Page Not Found — Wait But Why

Living simultaneously in multiple cultures is part of what makes being a human tricky. Do we keep our individual inner values to ourselves and just do our best to match our external behavior to whatever culture we’re currently in a room with? Or do we stay loyal to one particular culture and live by those rules everywhere, even at our social or pro... See more

We spent the rest of Chapter 7 thinking about thinking in 2D, exploring how our thinking process changed as we moved up and down the second dimension: the Psych Spectrum. At the end of the chapter, I reminded us that the entire discussion was only looking at a 2D cross section of what’s actually a 3D space of human thinking and behavior.

And these decisions matter—because the cultures we spend time in have a major influence over us.

The reason we need our second dimension—the Psych Spectrum—is because humans exist along a span of the Psych Spectrum. That’s why it’s a dimension.

The visuals can get a little complicated here, especially when I’m the graphic designer, but try to bear with me. Emergence Tower is kind of like a z-axis we can flip on its side and add onto our x-y graph:

For the rest of this post, we’ll zoom in on one specific type of culture: intellectual culture. There are all kinds of intellectual cultures out there, but we can slot them into two broad categories:

Which brings up an important question: why does a particular culture enforce certain values and not others?

A giant’s culture also affects how it interacts with the emergence levels above it, as each giant’s prevailing culture determines how it plays with other giants, and which types of other giants it will gravitate towards.

So far, we’ve been focusing on the relationship between culture and individuals. In that realm, culture functions as the rules of engagement. But when we move up to higher levels of emergence, where groups of people function like giant organisms, a group’s culture becomes the giant’s personality.