization. You're more likely to be fired (and lose money) if you defy a rule to do what you think is best for the company but it makes your boss look bad, than you are likely to lose your job due to downsizing or company bankruptcy if you follow the irrational rule, thus harming the company over the long-term. In the abstract, what is rational in the near-term for an individual departs from what is good for the company. This also seems to hit an inflection point at about 150. There's a great Dilbert (which of course I couldn't find) where Dilbert asks the boss, who's obsessed with screwing over another department as well as the customer, when they're going to think about beating the competition.

It seems to many observers that something happens as previously successful start-ups grow to make them go off the rails, largely because of internal cultural changes that cause them to self-sabotage. My observations of what happens during the startup transition contains that implicit assumption, although we have to admit it might be false: it might just be that we're seeing statistics, and regression to the mean implies that you should expect to see a bunch of companies doing well for a few years (during which time they will grow) and then their luck runs out. But the following suggestions assume that there really is a true negative effect on corporate culture and success in future profits of growth beyond Dunbar's Number.

To #1 and 3 above: these are intractable and I can offer no remedies. Removing founders often doesn't work; and status is important to humans. See this primate behavior experiment to understand why.

To #2: - Set performance metrics and relate them simply, visually, and frequently to the performance of the organization as a whole and against anonymized members of their teams. Automate it to the extent possible, so they can get frequent feedback (not just once a year or quarter) without consuming too much time generating the report. Make it clear that these are the same metrics their bosses are using. Suddenly you see that fake sick day you took, and how it affected a deadline that cut into profits (or some other metric elsewhere in the organization.) Of course, sometimes, the reality is that people's jobs really won't have a huge impact on the company's fortunes. But if you can't think at all of how to measure someone's performance and connect it to how the company is doing, then you either need to think harder, or get rid of the position. And if you're not willing to think of eliminating the position because Suzy in marketing is a nice lady and she knows Jim the Senior Director of XYZ, then you're already way beyond the startup transition.

- Focus on loyalty to small teams of up to 10-12 people. This is the military's strategy of enforcing emotional loyalty within a unit; it's not possible to be emotionally loyal to a large abstract organization unless you were raised in it as a child (like a state or religion.) Not only will this create more feedback for people - easier to to feel rewarded for doing something for a co-worker you respect than the organization, and know there will be real karma as a result (and these bonds of respect are created by the company). This also helps break down other kinds of alliances that form within the company (but not in the company's interests).

- When the founders aren't going anywhere, the new blood you get knows it's not going to the top any time soon, and you can't groom everyone to replace them. That's okay, as long as you're networked with the rest of your industry/space, and the hard work and reputation that they build while they're with you will count elsewhere in the network. Companies that don't expect young blood to leave are stupid, and some have actual functions in HR to address this. People in high-turnover, high-human-capital industries are saying "duh" to this one, but this should be something that's addressed explicitly right from the beginning of their association with the company.

Dunbar's Number Part 2 can be found here.