Great House Plan II

Further discussions on personal institutions

In my previous article, How to Found a Great House, I presented the idea of a new kind of institution with the following characteristics:

• A network made of families

• Headed by one individual, the patron

• The patron distributes resources, the clients give loyalty

• Pro-natalist, grows exponentially

• Cooperative

• Focused on profitable ends: business, politics, aggrandizement

To summarize, the Great House Plan is a particular instantiation of a network state with an emphasis on natalism and a mechanism for jump-starting the network (patronage).

If you haven’t read the piece, you should stop now and go read it. It got several thousand reads, many shares, and inspired a great deal of interesting discussion both in the comments and on twitter.

In this article I want to deep dive into the frameworks and assumptions that support the idea of the Great House Plan and demonstrate some of its attractive characteristics, especially compared to alternatives.

Why would you want to join a Great House?

One of the most common objections to Great House Plan is “How would the patron retain his clients?” After all, jobs outside the patronage network can be undoubtedly more lucrative than any monthly stipend a patron could reasonably offer. This is especially so for elite talent, who, if sufficiently bright, could go and found their own companies and even their own competing Great Houses. In my original piece I do make explicit allowance for this kind of entrepreneurial activity. I think that a client having been supported and mentored in his youth would absolutely maintain a cooperative relationship with the patron once he “graduated” onto his own pursuits. Loyalty to formative institutions is very strong, so much so that it has built the largest endowments in the world. However I do grant that a world full of opportunity imposes many centripetal forces that give incentives for talented individuals to leave organizations.

One answer to this question has to do with the competence of your Great House. Obviously if the benefits to be obtained through it are greater than could be found elsewhere, people will tend to stay. Therefore if you are running GHP you should absolutely be using your network of smart coordinated people to go out into the world and win stuff: found companies, put people in office, accumulate status, create areas with high quality of life for yourselves, etc. The intangible benefits here can also be very strong; those things that don’t cost money but people value very highly: community, status, high-quality dating pools, art, ritual. These are things that the market is bad at delivering.

Another aspect of discussion focused on the payments a patron would make to a client. $60k per year, which I gave as an example, was seen as either too much or too little. What I would say is that even a little bit of extra money helps growing families enormously, the exact amount is not important so long as it is material. The point of the subsidy is not to buy loyalty, but to help your families jumpstart. There is actually an inverse relationship between the strength of your vision / personal connection and the amount of money you might have to provide to earn someone’s loyalty. I suspect that for many people, you could win their eternal regard by visiting them, making periodic introductions or recommendations, and delivering them a Christmas ham on a yearly basis. A little bit of personal concern, which is in such short supply these days, goes an enormously long way. If you have a strong moral vision and can inspire people to your cause you can even earn their loyalty for nothing and use goodwill within the network to coordinate the delivery of benefits to people. Therefore if you want to do GHP you should first think very hard about what inspires you, then about how to connect with people on a deep level and share that vision. Then if you have the means, any money you put into the network is to help it grow stronger / faster.

With regards to the vision, I think GHP presents a very simple central founding idea, a big strength of the plan. Anyone can do it. If you have read Balaji S’s book about network states, you know that articulating a moral vision is critical for building a community. But what if you don’t have a unique moral vision? With GHP you don’t actually need one. Your moral vision is as simple as this: “I want to take care of you and in exchange I want you to help grow the network and occasionally do stuff for me.” Anyone with a little bit of means can offer this to anyone: the differentiation lies solely in the personal connections.

Another way to answer the question about retention has to do with assumptions about the future, which I think is going be rough in a way we have not seen in the developed world for some time. Due to the upcoming challenges of the next several decades, I think that people will be clamoring to get themselves admitted into networks that can deliver community, resources, protection, and opportunities. A poorly functioning general society makes the idea of community not only relatively more attractive, but an absolute necessity.

Let’s have a look at the future.

Open vs. Closed Societies

Once upon a time, late 20th century America offered the epitome of public life. A boy from a small farm town could access high-quality public education and libraries, travel to the city on public roads, attend world-class universities open to anyone, study anything he wished, and go into a similarly open job market. Any career path he desired was open to him; companies during this period trusted in the education and training provided by formative institutions and were happy to hire complete strangers. He could move anywhere aided by cheap gasoline, and live almost anywhere with a high degree of safety. In the realm of commerce he could buy and sell goods and property from and to whoever he wished, to anyone in the world. If so desired, he could enter politics, or found a company with readily available capital. It was an open world.

