Welcome to Cultureland
A tour of emerging relational order: the social vanguard that evolves our communities.
In this tour of the Gameboard for Life, we leave the safe shores of Order and towards the unknown potential of Chaos:
Cultureland is a psychological space we enter as we zoom out to see the picture of a community’s relational patterns: its norms, traditions, hierarchies, and values. It gives us a felt, intuitive vision of how our community aligns with subjective values like justice, beauty, freedom, compassion, equality, etc.
Flipping the gameboard vertically makes this aspect easier to picture:
As our mind’s eye floats up from the ground floor to the tree level, we begin to see vague, broader patterns invisible from the ground of everyday life. Here, we can play with ideas and ideals that are part “pie in the sky,” part just-might-work.
As part of the Relational World, the view from Cultureland isn’t propositional, scientific, or conceptual. But it’s first to spot opportunities for social change and to rally people to meet them. Conceptual tools typically come into play downstream of Cultureland after we care enough to put them to use.
Cultureland is where we play with new, incomplete social patterns: bleeding-edge causes, spiritual practices, revolutionary movements, art forms, memes, and other social expressions. It’s a dramatic, artful mess of ways to relate to one another beyond what’s permitted within the tight borders of Normland.
Cultureland is the epicenter of relational conflict.
As an emergent space, the patterns here are a broad-brushed, mixed bag of social impulses, most of which will never come to pass — but a few change everything. Naturally, this middle space is the epicenter of relational conflict from family-sized squabbles over values, to company cultural realignments, to The Culture Wars.
Unlike orderly spaces — Normland and Systemland — the players and plays in Cultureland are both inspirational and controversial, depending on where we see them form. Some of the examples in this essay will feel uncomfortable and raise questions. But if an idea or movement isn’t emotionally charged, it’s neither in this space nor in any position to create or evolve anything.1
A Normland perspective sees Cultureland’s critiques and ideas as threatening the hard-won social order with half-baked, offensive, and vague ideals. (Meanwhile, those who are on the outskirts of the current social order see it as a glimmer of hope.)
Systemland sees the plays here as overly dramatic, romantic, and illogical — not workable. It tends to prescribe more individual and technological solutions to social ills.
Both viewpoints are correct according to the rules and plays of their space, but both are equally limited in perspective too.
Remaining in the middle — with one foot kicking up the hornet’s nest of Social Order while the other grasps for new ground amidst a Chaos of possibilities — is a difficult straddle. Most of us don’t stay long in this headspace, and only a small part of any social group needs play here. A small dose can go a long way for better or worse.
Three Plays in Cultureland
A stable social and conceptual order is the foundation of any group. Robust plays and players in Normland and Systemland are fundamental. But Order — what reliably works — is stable, not static. It can evolve or decay but can’t remain as is.2 Plays in Cultureland are our vanguard for evolving our relational order to be more varied, supportive, and expansive.
Play I: INVERT
Each day, we navigate relationships turn by turn — a goodbye to our spouse, then annoyance at a stranger in traffic, then onto navigating political dynamics in a work meeting, and perhaps a polite chat with a barista for coffee.
But when our perspective zooms out to community-wide social patterns, we notice the outliers: the contrasts between the highest status and most disadvantaged; the gap between supposed cultural values and actual practice; the absurdities few around us seem to notice. Each grows more vividly dissonant while the mainstream fades from view.
Just as a technology innovator sees mostly flaws in the existing technology as space for better tech, Culturland sees flaws in the social order and how to change it.
It doesn’t matter if the current norms have amazingly progressed compared to those of our ancestors — a higher-altitude view is more critical of the present in contrast to what might be in the future.
So the first play made to the right of the status quo is to INVERT it with ironic, unexpected expressions that flip our attention out of the norm space towards people and expressions that are left out or oppressed.
Expressions like avant-garde art and comedy directly challenge the status quo by inverting it to an absurd or disturbing degree (c.f., Banksy’s “Napalm” or comedy roasts3). More positively, an INVERT play may cleverly reframe a common trope by inverting a colloquialism — For example, Martin Luther King Jr.’s response that “it’s a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.” 4
Social revolutionary movements like the French Revolution, ancient proclamations like “the first shall be last,” and modern ideas like Critical Race Theory aren’t often invoked in the same sentence. But each is a play to INVERT the established social structures, giving disadvantaged and oppressed an equal — or louder — voice than those higher in the present social hierarchy.
We play INVERT by zooming out to spot social dissonances, then flip them to expose them for what they are. One of my favorite examples is when the KKK took a knockout blow to the chin from Superman in the 1940s. After the children’s radio series exposed the absurdity of its secret codewords, rituals, and beliefs, it never recovered.
