Welcome to Normland
A tour of Normland — the norms, traditions, and values we didn’t ask for, but all depend on.
In this first deep-dive into the Chaos Map as a gameboard for life, we’ll zoom in to tour “Normland” — the upper left space where intricate, subtle relational patterns create the social order we depend on.
The holidays are a perfect time to inspect Normland because we’re spending more time in it than usual whether we like it or not. We enter this social headspace as we make small talk at the company party, dress up for a celebration with friends, or adapt to the social protocols of our kith and kin around a dinner table.
It's that time of year when subtle relational patterns are dramatized in real-time. Take ritual gift-giving: it’s not so simple as choosing something someone might like. We look to spend just the right amount on just the right gift for each person based on a cocktail of instinctive feelings:
First, we only consider gifts society deems appropriate for the kind of relationship we have with the recipient and the occasion, be they a colleague, family, or friend.
Then take a measure of our personal “reciprocal credit balance” with whoever we’re giving to so we don’t give too much or too little.1
But we still modulate how much we give to each person based on how much we give to others like we're grading on a curve.
But there’s no spreadsheet or math formula that could capture the full complexity of what’s happening as we select a single gift — we can only instinctively feel our way to being a good giver or a scrooge.
Surrounding the gift-giving are traditions, songs, and decor that anchor gatherings celebrating what we share in common (and leaving little room for what we don’t).
When you think about them, these social patterns don't make any more logical sense than singing “Fa la la la, la la la la” but they easily overpower logic. None of us asked for them nor do we often think about them — but we depend on them for our sense of belonging and identity.
Three Plays in Normland
Each space in the Chaos Map has its own plays — moves we make when we’re in that psychological space. Playing in Normland has little to do with where we are geographically. It’s about who we’re with and the social significance of whatever it is we’re up to.
Learning to spot these characteristic patterns of play can make more sense of things, especially when we’re feeling alien to this corner of our map.
Here are three plays — with a light side and a dark side — we make in Normland:
Play I: REMEMBER
Normland imprints us with shared memories more potent than all the history books ever written. We instinctively absorb social patterns from our ancestors by observing memorials, rituals, stories, pledges, and other traditions like Christmas, New Years Eve, or Kwanzaa. We listen, watch, sing, recite, and march them into our bodies without thinking about them.
“We'll tak[e] a cup o’ kindness yet
For auld lang syne [days of long ago].”
We feel the weight of our social heritage together and then live it out together.
REMEMBER is played when our heart swells as the national anthem plays and flags are raised before a sports match. When we feel reverence as incense is carried down an aisle. As Christmas songs lend a nostalgic background to mundane shopping trips. When fireworks burst over a monument while the same music plays in the new year that’s played for generations.
"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around." - G.K. Chesterton
When to play REMEMBER:
REMEMBER is the first play to make if you want to foster lasting cohesion in a family, company, or any community. Find — and repeat — stories that are emblematic of shared values, reference heroes, and enact rituals to create a feeling of groundedness to build on.
Advertisers, politicians, and entertainers make the REMEMBER play often, especially when their audience is in a conservative frame of mind: they employ nostalgic images, songs, and sentiments to transfer some of the instinctive warm feelings we have for the past onto whatever they’re selling.
Traditions, rituals, and shared stories aren’t about what’s true in a factual, scientific sense. They’re about being true to who we are in relation to each other and what makes us unassailable together.
You can play REMEMBER in small ways, too: for instance, if things are tense or lifeless at a holiday gathering, finding a way to recenter around a story from the group's past can help nudge everyone back a little closer. If you’re looking to increase groundedness on a team, repeat stories that genuinely reflect shared values and incorporate a few rituals with a uniquely “us” flavor to them.2
But there’s a dark side to every play: we’re as inclined to REMEMBER our shared past as we are to REPRESS what we’d prefer to forget.3
Notable REMEMBER plays & players
The British Royalty, Washington DC (as a destination), socially conservative political parties, military organizations, Hallmark, Catholicism (and most religions), Country Music, participation mystique, folktales, Medieval reenactors/LARPers, the pyramids at Giza, Old West Shows, Spiral Dynamics “Blue,” Holidays, sports memorabilia, Americana, memorials.
Our ability to build on relationship patterns from prior generations is the foundation for future progress. Once we have a supportive social fabric, the next play is to PRESERVE it:
Play II: PRESERVE
Norms are our communal immune system. They protect the social structure our ancestors evolved through blood, sweat, or tears from inevitable threats lurking beyond the walls. So, when a new social pattern emerges, that resembles one our ancestors warred over — communism, hedonism, eugenics, nationalism, fascism — a swarm of us who've never personally experienced any such -ism still instinctively swarm and attack.
Naturally, we find more traditional, conservative worldviews here.
For those of us who aren't native to Normland, the fixation and fixedness on the past can be frustrating and confusing. But it's not really about the past at all — it's about preserving the present state of things.4
"The past is never dead. It's not even past." - William Faulkner
PRESERVE is played whenever a politician cites a threat beyond the border (sometimes, literally a border, sometimes only psychologically). When an enemy is named, be it a competitor, ideology, tribe, or technology5. Any outside threat triggers our collective preservation instinct, but the most effective ones play on our deepest collective fears and become taboos.
When to play PRESERVE:
The PRESERVE play increases group unity and motivation even when the group is lackadaisical or fractured — it’s no wonder politicians love to play it.
“A common danger unites even the bitterest enemies.” — Aristotle
Like all plays in Normland, there’s a fuzzy line between a good play and outright manipulation. A positive way to play PRESERVE is to differentiate the genuinely essential core of your group’s values and traditions and buttress those while giving those less core flexibility to evolve.