The success of this system lay in removing structural barriers to the movement and growth of individuals and processing them through developmental institutions (public schools, universities, the military, corporations) to ensure a relatively high-quality and uniform result. By removing all individual barriers and unleashing the human capital latent in even the smallest farming town, this open system achieved massive, world-dominating scale. In the case of Neil Armstrong, who was born in 1930 outside Wapakoneta, Ohio, it carried him to the moon.

We must recognize this achievement. It was not always so. For most of history, all business was family business; the idea of hiring a stranger would have been unthinkable. New ventures always required the explicit permission of the sovereign. Education was a rare luxury reserved for the wealthy, and insecurity in the form of war, famine and disease were the norm. Because of these challenges most areas of the world were small private realms whose intercourse with each other was limited to war and approved channels of commerce. A serf in Norman England did have the right to occupy and develop his land and receive protection from his lord, but he did not have the right to sell it, take his money to London, and go into business importing French wine. These systems seem unbelievably rigid to us today but were products of a time when food production and security relied on human labor. As a result, most people were organized into systems that controlled human labor resources. They were bounded by geography and class and the mental disciplines required for commerce or technological progress were distributed unevenly. Furthermore overarching systems of trust that could integrate all these little worlds and form the basis for cooperation between them were relatively limited in scope.

This was the world of closed societies. Before we dismiss them, I want to present some interesting benefits they tended to offer.

• Firstly, they offered decentralized forms to cooperate against challenges, in a way that insulated against central failures. If you have your own little army you are less concerned if the sovereign decides to abandon you. If you grow your own food you are unconcerned if wheat shipments do not arrive to the capital. Within the community you live a life of cooperation that is much more intense than within an open systems. It’s possible to enjoy an ideal of close community that is missing for many people today. Within these worlds the different social classes enjoy a close common life. Compare the clear windows of centralized Versailles to the riotous stained glasses of the Sainte Chapelle in Paris. In the age before absolutism the entire community of the realm is included; builders, farmers, musicians, shepherds, craftsmen, soldiers, nobles and king; an ideal of togetherness.

• Secondly, they tended to offer incentives for family growth. For example, in many feudal arrangements labor obligations were levied per family (i.e. three days a week tilling, sowing, reaping on lord’s fields) but not per individual. Therefore peasant families were incentivized to grow in order to spread the cost of labor over many individuals.

• Thirdly, closed societies were unique. Because they were independent and shaped by personal preference they had unparalleled individual character. In a world without mechanization there was less need for standardization. Think of the different kinds of relationships you have among your friends: some are close, some are distant. Some are mediated by obligations, some by pleasurable shared interests. Each is entirely unique. Likewise in closed societies; we see the echo of this kind of personalization in the obligations that exist in historical records: this particular town will deliver the king five baskets of eels on Christmas, in that duchy the duke will lead the Easter procession in commemoration of some ancient victory, in another the obligation is only military service. Feudalism was an infinite patchwork of overlapping personal obligations, giving the whole system immense and interesting variety.

The Failure of the Open Society

Now imagine you are middle class family in 2020 and public life has been closed by your government. There are barriers to crossing borders, you cannot gather in public, you cannot send your children to school, and unless you have a laptop job you cannot work. If you have a small business that relies on foot traffic, you are in danger of losing it. Furthermore, through some madness, government officials decline to enforce public safety. Downtown shopping centers which used to be areas of recreation are now open-air crime zones predated by roving mobs.

Aside from COVID-era suspensions of normal order, the open society has achieved such scale and penetration that you are entirely exposed to the market. Trade, education, and labor are international. To earn a place at a good university (the primary gate for advancement into the upper-middle class) you must compete with international students, legacy admits, and government-mandated preferred admissions. While productivity has risen for 50 years, wages have not risen commensurably; your wife is obliged to work, so you must outsource childcare to the market as well. Also, because of the twin pressures of international investment and immigration, the idea of buying a home is a distant dream, demand anywhere is demand everywhere; prices in your bracket are simply out of reach. If you are a young person, your exposure is even more extreme. Social life has been forced into digital networks that demand your performance and where you can be easily surveilled. They have the power to thrust you immediately into the global spotlight for consumption by outrage mobs. Everyone, left, right and in-between, lives in fear of being cancelled.

