Thursday, August 3, 2023

Cuture Seeding

Building a culture from scratch is easy and straightforward. 

First, decide what the culture is for. What do you want to accomplish? 

Then, work out what virtues would lead to upholding this value. What behaviour do you need to encourage?
You'll probably screw up this step. That's fine, simply iterate. Try it, and adjust what doesn't work.

Then tell stories of heroes who uphold these virtues. As long as they're realistic-ish, and reasonably entertaining, it's fine. Touching up and lightly embellishing a true story works quite well, but pure invention can work also, it's merely more work and unless extremely lucky takes more iteration. 


Usually it's best to select a king or pope first, so there's no ongoing argument about what the culture is for. You follow that guy, he tells you what the culture is for. If he's a good king he will value your input, but you don't get a say or a voice, exactly. If he tells you to sit down and shut up, you do, or he isn't your king. If he isn't your king, he should probably banish you, so...


The only real difficulty is that if you take any random Caino hypocriens for anywhere in the world, they almost certainly enjoy a little of the old ultra-self-violence. Their culture leads to a hellish, sadistic utopia where they torture each other as much as possible without actually dying, and that's exactly what they want. Not really interested in a new culture, since the old one already supplies all their demands as much as can be reasonably expected.

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