Group Membership

A group is a combination of individuals sharing a common purpose. We often see them with structured organizations, but that common purpose can extend to just about anything and be extremely informal and decentralized.

We connect ourselves with a group because we believe it’ll serve our purposes:

  • We can specialize in what we want to do.
  • The other people in the group will keep us safe from various things.
  • Multiple people in the community can sufficiently meet all our needs.
  • We can experiment with actions and understand how to behave in response.
  • We’ll feel important as we contribute to the group’s maintenance.

In exchange, the requirements are perfectly reasonable to us:

  • Obey the rules.
  • Trust everyone to do what they’re supposed to.
  • Contribute (at least somewhat) to the interests of others in the group.

Finding Groups

We’re automatically associated with a few groups from our upbringing:

  • Our family and family name’s reputation.
  • Our family’s trades and skills.
  • Formalized education and clubs we’ve attended or been forced to attend.

While we all naturally identify with at least some of our culturally established groups, we make decisions later that identify with other scopes of living:

As followers of various groups, the leaders of that group (along with all the sub-leaders) define the values the group follows. Very often, if that group has been around longer than the present leaders, the entire group has created its own culture and reputation.

To join a group, a member must demonstrate a sacrifice of power (and likely promising a future sacrifice) in exchange for a different form of power (or future power) inside the group (e.g., promising labor/expertise for the promise of money). It typically leans to more power submitted by the member (such as becoming a member of a church), and is usually meant to represent loyalty through that sacrifice. This sacrifice creates an in/out-group mentality that forms the group’s culture compared to its surrounding environment.

Typically, most group members trust their leaders. Instead of understanding things for themselves, it’s less work to let the leaders understand things and tell them what to do.

Very frequently, we’ll start seeing the outside of that group as a non-thing. It may or may not exist, but we’ll be so engaged inside our group that we’ll completely forget the group is linked to many, many other groups through the associations of the people in it.

As we gain influence in the group and start leading it, we’ll often see those changes, but not typically as junior members of the group.

Future Purpose

A group defines much of our environment for us. Thus, social groups establish most of our memory, and therefore most of our understanding of the world.

By existing in a group long enough, our purposes change. As we grow to trust the group, we associate more future purposes to it.

We continue thinking of the group as our source of meaning and purpose, until it fails our expectations. While everyone will have their own inner conflict about a leader doing something scandalous, each group member is constantly wrestling with their individual changes and how they’ll conform those changes to match their reputation in that group.

The only way people continue indefinitely in a group is if the members see the group’s actions as always loving or virtuous. Otherwise, members only stay in the group as long as they can advance self-interested opportunities or are scoping out a new group elsewhere to eventually go to.

When most of the group’s members can no longer see love or virtue, the entire system devolves into a power game. At that point, the only way the group persists, barring a cultural shift by one of the leaders, is through promising and (at least sometimes) giving power to the members.

Conformity

We tend to conform our lifestyles to match the group’s to the degree we identify with that group and like the other members we’re around:

  1. We find meaning and purpose in that conformity because it reflects how we see the group’s identity.
  2. We’re trying to adapt to the standards we think will influence the other members the most, which means we value what we think the group values and do what the group expects.
  3. We anticipate future purposes will also work best if we conform to those standards.

The amount the group expects us to conform is proportional to its size. Large groups expect near-total submission, while small groups have far fewer expectations. The conflict between the individuals and the leadership defines a massive portion of its culture.

While we conform, we tend to believe social rules are the reality itself around us. However, they’re simply everyone’s shared imagination.

We tend to behave differently when we know others are observing us, often proportionally to how much we feel observed. However, addressing any lack of leadership integrity inside a group will usually make the leaders more shrewd than legitimately address the problem, typically proportionally to how much power the leaders have compared to the dissenting member.

Frequently, to maintain our power in the group, we’ll state things everyone in the group already knows (virtue signaling). That way, we can convey association to that group and solidify everyone else’s association with it. Leaders can also use it to keep the group together.

Image

In larger groups, since we’re not familiar with everyone, we’ll become much more obsessed about our image, across several possible approaches:

  1. Keep a very polished image except with highly trustworthy, close friends, which is its own small group.
  2. Stay authentic with everyone and fiercely abide by virtue, frequently at the risk of stifled advancement or rejection by the group.
  3. Keep a rigidly enforced, elaborate system of trust, which is what most people do inside a group.

Unfortunately, we can overwork our image beyond what’s healthy instead of pursuing better options. We often fear the unknown outside the group as if it consisted of zero available possible opportunities for our purposes. Other times, we’re working so tenaciously to maintain or build power that we forget what we want!

