Ethos: The Kernel of Culture 🌽
How to create great institutions and an intermission to mark newsletter 25
Ethos: The Kernel of Culture
Several weeks ago I wrote a draft essay about how good statecraft involves the moulding of belief. I received some feedback that the essay was too ambitious in scope, and lacked a clear definition of statecraft. Since then I've tried to update the original a few times, but was never satisfied with the result.
This week I read an excellent hagiography of Stripe. The article outlined how the founders' unique philosophy has informed every aspect of Stripe's culture. It was very insightful and inspired me to have another go at the essay. This time I've tried to put it together as an exercise in defining terms, with the aim of understanding what we mean by a phrase like 'a culture-led company'. I hope you find it useful.
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Humans act in an environment. The environment, in concert with our bodies, determines the set of actions that can be taken. Within this context, we have specific aims. There are a limited number of actions in the feasible set that will allow us to approach these aims. We can call all the potential actions available to us in pursuit of our aims the array of human activity.
Some of our aims are broad and the associated array is large. For example, we aim to eat enough to maintain our bodies. There are many ways this can be achieved. Both takeout meals and home-cooked masterpieces can satisfy us.
Many actions can satisfy a set of constraints, but each one has unique qualities. These qualities are elusive, but you can get an idea of them by thinking about what it means when we call an action "noble", "gentle" or "silly"1. By consistently choosing to cook my meals rather than ordering takeout, my path through the array of human activity develops a collection of associated qualities. Over time, this collection adds up to what might be called a sense of taste, or an ethos2.
Every person generates an ethos. As we act in each situation we both express and continue to create our ethos. This gives each person a particular aura. When we see admirable individuals, we may anchor on some particular achievement. However, if we are attracted to them 'as a person', it is always this ethos that we admire. We wish to emulate someone by taking on at least some of the pattern that they are cultivating within the array of human activity.
This emulation of an ethos is, of course, a flawed process. No two people's paths through the array of actions can be exactly identical. Nonetheless, certain forms do start to reemerge. An ethos never repeats but it can rhyme3. When many people start to copy all or part of an ethos, this creates a culture.
Like ethos themselves, the development of culture is emergent. A strong culture is the coherent expression of an ethos across many people. Such a culture requires a powerful kernel ethos.
This is another way to read Samo Burja's Great Founder Theory4. Truly lasting institutions could never be the work of only one individual. There is too much complexity for the deliberate machinations of one person to inform all that is done by the group. However, an institution can be bounded in its interaction with the array of human activity. This bounding comes from the shared culture. This in turn proceeds from the kernel of ethos imparted by the individuals that acted as founders.
Newsletter 25 Intermission
As of this week I've written 25 issues of this newsletter since committing to a regular weekly update at the beginning of the year. I heard that 25 was a magic number in terms of consistency, and it also coincides with being halfway through the year. I thought it would be a good opportunity to take stock and write about what I've learned. I hope you will forgive the personal intermission. If it doesn't interest you, please skip it. We'll be back to the essays next week.
Looking back at my first post this year, I promised that "you can expect to see this domain appear in your inbox more often" and that has certainly happened. I'm proud of the consistency in general but have been a little disappointed by how sometimes (like today) the post has come later in the day then I would have liked. I still think the Saturday morning timing is good, so for the back half of the year I'm going to also commit explicitly to having this out at 8am Eastern each Saturday. That should be a good time for everyone to pick it up on the weekends.
I've also found that the book reviews I did at the beginning were mostly dead weight. I got a lot of feedback that they weren't as compelling as the essays and didn't tie well with the overall themes. Plus, each week I felt like I had a weight hanging over me to read something worth writing about, which sometimes led to very sub-par entries. I'll be dropping these moving forward.
The weekly essay has been very good for my writing and thinking. I will definitely continue the practice. However, my natural interests haven't led me to explore a specific topic in depth. There's nothing necessarily wrong with this, but I hope that in the second half of the year I can do more deep dives in particular areas. I have a couple of projects in mind, some of which are already in the works, though nothing I feel comfortable announcing formally right now. Stay tuned though! I'll post here when any of these break through.
There are now 65 people signed up to this newsletter. Most seem to open it at least every couple of weeks. I also can't know for sure but I think that only 4 people have ever unsubscribed. All of this is kind of amazing. I am sincerely grateful for your attention. I know that it really is the most valuable thing that you could give and I don't take it for granted. I hope that I can continue to provide you something worth reading here.
Thanks to Casey Li for reading a draft of this newsletter
In case anyone hasn't read it there is a wonderful exploration of quality as a real part of the world in Robert Prisig's book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Of course, one person's ethos may be fairly described as 'incoherent' as they switch from one kind of action to another. Yet even in this case it is undeniable that their path through the array of human action has a certain flavour.
Here is an interesting provenance for this phrase
To quote Samo's own encapsulation of his theory: "What drives social change throughout history and the present? What are the origins of institutional health or sclerosis? My answer is that a small number of functional institutions founded by exceptional individuals form the core of society. These institutions are imperfectly imitated by the rest of society, multiplying their effect. The original versions outperform their imitators, and are responsible for the creation and renewal of society and all the good things that come with it—whether we think of technology, wealth, or the preservation of a society’s values. Over time, functional institutions decay. As the landscape of founders and institutions changes, so does the landscape of society."