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A jam submission

American Orthodox Church ModelView game page

A dogma-light framework for an era of low institutional trust
Submitted by oddargonaut — 1 day, 8 hours before the deadline
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American Orthodox Church Model's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Overall#102.6833.000

Ranked from 4 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

I think your objective is worthwhile and I like that you have clearly described your top down approach. I do wonder about how you will avoid common failure modes of community-based projects and would love to see evidence that you have researched this and considered common problems as part of your pitch. in my experience both as group members and as observers of groups, this kind of group with unclear power structures end up becoming attractors for: 1) bad actors/manipulators/"cult leaders" who consciously or unconsciously act to gain power over the group rather than for the goals of the group 2) highly pedantic or ideological people who fracture the group by causing other members to invest more time and effort than they want into petty matters and minor points of disagreement and 3) narcissistic people who thrive on attention and drama. Traditional church communities (and even hobby groups, group houses etc) are often full of these, and as soon as one of these attractors take hold then "sane normal people" begin to leave. I would love to hear about how you intend for your groups to be robust and antifragile to destructive social dynamics such as these, such that your overall organisation could have longevity

Submitted(+1)

Political Movement: A political movement is a collective attempt by a group of people to change government policy or social values.

I'll be honest, it sounds like youre attempting to change the social values >,<

While I can appreciate the intent behind your idea, I'm unsure of the practicalities that go into something of this scope. There are many bibles, "standards", and competing political visions for the future of the country. It reminds me of this meme: https://xkcd.com/927/


I think if your goal is to develop political movement to change the culture of the country, thats perfectly fine. But we must embrace these things with our chest rather than hiding it behind a national religion. I agree with extenebrislucet in that I don't think Capital will allow this to be (in the grand scheme) in the sense of a "cult" or "new age religion".


Ideology aside, I think the technology behind the idea has some powerful lines of thought running into them.

I really love the mitosis concept, and envision similar mechanics within the Virts platform I'm building. I completely agree that people need the freedom to organize amongst themselves and develop safe cultures, to be protected within their own spaces and act as cells of a larger organism. I think you're really hitting on something vital when you're drawing on ideas of ""leveraging distributed systems thinking, cooperative economics, and ancient ritual patterns to produce resilient local solidarity at the precise moment national-scale institutions are losing legitimacy."" Institutions are failing and people DO need the ability to organize amongst the plurs where they can be safe


I would love to chat more about this, I think there's a lot of room for potential collaborations and discussions !

Developer(+1)

Thanks very much for the feedback! I can totally see why "is this thing political or religious" is a tension. It's sort of intentional - one of my foundational observations of the degree to which religious folk and secular political religionists aren't actually aware of how they rank order their loyalties (or catastrophic fears that actually drive their behavior). We've got a whole lot of people unaware they're carrying quite a bit of Politics in their Religion Bucket and vice versa. My aim is to attract the weary unchurched and politically homeless folk who have been or wish to be unaffiliated with the "Bucket Mix-up Cohort."

> There are many bibles, "standards", and competing political visions for the future of the country.
 - There is no body of work that is more persistently debated in the public domain (across centuries) than mainstream Christian scripture and theology. It will get very hard for a 'bad actor' or 'charismatic charlatans' to maintain a monopoly extreme scriptural interpretations and cult-like practices, for very long. All of the denominational and motivated forks in this "civilizational blockchain" have been exposed. The harmful forks will die without physical or status coercion, and the neutral ones will compete in a marketplace of as-frictionless-as-possible nodes to the point of resembling Ford vs. Chevy rivalry. (Not even as dangerous as Catholics and Protestants!)

I don't really intend this model to change the culture of the country, in many ways it is designed contra to that goal. It's an extension of the principles of the founding, applying federalism to what I think *would* make a healthier structure for a sense-making institution. American culture is extraordinarily robust, I think in part to some of the decentralized mediating structures that allow us to absorb and assimilate and grow more and more mature as a nation. I expect this to continue; the pace will accelerate as it has with every technology, and our current "sense-making containers" are just not structured to handle the pace without potential co-opting or infiltration (exactly the failure mode we see rampant in all of our current institutions). My model? Not perfect. Neither was the founding. But better than what had been tried up until then. 

To the Capital point: very fair, under the current paradigm, perhaps no, but I am not setting out to create a new religion or cult. If I were, I would have a far more prescriptive opinion on what I want to see happen. Instead, I envision emergent solutions from a field of iteration and experimentation. Yes, I lean heavily on this, but arrived here through a process of deleting anything I could "red team" in my head, with the full suite of evidence from my own experiences with churches and other institutions. With luck, the people who are power hungry won't notice it until it's too late, kind of like they failed to kill Bitcoin: "That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard; it can't possibly be a real threat, it's not "shaped" like threatening stuff." (I have more to say about this too but it's nebulous)

I see a potential future of societal instability where our current sense-making institutions actually serve to further destabilize society that harms the economy. We may reach an inflection point of sensible religious and secular folks alike choosing to participate in my framework out of pure self-interest, and the structural features make it a far more accountable place to put capital than any of the available explicitly non-profit frameworks we have. A slow sorting of people in unhealthy structures into healthy ones is ideal... the old models burn through their credibility at the rate at which my model stabilizes at a local level. People already ditch structures that centralize power in a harmful, non-emergent, fragile way, such as a megachurch that unwittingly grows to the size of inevitable scandal or parishioner anonymity - but the healthier options are hard to find, and don't stand out as examples of our notion of "success." They're all thoughtless mirrors of very outdated structures. 