A caution: Inversion creates necessary contrasts needed to see space for change but shouldn’t be mistaken for positive solutions. This play is better viewed as “softening the ground” by deconstructing or subverting aspects of the existing order to make space for the new. Inversion is a pointer, not a plan; It's risky art, not science. When generalized critiques indiscriminately get applied as practical solutions, we may instead PERVERT the nourishing, stable roots of our community.5
Below are a few worldviews, movements, and people that are — or were at one time — somewhere in the middle space of Cultureland, making INVERT plays. (Keep in mind that the further we move towards Chaos, the more complicated and messy it is to place things.)6
A mishmash of old and new INVERT plays and players:
Anarchism, Jordan Peele movies, socialism, multiculturalism, Jonathan Swift, post-colonialism, the Sermon on the Mount, Picasso, non-violent resistance, Banksy, critical race theory, “roasts,” sex positivity movement, moral relativism, absurdist/anti-comedy, postmodernism, environmental justice, alternative medicine, feminism, mimetic rivalry disruption, queer theory, Robin Hood, The Onion, avant-garde art, “Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” pacifists, Dada movement, body positivity, deconstruction, Michael Moore,...
Play II: AMPLIFY
Changing our own beliefs and values is hard enough, let alone changing someone else’s. There’s no exact science for how to go about it, of course, but we could quantify it like this for fun:
“Emotional energy units” (EEUs) required to…
…keep the status quo: 1
…change it: 1,000+
The older the tradition, norm, or social hierarchy in question, the more EEUs it’ll cost. To gain a sliver of a chance at changing things, idealistic visions and criticism must be compelling enough to catch the edge of our social fabric on fire and burn away some space.
Enter the AMPLIFY play: it dials up collective feelings for social differences, dissonances, and higher aspirations with dramatic expressions that push people to feel things beyond the window of what’s polite and nice: galvanizing stories, mass protests, startling fashion, new kinds of art, and provocative slogans play on our heartstrings before opening a path to our minds.
“Lips that touch liquor shall not touch ours.”
— Temperance Movement Slogan
Even individual words like “violence” expand provocatively to express more than the mainstream definition can hold — what means active physical harm to most expands to include invisible emotional and psychological harm that may be inflicted by not acting. Charged words like “racism” expand beyond explicit prejudicial acts to include unconscious biases and passive participation in unjust systems.
“Silence is violence.”
Broad-brushed amplifications like these naturally create confusion and unease on the ground floor of reality. In everyday interactions with friends, family, and coworkers, using words according to their more literal, common usage is the safer play. But at a societal level, timely amplification gives a critical spark to expanding ideas like “all men are created equal” to include men of all skin colors, then to women too, and later others.
At a less culture-wide scale, amping up what’s uniquely resonant about your product or company just enough and at the right moment differentiates a great brand from a generic one. Artful amplification distinguishes culture-making classic tracks from run-of-the-mill pop music; groundbreaking cinema from popcorn flicks; innovative art from kitsch.
As covered in the last essay, a common misplay from Systemland is to think that merely showing the arguments — the facts, precedents, and rationale — will be enough to change people’s values or beliefs. But those adept at the AMPLIFY play instinctively know that powerful change spreads across the world from artful expression before logical argumentation gets around the block. But amped-up zeal can lead us into another misplay unique to this space:
Misplay: Progressive Presentism
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a galvanizing spark for the abolitionist movement and the American Civil War. But for some who look back at it from a modern perspective, it reads as overly simplistic and sentimental while invoking exaggerated, problematic stereotypes. But this shouldn’t surprise us: generalized, exaggerated, and “mixed bag” sentiments are a feature of any emerging social movement that eventually becomes a more mainstream view. Inspect any past social revolution or revolutionary just a little, and you’ll uncover some dirty laundry; The older, the dirtier. The evolving — but imperfect — cycle of social change leaves no doubt that our grandchildren will look back on whatever causes we advocate for as equally messy and problematic as well. But zeal for more progressive ideals can easily create an illusion that they’re more pure and complete than those that constructed the platform we’re playing on. It’s a kind of naive perfectionism that can block us from making the next play required for making real change: REFORM.
Prompt: How might positively emotive art, music, and stories help open people’s hearts to update their views?
