#parallel institutions

There’s the long-standing idea, at least in the fields of business and technology, that if you think you have an idea for how to do something better than the established entities, you get together some friends, and start a business to implement your ideas on a small scale — if they are indeed better, you’ll attract customers and grow. Then, either you displace the “big boys,” or else they buy you out or otherwise implement your ideas. Now, some proponents will admit this is an ideal, with some real-world complications and barriers that make this much more easily said than done, but it’s still generally held as a better way to go than just trying to persuade an established business to switch over to your way.

A number of times online, I’ve encountered people who argue for extending this to political and cultural issues — if you’re part of a group who disagree with some element of modern society, get together and build “parallel institutions” where you live out your preferred alternative as best as you can implement it, and hope to attract “converts” through your superior outcomes. (I note that the bulk of people I’ve encountered promoting this view have been ex-Mormons.)

I could go on at length about the number of issues involved in trying to do this that make it far harder than the business parallel:

that all the successful examples people point to are explicitly religious and over a century old at the youngest (again, the most common example seems to be Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and the LDS church);

that your group can only be stricter — you can forbid what the rest of society allows, but you cannot allow what the rest forbids;

that your enforcement mechanisms for any rules are limited to social sanction and the threat of expulsion, which is only an effective punishment if everyone’s sufficiently “invested” in the group and identity, in a way that pretty much requires religion (see above);

that on certain domains, the government claims monopoly — for example, if your goal is to replace the prison system, you can’t just “startup” your own “parallel” criminal justice system (at least, not legally);

(And I could even go on about the usual, or expected, counter-arguments, which often boil down to “nobody promised it would be easy,” “even if you’ll almost certainly fail, it’s still better to try it this way,” and particularly for the last one, “if you can’t build your preferred institution, then the next best alternative is working through traditional politics, trying to persuade people, where at best you might eke out some tiny reforms in your preferred direction, so if your goal can’t be done incrementally, just give up hope and learn to live with the status quo.”)

But, to avoid getting lost in all those details and come around to the more specific point:

Liberals want to win the victory they can’t achieve at the ballot box by using their cultural power to systematically marginalize and exclude Normal Americans from every aspect of society – and we can’t let them. From the business world to Hollywood, we are seeing them react to their utter repudiation in recent elections by trying to intimidate us into silent conformity as the price of us being allowed to participate in the non-governmental institutions of society. We must therefore have a two-part response to this act of cultural warfare – not only must we get right back in their smug little faces, but we must also build our own cultural institutions, ones that they can’t control.

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