But the more we reflexively treat any change as an existential threat, the more ossified our community grows into one that can no longer evolve, only deteriorate — the dark side of PRESERVE is a tendency to PARALYZE.6
Notable PRESERVE plays and players
Nationalism, Trads, fundamentalism, war rallies, Luddites, the Amish, patriotism, the “old guard,” most grandparents, family values, Puritanism, conservatism, orthodox rituals, “God and Country.”
Play III: PLACE
There's no room for vagueness, nuance, or hand-wavy ideals that complicate our safe place within our family, friend group, or other communities. The down-to-earth patterns in Normland rest on black-and-white borders between heroes and villains, friend and foe, insider and outsider.
Our success in any group often depends on how well we place ourselves within its unique social hierarchy. So we instinctively signal our place with overt displays like uniforms, titles, fashion, aesthetics, credentials, value displays, retweets, and hashtags that signal to others in our group where we are and display just the right amount of deference or dominance.
"The clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society." - Mark Twain
Celebrities, priests, venture capitalists, and online gamers alike have their own flavor of the same normative social signals.
Social hierarchies necessarily emerge for any sizable group, even within groups with anti-hierarchical values. But they can quickly become dangerous when we use our PLACE to PERSECUTE those "below" us.7
When to play PLACE:
During the early part of my life, I’ve misunderstood — or refused to use — social signals to place myself properly in various groups. I still struggle with it, but with practice over time, I’ve learned how much more buttery smooth it is to make connections with people by attending to their sense of PLACE.
Like any Normland play, these can be used manipulatively. The goal should not be to play people for our own ends but to play along with them in order to remove unnecessary obstacles to forming mutually beneficial connections.
Dress according to the group’s expectations. It’s startling how much more naturally people will respond to you.
Kindly treat people with the amount of decorum and deference they expect regardless of merit.
Look for natural ways to highlight someone’s relevant credentials or achievements on their behalf. Advocate for them.
Avoid referencing figures, books, or movements that are controversial to their in-group. These taboos trigger a PRESERVE play against you and accomplish little except to create unnecessary obstacles.
You might object to playing “social games” like this, as I did. But if you have a grounded sense of your own identity and are playing for the benefit of others — not just yourself — adapting to various norms where you can makes navigating any social circle a little easier for everyone.
Notable PLACE plays and players
The military, fashion, influencers, credentials, citation counts, celebrities, org. charts, mainstream brands, multi-level marketing, consumerism, pop culture, job titles, advertising, platforming or de-platforming, pronouns, awards and accolades, follower counts, social media hot-takes,...
What's your relationship to Normland?
Many of us who prefer a more conceptual, scientific way of seeing the world will intellectually object to much within Normland and only begrudgingly play along, if at all.
Others with an affinity for cultural change tend to only see the existing social order’s dark side and seek to overturn it entirely.
If unchecked, both impulses lead to misplays — attempts to play cards from a foreign psychological space8 while ignoring the bedrock value of Normland. These misplays aren’t simply ineffective and naive — they actively destabilize us and others.
Personally, a lack of well-ordered and stable social relationships leaves a feeling of groundlessness that carries an unreliable “smell” others can detect. But being part of a well-ordered community that’s older than ourselves is socially nourishing and gives us a supportive foundation to build on.
In the next essay, we’ll explore Systemland — a conceptual escape from the drama, excess, and temporal experience of Normland.
You have a “reciprocal credit balance” with each person you know. You and they are instinctively aware of it and will act accordingly. Reciprocity (alongside mimicry) is a fundamental ingredient for forming relational patterns individually and collectively.
You can’t fake a REMEMBER play — it’ll only land if it genuinely sparks common feelings among the group. Tacked-on corporate values statements and other forced attempts to form norms will awkwardly fail if inauthentic. Normland plays are more like playing music together than code; More art than science.
REPRESS: the dark side of REMEMBER. Any social order tends to whitewash the unsavory aspects of its collective history. Our social memory can be as selective and repressed as our individual memories.
"History is a set of lies agreed upon.” — Napoleon
Behind every nostalgic, rose-colored view of the ancestors is a cover-up. When we REPRESS the dark parts of our collective past, we’re bound to REPRESS new, healthier expressions of relationships as well. A hallmark-card view of our ancestors leaves us feeling comfortably safe but dangerously blind to how easily we repress and harm others when we cease to evolve.
See The past is never done for a new perspective on the past as the present we’re living with now.
AI is a new technology that will continue to disrupt the order of many people’s lives and careers. You can see the PRESERVE plays happening in real-time (and expect a lot more to come).
PARALYZE: The dark side of PRESERVE. Our preservation instincts kick into high gear when threatened — we get roasted on social media, our country goes to war, our children reject our worldview, or a group hero falls from grace. Group trauma can trigger seeing all potential social change as a DEFCON 1 threat, even when it might positively expand and enrich our social relationships. Playing PARALYZE may slow down but never ultimately stops social change. It’s up to us if we want to be part of evolving our social fabric in a healthy way or like a deer caught in headlights about to be run over by the next generation’s norms.
PERSECUTE: The dark side of PLACE. Our position in the social hierarchies we move in is so important that everyone has a tendency to use emotional violence to PERSECUTE others who might threaten our position. Gossip, de-platforming, mobbing, bullying, and slandering are shame-inducing means of keeping others in their PLACE while securing our position. These social weapons are often quite effective but create a retaliation cycle that escalates into a destructive social war that no one ultimately wins.
I’ll write about the plays in each of the other five spaces in detail in upcoming essays. For a brief overview, see A Gameboard for Life.