@Zac,
All human societies necessarily function as tribes.
I'm about as hierarchy-averse as you can get, but you can't run anything without some kind of tribe/hierarchy.
You need leaders, core guys who serve as helpers and advisors to the leaders, and up-and-comers who are moving up through the ranks and can someday replace the leaders and other core guys, because no one lives forever, and no one stays in his role forever. Presidents, CEOs, fraternity presidents, these are all temporary roles people rarely occupy more than 4-10 years.
So then you need to figure out succession strategies, and make sure there's a core community within the broader community that can keep the culture stable and guard against hostile outside influences.
We did it this way from the very beginning. I even explained it as such. We opened the Boards to 50 registrants in 2012, then closed registration for I think 4 weeks while Franco and I worked personally with guys to make sure we had a strong early forum culture, before we opened the Boards up to more people.
Then when we did open up, we had a bunch of regular members at that point who were acculturated to how we want to do things here.
That made it much easier to make sure we had things right from the get-go.
It's always functioned as a 'tribe' in that sense.
If it did not, it would just be a free-for-all of random anonymous people with no ties that bound them, no shared understanding or perspectives, and they'd all be yelling at each other and arguing with each other constantly and telling one another they're wrong and evil and accusing each other of stuff.
Until eventually a tribe emerged and enforced its own de facto culture on the forum and pushed out people who did not agree.
You can take a look at the GC Boards and the challenges it's dealt with over the years. We have had:
- A big anti-monogamy wave where some members, led by one senior member, were going around everywhere telling everyone monogamy does not work. Any time anyone posted a problem about a relationship ("My girlfriend caused drama last night, what do I do?") he'd get a post or two almost immediately telling him monogamy doesn't work and he needs to NEXT that girl and get himself a couple of open-relationship FWBs. We had to warn those members, I had to write a post about monogamy, and then it finally cooled back off
- A few guys went on complaint streaks, claiming this stuff doesn't work or is too hard or is impractical. We asked them to cool it off, and go out, and field test stuff, but they stepped up going around on everyone's threads and telling them they needed to stop trying to do this stuff because it doesn't work, and we eventually banned them
- We had the "brown guy struggles" of 2015-2017 or so, where a collection of 5 or 6 brown guys were swamping the Boards with tales of woe about how women didn't want them because they were brown, and would reject everyone else's advice or say it didn't count (including fellow brown guys like Grand Pooba). I really wanted these guys to pull through, and a lot of members of the Boards were annoyed with us for letting them stay for so long. We eventually had to ban almost all them, because even after years they were still drenching the boards in victim mentality
- We had a few other things, like the guy who was here for a while writing field reports, then left for a year or something, and came back saying "this stuff on GC doesn't work, I went and got jacked and finally got girls, getting jacked is what gets you girls" and he posted some reports and everything he was doing with these girls was GC stuff, and the girls he was going for were all bleached blonde gym bunnies (so of course you need to be hitting the gym if you want those girls). Or Drck, who went over to the dark side of red pill/MGTOW, and started posting a ton of cynical stuff arguing with senior members. I really did not want to ban him, but we warned him about it, and he didn't change anything, just kept posting negative stuff
Those may seem like isolated incidents, but they all have a thing in common.
They are attempts by these guys to
form new tribes within the existing Boards.
If you allow them to continue, where they are swamping the Boards with these ideologies ("monogamy doesn't work! Only polyamory works", "none of this stuff works. Women are bitches", "no woman wants brown guys. Why are brown guys so unloved!", etc.), and it gets pervasive enough, guys who don't agree with that stuff will leave, and other guys who agree with it will migrate in and start participating.
You absolutely have to have a tribe. The only thing strong enough to resist the push of new tribes moving in trying to take over territory (and a forum very much is a kind of online digital territory) is an existing dominant tribe ready to defend its territory.
I've done my best to ensure the tribe here is welcoming, open-minded, non-dogmatic (anti-dogmatic, even), positive, can-do, and helpful.
But of course, it is still going to be a tribe.
It still must have rules, customs, and shared understandings. And new members must at least respect these (even if they don't fully subscribe to them), to hang around here.