As with any play, there’s also a darker side to AMPLIFY. If we play it too much — or too bluntly — there’s a risk we’ll actually NEUTRALIZE the very people we set out to emphasize.7
A mess of AMPLIFY plays and players, old & new:
Greta Thunberg, Impressionism, “Silence is violence,” Sit-Ins, “Black Lives Matter,” 1984 (the book and the ad), Iranian protests, Marina Abramović, Bob Dylan, Antifa, “Defund the police,” Punk rock/Grunge, Iconoclasts, Animal Farm, Black Arts Movement, The Art of War, Ingmar Bergman, Rosa Parks, “Believe women,” PETA, The Handmaid’s Tale, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, #MeToo, “Give me liberty or give me death,” Beatniks, “Make love, not war,” Picasso’s Guernica, “Save the children,” The Diary of Anne Frank, …
Play III: REFORM
INVERT and AMPLIFY can make problematic social structures grow intolerable or at least silly enough that people grow open to change, opening space for REFORM. This play funnels energy from free expressions and social experiments into activism that alters the order of things. But as we approach the rocky, stormy shores of Order, we must negotiate our way carefully or risk a crash.
"Activism is my rent for living on this planet." - Alice Walker
The first set of rocks are the shores of Normland: despite seeing a need for change, the view from here is to look to restore patterns from the glory days of yore: Western Civilization, simpler times, traditional family values, the "good ol' days," and the like.8
So part of navigating positive social REFORM is the art of helping folks find their own way to PRESERVE the essence of older values, norms, and traditions while attaching them to healthier, more robust social patterns.
Constructive REFORM requires genuinely seeking common ground with the norms and traditions we tend to overlook and often feel disgusted by. Finding common ground with social order has little to do with reason — it's about shared emotional resonance.
For example, translating amplified, inverted expressions into popular art helps early social adopters latch on to them on the “Fashionable Edge” and take them across the permeable border between Cultureland and Normland.9
Prompt: if you’re in a position to change a group’s social patterns for the better, can you find common ground in how they express their values, social signals, or aesthetics? How can what you’re advocating for help them live up to their own values? If you can’t, you may not have yet reached the starting line.
But there’s another complication: our existing social Order is interwoven and buttressed with the underlying conceptual systems in Systemland. So, we must also negotiate with and change the laws, facts, and theories underneath if there’s any hope of making lasting change. This is best accomplished in partnership with innovative — but distinctively impersonal — emerging concepts that we’ll look at next in a tour of Innovationland.
Here’s a way to know you’re making a REFORM play: it feels less glamorous and more like intense emotional labor. The intoxicating momentum and excitement from battling into a strategic position to change things dissolve into tedious politics, negotiations, and iterative compromise. If they’re to last, we must reshape, edit, and troubleshoot idealistic notions into practical social patterns that are less exciting than when they were still unrealized.
Persisting in REFORM requires a kind of positive faith and iron will that few people can muster for long. It’s easier to refuse to negotiate with the social order and retreat into fantastic ideals. Or to make a darker play where we attempt to RECONDITION people to fit our ideals like puppets.10
A jumble of old & new REFORM plays and players:
Mr. Rogers, Noam Chomsky, Martin Luther, Martin Luther King Jr., Greenpeace, Zapatistas, Woman’s Suffrage Movement, Margaret Singer, DEI, Constantine the Great, The Arab Spring, Temperance Movement, Mahatma Gandhi, The Black Panthers, Christianity, Nelson Mandela, Betty Friedan, Che Guevara, The French & American Revolutions, Joseph Smith,…
Conclusion
Let’s consider a practical example of how all these Plays work together: Not so long ago, the notion that women should have the right to vote emerged as a chaotic and unsettling ideal. For millennia, the idea of equal female participation in governance was silly and rarely occurred in serious conversation. The normative view of the statesmen, citizens, and clergy alike was that equalizing the rights of each gender was an attack on the ordained social Order — a dangerous inversion of what God or Nature intended. As art, persuasion, and social protests amplified it into a movement, social order defenders of all genders opposed it as an existential threat:
“[Women’s suffrage] are the politics of the very far future. They are too altruistic, idealist and unwanted for the human nature of the present day!” - Mrs. Kate Roosevelt.
Mrs. Roosevelt was right about one thing, at least: the firings, beatings, and imprisonment faced by advocates for women’s suffrage clearly showed how “unwanted” it was at the time.
Yet, what seemed a distant fever dream amplified and spread as mimetic sparks enflamed people with the potential of a more just citizenship and balanced governance. The sexism woven into our social fabric slowly grew to feel offensive or at least antiquated.
But during the decades it took the movement to spread, it wasn’t fashionable to be a feminist like it is today. It was beyond the edge of Normland in the risky, messy, and isolating space of Cultureland. But here we are, a century later, and women’s right to participate in democracy isn’t merely accepted but normative.
Just like technical innovations, most social revolutions fail. Others succeed only to do more harm than good. But a few improve things and evolve our social patterns to be more expansive, colorful, and robust for future generations to build on.
Prompts:
What modern challenges to the social order seem to you as realistic only in the “very far future” and too “altruistic, idealist, and unwanted” for the present day?