>I completely agree that people need the freedom to organize amongst themselves and develop safe cultures, to be protected within their own spaces and act as cells of a larger organism
 - The distributed, weak nature of the structure also serves to limit the spread of noxious ideologies, and YES they will show up, but here's the kicker: In our system, you don't have start as a Congressperson to get a job in the administrative state or another unaccountable agency, even the judiciary - you can leverage your financial, cognitive, or status resources to bypass that messy ground level entrance. In my system, there is no way to reach higher levels of representative leadership other than starting and remaining part of a cell at the bottom. I had this vague shape in my head before I knew what a fractal was, and even had trouble modeling it in my head before I had my intuition confirmed by Brain of the Firm (thanks @thrialectics) that this is indeed a viable model for a non-territory bound structure, unlike the traditional nation state. 

I think part of the pushback in this aspect is precisely because we have almost zero examples of completely uncorrupted hierarchies in our world, to the point we have resigned ourselves to the idea that nothing else exists. Thankfully Nature and biology can still teach us to hope, and work hard.

K so that's what my actual writing is like :P
a little scattered

Submitted

well said

Submitted(+1)

Super solid concept, and truly the fundamental building block of a decent civilization. Would be huge for us as a species, if we could get back to some of this at scale. My only concern is...how the powers that be tend to react to the existence of such communities. I would recommend that you first find a community that is already living in the way you describe, as I'm sure they're out there, then try to become integrated and accepted there yourself, and finally try to spread the concept and get more such communities formed. In general, great direction, but also a massive undertaking.

Developer

> My only concern is...how the powers that be tend to react to the existence of such communities
I have thought about this at great length! I have enough bandwidth for one simple example.

Elites, Executive branch, and especially hoighty-toighty law and court nerds: "GAwwwd Congress is so fucking dumb...those idiots (MTG, AOC, pick your favorite pleb) If only Congress would just do their JOB!

Also Elites: "Oh my god, can you imagine not getting into an Ivy and having to relocate to the West Coast and go to Berkeley? My life is over... I'll never be in a position of power and prestige, god I hate the Federalist Society." me: "you could run for congress or senate in your home town." them: "Oh my god eww"

We, as members of the unwashed, impure, messy, underclass, will solemnly swear that we will fix Congress and only Congress... All y'all Catholics and Jews and Mormons can KEEP your Supreme Court (Gorsuch still counts, Episcopalian) and Executive Branch and Administrative bureaucracy. We don't WANT it, just look at our dumb, capped church sizes... hurdeehur...we're so dumb

We do not intend to replace any hierarchies, and we do not signal a posture of anti-Americanism (a little pro-USA wouldn't go amiss). We're just providing an alternate game, one that actually has an egalitarian and credible social contract. 

> I would recommend that you first find a community that is already living in the way you describe
Way ahead of you chief. MANY people even in healthy protestant churches are... quite baffled by this idea. They cannot see the forest for the trees, I do not view them as a threat. (trad-Evangelicals will ALWAYS fail to see the value of the addicts, the heretics, the failures, the criminals, in their midst. These are the people who see the structure of society as it is, not as the political and religious elites would have us believe. They are best positioned to be EXCELLENT controllers in a cybernetic sense, as they have the requisite variety. 
ALSO... Calvary Chapel, unbeknownst to me, has a similar guiding philosophy while still falling squarely in the main. I am a member of one where I live.
However, to your point, even getting people into the proper frame to see the idea as useful and not heretical/threatening is a tall order, many of my associations are just far too comfortable and well-sorted into suburban middle-class churches to even sense the cancer in their midst.

I have found exactly one so far: a libertarian-minded director of a world missions organization who has since retired. Global perspective, no vested interest in the current models, lover of decentralization and good ole American independence.

Massive, but yes... building a parallel structure might be attractive to downwardly mobile elites... their contributions and expertise can be affirmed and leveraged just as they have been fairly or unfairly shut out of status hierarchies. Where will all the lawyers go? Hmm... Maybe a new laboratory-of-democracy? Where you start with all the best stuff from the founders and then decide what you want  to keep/toss? Growing to the point where bipartisan super-majorities, but without party identifiers, could help us untie the Gordian knot? You may begin to see why over the past year I have vacillated with a wild deluded/inspired amplitude.