In effect, every structure of social protection between you and the state, or between you and the mob, has been removed. In the Roman republic there were situations where it was impossible for the state to prosecute individuals because they were shielded by the jurisdiction of the paterfamilias. Today, you are subject to overlapping jurisdictions of Federal, State, and municipal governments. Your institutions likewise have jurisdiction over you; as a young man you can be prosecuted in secret Title IX courts without ever being afforded the right to question your accuser. Your subjection does not end there: your job, your professional organizations, the technological systems you interact with; all these cooperate to wield disciplinary power over you. At all times they seek to implement their formative programs on their subjects and extract their consent.

The current hostility of governments and institutions towards their subjects is very strange. For most of human history, it was in the best interest of rulers that their subjects should flourish. More men, women, and children in your kingdom meant more soldiers and laborers. In a world defined by human power, more humans meant more power. Even continuing into the age of mass democracy and industrialization, larger populations could field larger armies. Therefore developed powers had an interest to grow their populations. However, with the advent of nuclear weapons and mass automation, large populations were no longer necessary. Bombs could protect borders, and goods and food could be made by machine. Population growth came to be viewed as a liability that could interfere with development. Ideas about overpopulation came in vogue in the ‘70s with thinkers like Paul Ehrlich whose seminal work, redolent of nuclear anxieties, was ominously titled “The Population Bomb.” Nations instead of expanding their borders turned managerial efforts inward with strategies designed to maximize the participation of every potential individual within the economy rather than meaningfully expanding the total pool of labor. High-growth population groups were viewed with suspicion and a variety of programs designed to suppress their fertility were deployed to encourage immigrant groups to abandon traditional life-ways centered on family and integrate into American society as atomized units prepared to produce, consume, and inhabit institutions.

For a time these systems worked, even after manufacturing was sent overseas and subjects would no longer be required to even produce, because the inconvenient masses were re-conceptualized as consumers: they could demonstrate their utility to nations and corporations by buying things. As long as the economy continued to expand and there was a constant stream of new things to buy the system could sustain itself. Now in the 2020s we must evaluate whether these assumptions still hold.

Inflation, Shortages, Breakdowns, Work Stoppages, and the Gray Wave

• As of the time of publishing this essay, July 2022, inflation is expected to hit 8.5% this quarter. The actual figure is likely much higher. The price of housing, gasoline, heating oil, meat, and eggs has risen precipitously. More of people’s money will have to be spent on necessities rather than on new consumer goods which drive economic growth.

• World supply chains, long-optimized for efficiency, are struggling to deliver construction materials, chips, metals, and materials needed for new projects. Most of these issues are due to lingering shocks from COVID measures. Ukraine, which accounts for 10% of global wheat exports, is beset by war, leading to rising food prices in Africa and the Middle East.

• The infrastructure that we depend on to move people, goods, and fuel, built at the height of the 20th century is old and rotting, the people with the expertise needed to maintain it are retiring or dead. Attempts to fill the gaps with technology are prone to failure and expose critical systems to the threat of cyberattack.¹ In some cases governments do not even have the will to defend it against active attacks.

• The labor participation rate has been in continual decline since the year 2000. Some of this is due to early retirements, but there is a worrying trend of young people dropping out of the workforce. Who can blame them? Wages are depressed relative to productivity. Low end jobs seem to only offer drudgery, not paths to advancement, self-sufficiency and family formation as they did in previous decades.

• Most significantly of all, the populations of the developed world are rapidly aging because people are living longer and having fewer children, in some cases far below replacement level. This is an unprecedented challenge in human history, where a smaller core of young people will be expected to support a massive aging population and the concerns of the elderly will dominate. The average age in Europe is expected to be 49 by 2050. In some countries a quarter of the population will be older than 75. Think about how an aging population works or responds to challenges: they are not dynamic or flexible, their primary concerns are safety and maintaining the status quo. In other words, just as the challenges of the 2020’s become crises, many countries in the world will be least capable of addressing them with energy and new thinking.

