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Hmm, "tribal, violence-based political-religious movements." Going that way though, we could start pulling in examples from the Crusades, witchhunts ... I don't
by qaexl 19y ago
Hmm, "tribal, violence-based political-religious movements." Going that way though, we could start pulling in examples from the Crusades, witchhunts ... I don't remember if they matched all of the factors:
- Restrictions on the free flow of information.
- The subjugation of women.
- Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure.
- The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization.
- Domination by a restrictive religion.
- A low valuation of education.
- Low prestige assigned to work.
Given that, Dark-Ages European cultures matches most if not all of those traits.
As a tangential note, Malcolm Gladwell, author of Tipping Point and Blink wrote about these guys who were able to figure things out from people because they have studied the way people make faces. They categorized facial expressions. They were able to distinguish between two South American tribe based photographs of the individuals within each of the tribes. One tribe is very friendly. The other is not -- includes a lot of the attributes listed in 'Spotting the Losers'.
The caveat is that face reading like this is a specialty that requires a lot of training. Would be interesting to write software that can suggest cultural influences though, then run it through say, all the American news footage and see what kind of subcultures we have here.
- DanielBMarkham 19y agoI'm not about to defend the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition! However there are certain differences between say, Europe in the year 1200 and any random warrior nomadic tribe of the same time. I keep getting back to private property rights, which I believe is the foundation of all western civilization. Also the religious insistence on personal responsibility (as opposed to blind submission) was nascent even at that point. And the Magna Carta showed that the idea of governance being a two way street. These themes bloomed into the Reformation, which kicked off the 100 years war, which got us modern secularism, which enhanced the renaissance and set the stage for all those miracles that happened in the last 400 years or so. I would tell you to wait for the movie, but it would be something like a 200-hour serial or something just for the highlights. You hit on an interesting startup topic, though. Is it possible to algorithmically determine cultures and sub-cultures by biometrics, writing analysis, web sites visited, or some other factor? Aside from the big brother implications, there's actually a real market need -- people who belong to the same "clans" usually like spending time together on the web. Any way to make that easier should have value. In the information age, it's very possible that people belong to some sub-culture that they are not even aware of.