What changes to social Order are you open to or advocating for? Do you have a sense of how to negotiate with the current Order? What are you willing to trade for incremental (but not total) progress?
The Chaos Map is “fractal” — every group has its own relative sense of what is orderly or chaotic. Someone immersed in a progressive worldview will place progressive ideas more toward Order while someone surrounded by more conservative peers will place the same more toward Chaos. Similarly, because society progresses more than it regresses, older ideas usually look more orderly (common and uncontroversial) from the present no matter how hotly contested they were in the past. Some timeless ideals and expressions remain in the middle space, but these tend to have one foot in Visionland which we’ll tour later.
In this essay, I’m attempting to place a mix of modern and historical examples of movements that gravitate(d) around the “Cultureland” space. Many examples fit under more than one play, but I list each one time. If you’d like to suggest other examples — or challenge one I’ve listed — I’d value hearing your perspective.
It’s helpful to view the past and present as a living garden to tend to, not something that’s ever “done.” See, the past is never done.
A “roast” of a celebrity, boss, or the U.S. President during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is a contemporary version of a court jester’s role to check power by humorously inverting an influential person into the butt of a joke. I think this is at least partly an instinctive social test for despots — if the King kills the Jester, so to speak, that’s a powerful signal that they can’t be trusted. If someone can’t take a joke, that’s an equally good sign not to work for them.
See more of this classic exchange here.
PERVERT: the dark side of INVERT. Giving so much attention to the marginal extremes of human experience can warp our perspective, leading to believing in social conspiracies that blind us to what’s reasonable, ordinary, and practical. Cultureland is where new, better social patterns are honed, experimented with, and developed. But attempting to bluntly replace stable relational order evolved over millennia with half-baked opposites leaves us unmoored. If INVERT isn’t grounded in some appreciation of — and genuine attachment to — an older, more stable social order, it grows increasingly vacuous, isolated, and vengeful.
Each worldview and social movement has its own relational and conceptual Order. But as soon as we step towards Chaos into Cultureland or Innovationland, placing worldviews is messy and incoherent. This space is where worldviews are formed and reformed, not held to as precise, unshakable doctrine (that happens later, to the left). The examples listed are now — or at one time were — well outside of mainstream norms. But each also has aspects that are currently mainstream to at least one group.
Additionally, the ideas in any middle space are provocative because they threaten the way things are. I hope it’s evident that including them as examples isn’t an endorsement, denunciation, or implying equivalence.
NEUTRALIZE: the darker side of AMPLIFY. The tendency to constantly push the borders of social expressions and widen them to apply to an increasingly broad set of behaviors can have the same effect as “the boy who cried wolf.” The initial contrast created by the amplification fades if everything is amplified to where everyone becomes either a Victim or a Villain. For instance, the more someone vilifies the Medical Establishment, the more they view its consumers as hapless “sheeple.” The more quickly someone resorts to calling someone a “Fascist” or “Nazi” online, the more likely they are to infantilize the victims they claim to protect which is, ironically, every bit as dehumanizing. Too much amplification creates tribal war, effectively neutralizing the positive benefit the initial message might have kindled.
This kind of Edenic myth is a PRESERVE play that impulsively helps us protect the valuable parts of the social order, even if we don’t know why they’re essential. But in reality, our social order can only decay or evolve. There’s as much a chance of returning to a past version of the social order as there is for a member of the Boomer generation to wake up tomorrow in their 20s again. (And even if we could perform such magic, it wouldn’t be as rosy as we see it in hindsight.)
The Fashionable Edge is where we dip our toes into the newest social patterns: recently emerged sentiments, fashion, and social signals that aren't mainstream but also not too risky. Celebrities, social influencers, artists, progressive brands, teenagers, and other early social adopters endorse them as the next fashion, and aspects of them slowly permeate the mainstream. For a picture of this process, see a path from relational order to chaos.
RECONDITION: the dark side of REFORM.
“You can repeal all past history, but you can’t repeal human nature.”
— Abraham Lincoln
When REFORM seems too difficult or impossible, it sometimes flips into a much more dangerous game of forcing people to bend and reshape themselves to a theoretical and unproven ideal. All social patterns act directly on positive and negative emotions — promising more relational safety or threatening it if we dare trespass. Failing at more positive REFORM, RECONDITION relies primarily on negative instruments: public shame, mockery, and the threat of ostracization to silence people into puppet-like compliance. These social torture tools work startlingly well on the majority of people in any group while only needing a slim minority to wield them. The few who refuse to shape themselves into an increasingly zealous party line get scapegoated. While the party line may be progressive, these tools are the same as those wielded by any fundamentalist religion or cult. But in this highly-charged middle space, they can more easily spiral something more broadly destructive.