These five examples are illustrative of a system beset by grave threats to its core functioning, both on the supply side and on the demand side. If the open society can’t deliver goods, and no one wants to work to earn them anyways, how do we re-evaluate the relationship between the masses and our cornerstone social institutions? In times of scarcity, the line between “consumer” and “useless mouth” is ominously thin.

The irony is that most these challenges are due to failures in management in part of government decision-makers. COVID overreactions, attempts to jump-start a halted economy, decisions to pursue endless foreign wars, green policy-derived magical thinking leading to energy interruptions: none of these have to do with fundamental limits or resource scarcities. Unfortunately mismanagements of this kind is likely to continue until our current rulers are replaced. If crises like the above examples continue, growth and consumerism will not be possible and fundamental assumptions about society’s organizing principles will be re-evaluated. Indeed, the Great Reset project sponsored by the WEF is precisely an attempt to think about this fundamental re-imagining.

Therefore, if you assume like I do that the current situation of opportunity in the developed world is not likely to last, then you should begin making plans for how to meet the coming demand for supportive communities. In other words, “winter is coming.” I am not predicting collapse, but I am predicting big changes which present both opportunity and hardship. Don’t stack beans in your basement: that’s isolated, defensive thinking. Instead, build communities and start using them to do productive things. GHP is a plan for how to jump-start a growth community. It’s a good time to begin. People are going to want to be part of these.

Human-Eliminationist Institutions vs. Human Nurturing Institutions

Thus far we’ve talked about why someone might want to join a Great House and how the conditions under which they could exist. Now I want to talk about why they should exist. These ideas were sparked by thinking about Elon Musk’s tweets about birth rates. I began to think about institutions and wondered if there were any that were explicitly dedicated to nurturing human fertility.

I arrived at a framework of “human-eliminationist institutions” vs “human nurturing institutions.”

A human eliminationist institution is an organization whose fundamental logic is the removal of people from its core functionality or from society at large. An example of an HEI is a manufacturing or a technology company: by using automation these companies remove humans from the production-chain allowing the value that would otherwise be captured by them in the form of wages to be retained in the form of profits. Obviously, in the course of launching and growing the business, the company will make hires and develop human talent, but its fundamental logic is that human processes should always be replaced by technology. Furthermore, they are constructed as impersonal organizations, meaning all people within them, from CEO to janitor, are ultimately replaceable. This presents certain benefits of course, but it means that existence within these organizations is subject to constant disruption and re-shuffling as the system is continually optimized. They are not designed for long-term human habitation.

Please note that this term is presented without judgement. There can be both benign and malignant HEIs. I would consider the previous example to be relatively benign; there is nothing wrong with HEIs so long as they are sufficiently balanced by “human nuturing institutions,” (more on those in a minute) and are limited in scope.

A malignant example of an HEI would be a green organization whose leadership subscribes to values of human population reduction, or a health organization dedicated to controlling fertility. These groups, for whatever reason, have a primary interest in reducing populations; therefore they are also human eliminationist institutions. Very worryingly, this thinking has seemed to infect a number of elite institutions that have practically unlimited scope. Yuval Harari, darling of the WEF, is famous for his predictions of what they’ll do with the “useless class” whose jobs are displaced by AI. In fairness to him, he would say he is being hyperbolic in order to give a warning, but Harari’s technocratic world-view has trouble thinking of people as anything other than a resource whose value lies in their utility. Therefore, according to a technocrat, if people become useless or inconvenient, they should be reconfigured for the more efficient functioning of the entire system.

A human nuturing institution (HNI), on the other hand, is one that develops human talent, and that is “inhabitable” in the sense that people can find community and enjoyment within them without being subject to economic or bureaucratic shaping pressures; they can spend their whole lives within them. A good sign that you are in an HNI is that you are primarily concerned with dealing with other people rather than with a process. The best HNIs are also conducive to fertility. A city that is concerned with endogenous growth would be an example of a human nuturing institution. A religious college with high marriage rates between students, as exist in some parts of the world, would be another. Even some dating apps focused on marriage and long-term relationships could be called HNIs. Within HNIs people are free to pursue human ends.

Of course families themselves are the best examples of HNIs. People originate within families, within families people are developed from children into adults. Stable families have higher fertility rates. The boundaries of family give space where people can be free from the economic forces that mediate relationships in the wider world. Part of the idea with GHP is to take this idea that works (family) and scale it.