In most groups, there is an obsessive minority of that group who has decided to over-identify with it, and have adapted behaviors that cause tremendous conflicts with others. While they aren’t the majority of the group, they represent that group’s values to the outside, proportional to the leadership’s public response to them.

Climbing

In a group, a person’s influence is a social trend:

  1. People close to that person accept/adopt the person and the things they identify with, then add them to the group.
  2. It moves outward from that one person as other people trust the new people who trusted that person in the first place.
  3. It reaches the majority, where that person is now leading that group.
  4. The group grows under that person’s guidance, or that person eventually fades from importance as another person is accepted.

Generally, submission is a more reliable tactic than compliance to survive in a group. Compliance (i.e., following rules) determines how rarely we will fail. Submission (i.e., subordinating power) determines the grace people in more power will give when we do fail.

In groups pertaining to aptitude or performance, a person’s ability to influence the leadership can “tweak” their results. Often, people will cheat the system by drawing from unique forms of power, typically from the added resources of an outside group (such as their family). Because of this, any aptitude-based system becomes progressively worse to measure aptitude proportionally to how much leaders’ feelings dictate results.

As we gain influence, our group-related tasks become more complicated. Instead of our performance showing through aptitude and attention to small details, we’re measured by our communication ability to empower others’ aptitude and attention to small details.

The group’s size and collective influence represent the ceiling of how much power a person can use. A low-ranking member, however, must spend much more work and more time influencing until they have the power to make far-reaching decisions.

At absolutely any point, an influencer can violate a cultural standard and incur shame, which will quickly make them lose favor with the rest of the group. The only exception to this is in a defective social system.

Departure

There are a host of reasons we decide to leave a group:

  • We’ve changed too much to conform to the group’s standards anymore.
  • We’ve run out of purposes the group can satisfy.
  • We’ve grown up and no longer are interested in what that group offers anymore.
  • The group has changed, but we haven’t, and we want to retain the culture we used to have.

We only have a few options in that situation:

  1. Leave and become a junior member of another group.
  2. Leave and start a separate group.
  3. Stay and slowly drift into obscurity as an outlier of the group’s values. Occasionally, the outlier’s behaviors, many of which were the old group’s standards, will slowly shift to taboos!

While reforming the group is possible, that requires leading that group in some capacity, and if it’s not a key leadership position the group is likely to split over the conflict. Pushing against this to try forcing a change will often involve getting ejected from the group and labeled a pariah.


Application

We must stay vigilant to the influence our groups have upon us. Most people imagine their thoughts to be self-determined, but that is almost completely false, since their decisions are a reactive consequence of the group they’re in.

Unloving groups are all power games. A cult leader focuses power upwards, and self-help seminars focus power on each individual, but it’s all the same mechanism of rearranging power from its natural state.

Associating with a group that doesn’t reflect any of your values is a waste of time because you’re investing in something you don’t stand for. If you don’t expect you will change to match the group’s culture, you’re better off finding a group somewhere else or making your own. The worst-case (and likely) possibility if you don’t leave is that the group will mold you into a jaded shell of what you were.

People change individually at different rates, but the group changes at the average speed of all the individuals together. So, anyone significantly above or below average will grow slower or faster than everyone else. The faster ones will often outgrow the group unless they receive positions of influence, but the slower ones will often become mainstays of the group and slow down its cultural changes.

The larger a group grows, the more extreme personalities it’ll acquire, and those extreme personalities become the representation of that group to everyone else. For that reason, by the time a group becomes large, it’s already become different from it was when it was small.

Each group we choose has an opportunity cost:

  • If we’re not associated with a group we’re unsupported but have unlimited freedom to choose a group, but associating with a group gives us power and frequently comes with implications to outsiders.
  • We must sacrifice some personal values to join a group.
  • Whatever habits we had before we entered the group play a significant role in how much favor we can draw from the leadership.
  • The leaders will expect you to conform to their values, whatever those values are. The higher your influence in the group, the more expectations.

Join large groups to learn, especially from the elderly in that group, or join as a high-rank member to influence. But, never join a large group to influence anyone, since small groups yield better results, and they’ll eventually become a large group if you’re succeeding correctly.

If a group is violating your boundaries by watching you too closely, even if it’s remotely (such as via the internet), your only hope to have any privacy is to make a public spectacle of it or leave the group. You’ll usually become a leader of another group afterward if nobody kills you first.

Most group membership takes work, though that work may be worth it. If that group isn’t yielding anything worth the work, however, it’s a waste of resources to maintain any status or affiliation with it.