If you are far enough outside the perspective of a given tribe whose territory you try to hang around on (say, you're a red pill MGTOW who thinks women are all manipulative bitches... and you want to come hang out here), you're going to feel like the guys of this place are misguided and need to 'see the light'.
So you will come here, proselytize to us, try to convert us. And when guys find you negative and annoying, and you get banned, you will walk away shaking your head calling us unenlightened.
The truth is everywhere is run by a tribe.
This forum is a tribe. Political parties are tribes. The mainstream media is a tribe. Hollywood is a tribe. A country is a tribe.
And within each tribe, there are these concentric circles, decreasing in size and increasing in power and intimacy, as you move toward the leadership at the center of the tribe.
And you periodically have dissenters and invaders who come in looking to upset the power balance and form a new power center within the territory, as well as more minor disruptions as people question this or that tenet of the tribe's worldview or challenge members of the leadership.
There are various ways to gain power within a tribe's territory:
- Work your way up within the tribe, gaining the respect of its senior members, by doing the things that tribe holds in highest esteem (here, that'd be going out, posting field and lay reports, being cool toward other members, helping other guys succeed, keeping a positive mindset, and posting new and useful techniques, insights, and other info that is useful to other members). Working your way up is the lowest friction path to the top of a tribe, and it's the one the leadership of the tribe wants members to take, since it means those members are respecting the rules and spirit of the tribe as it presently exists, and will aid, rather than disrupt, tribal continuity.
- Challenge core precepts or senior members of the tribe, from within the tribe. This is analogous to internal dissent and revolution, and obviously works best if you build a power base within the tribe first. Typically you need a few senior members of the tribe to pull off a successful revolution (there's studies of this in national revolutions, and basically, pure lower class revolutions never win. The only time the lower class is successful is when it combines forces with a disaffected group of the ruling class to seize power from the majority of the remaining ruling class individuals).
- Establish a competing tribe, with greater energy and better ideas and technology, and grow and draw strength from the old tribe, eventually conquering or absorbing it. This is analogous to external revolution. A Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great conquering broad swaths of other tribes' territory, rather than a Caesar or a Cromwell or a Robespierre or a Lenin taking over the tribe from the inside out. This was closer to the approach I took with Girls Chase to the pick up artist community. We started as a tiny blog kind of on the outskirts of the community. We grew with minimal support from a few fringe members of the old community, and set up our own boards that were quite separate for a long time. Eventually a lot of guys started migrating over here as the older places fell, and at this point GC's the biggest site in game, and the Boards are more or less the home for the seduction community online. There's still a lot of territory for us to conquer, but sooner or later we'll either conquer it all and have nowhere to go but down, or we'll lose our energy and some hungry new upstart will come along gunning for our position, and all the energy will go over there. Hopefully that won't happen for a really long time, but that is the way of all things. Nothing ever lasts forever.
So, I mean... that's that.
It's a tribe.
All gatherings of humans are a tribe.
It may not feel that way, especially when you're sort of bouncing around from tribe to tribe.
Zac, you're not in the leadership circles here, but even you, you know, are more deeply entrenched within the tribe than many guys here. You've been here a long time, a lot of guys like you, and while you're sometimes too inscrutable in your postings, you generally have a positive attitude and you offer guys useful feedback when you deign to do so.
There is this dream of the world, as sort of a one-world tribe, where everyone is equal, and there are no power differentials, and everyone can talk to anyone at any time because we're all exactly the same.
It's a beautiful dream, but in a world where people have unequal knowledge and experience and ability, it's unachievable.
You are always going to have tribes, and if a specific tribe starts breaking down, and those at the center of it no longer uphold their contract with the tribe (they stop providing value, start asking for more than they give, etc.), a new tribe will come along to replace them.
It's an unavoidable part of dealing with humans.
If you don't form up a tribe, someone else will form one up for you, and it may not be one that does things the way you'd like to see them done.
So, you form one, make it what you want it to be, try to attract others who like what that tribe is and will help to defend and uphold and expand and improve it, and you end up with a cool place that is everything you hoped it would be.
But is, still, of course, a tribe.
All large-ish, stable-ish gatherings of humans necessarily must be.
Chase