When comparing benign HEIs and HNIs, if they are sufficiently balanced, then society functions well. Corporations pursue profits and deliver goods to society while human nurturing institutions develop humans. The separation is good for both people and corporations. When families are strong, corporations do not have to take on nanny-like functions such as those at Google, where work and and abundance of amenities seem to encourage employees to replace their personal lives with work time. Work is understood to stay at work. When family is broadly understood as the primary locus of human development, people are free to pursue more individual desires away from the standardizing mechanisms of corporate HR. On the other hand, as companies grow and shrink, there are sufficient reserves of human capital to draw on and society is capable of absorbing the risk of failed ventures.

However, when human nurturing institutions become compromised, it leads to individual and societal dysfunction. This is why marriage failures, drops in fertility, or failures of family formation among young adults are grave problems. Broken homes, unfortunately, produce broken people. Up to 75% of American young adults are unfit to serve in the military. This is the situation we find ourselves in today.

Even worse, many government bodies which in previous ages might have been concerned with contributing to population growth and human flourishing are instead committed to policies that are structurally hostile to it, or animated by favoritisms that have the effect of denying support to majority populations. For example, when the stated policy of governments is permissive of mass migration, and the overriding moral motivation for the deployment of new government resources lies only in favor of new populations, the end result is neglect or hostility to the concerns of a country’s core population, a position of de-facto eliminationist policy. The point is, many middle-class Americans are alienated and have no recourses for official support. There are millions of bright people out there who are ripe for someone to help take care of them and bind them together into high-quality groups that can go out into the world and do things.

Comparisons

Therefore what is required is a new kind of institution that safeguards the interests of families. Not a think tank, not another impersonal bureaucracy, but a structure whose fundamental logic, from the ground up, is predicated on incentives for family growth, personal connection, and community, in a way that is resistant to co-option by hostile ideologies. This is what the Great House Plan purports to offer. Let’s compare a Great House to an example bureaucracy:

Notice how the Great House, in every component of its construction, is centered on personal connections, families, and individual decisions. It also has a “sustainability mechanism,” analogous to a business model, which is the way in which benefits can continue to accrue. In this case, it’s endogenous growth which produces a valuable resource (high quality, coordinated human capital). These people are then employed to do productive things and bring resources back to the Great House. When we consider aging populations and their difficulty with work, we can see that smart young labor in the future is going to command an enormous premium. Imagine a world where the average age is 50 and people have difficulty working or doing new things, while you have access to a pool of talent whose average is 25. GHP is therefore a bet on the ability of youth to out-compete in a graying world. You will have no trouble deploying your human capital to go and do productive things that accrue resources back to the GH, thereby closing the cycle and making the whole thing sustainable.

Conclusion

There’s more to be discussed, including step-by-step examples of how to implement a plan like this, as well as more exploration of practical considerations. Also I’d like to do a comparison between investment into human systems vs. AI systems, but we’ll leave that for later articles. The GHP, in addition to being a way to accumulate capability and enact the vision of a patron, is a new kind of entirely pro-human institution. Instead of a government body, the concept is elegant in its simplicity: great families will nurture lesser families; all will rise together. The answer for families is not government policies or free daycare which represent more process-focused meddling, but institutions that directly accrue power to families. As official state structures decline in capabilities, networks of these kinds are going to rise in prominence. Despite their differences from the scale and openness of late 20th century America, these worlds are going to be refreshing centers of life where community, growth, and individuation can be found free from the ravages of the market and official transformative designs. I look forward to a patchwork of Great Houses, a constellation of unique and beautiful worlds. I look forward to their ascendancy and the retreat of the State, and I look forward to the expansion of these protected shoals where the culture of youth can once again flourish.

1. In May 2021 Colonial Pipeline, a major fuel delivery system for the US East coast was targeted by hackers in a ransomeware attack. In response, the pipeline company shut down operations for several days, leading to fuel shortages along the east coast. In May of 2022 the US Department of Transportation proposed a ~$1 Million fine because the Colonial Pipeline company was not prepared to perform manual operations. This is a perfect example of a human system being replaced with automation in a way that exposes the system to digital attack. The human system was allowed to degrade and when the automation inevitably failed (because defense and maintenance of automated systems relies on human systems as well) the system failed catastrophically.