The Society Builders
Case studies on the hidden power of moral innovators
Recently I began a series about startup societies—groups centered around a moral innovation, who build a community around a new way of life.
This series started with an essay about Alcoholics Anonymous, the society formed in 1935 around helping people quit drinking alcohol. Their remarkable success—123,000 groups globally, 30 million books sold, its co-founder honored as a Time Magazine “100 Most Influential People of the Century” in 1999—I believed deserves more attention than it usually gets, especially from those who would create new societies or communities.
But despite having already started the series, I’d like to begin where I should’ve begun and write a quick introductory post that sets the stage for why I think these studies are worthwhile and how I hope they’ll be useful.
There’s four main reasons I want to look more closely at how interesting and influential societies were founded, managed, and scaled:
1. These societies are sometimes covertly influential, which is worth studying.
They often shape cultural narratives without drawing attention to themselves. AA, for instance, has influenced how we think about addiction and recovery far beyond alcoholism, yet operates largely in the background of society.
2. These societies often have to create a microculture, which is an interesting problem set.
They must create their own vocabulary, rituals, and social norms while still remaining comprehensible to newcomers. This delicate balance of being both distinct and accessible offers unique insights into cultural engineering.
3. These societies faced common challenges, which makes evaluating their stories in tandem probably uniquely enlightening (more so than knowledge of just one or two stories would allow).
Whether it's managing growth, defining central ideas, or handling leadership transitions, these groups often encounter similar hurdles despite their different aims. By studying multiple cases, we can identify patterns that might be invisible when examining any single group.
4. I'm personally interested in the question of what societies can accomplish that businesses or governments cannot—yet I find public thinking-out-loud on the subject pretty scarce (at least in my circles of the Internet).
These groups often tackle problems that seem resistant to market solutions or policy interventions. They demonstrate how voluntary associations can create change through social bonds and shared values rather than through profit motives or legal mandates.
Some of the societies we’ll look at are modern, whereas some are historical—some are still gaining steam, and some are long past their apotheosis. But I think there’s lessons within each of their stories for those who would build new societies, and untangling those lessons is the chief goal of this series.
Lastly, this series will be interwoven with a series on ways that societies can be led astray—how their work can go awry, their leadership fail them, or their growth take catastrophically wrong turns within the idea maze. This will be equally useful, I hope, in clarifying some guidelines for what makes a society a positive force rather than a negative force in the world (i.e., a beneficial society vs. a cult). And, since I’m researching these essays in real-time, these studies will hopefully be as helpful for me as for any readers who may be following along.
I’ll add to the list below as new installments are added.
Alcoholics Anonymous: How AA invisibly built the most influential decentralized society in world history
The Clapham Circle: How 12 families in a London suburb abolished slavery
The Mondragon Corporation: A historical blueprint for cooperative capitalism (with a crypto lens)
MSCHF (aka Mischief, aka Miscellaneous Mischief): How to create a venture-backed art society that creates subversive culture
The Network School: Dispatch from the Malaysian ghost-city startup society (that bootstraps startup societies)
IBM: What their 1937 Song Book says about a bygone era of Corporations-as-Societies
The Society Builders: An Intermission—A quick essay for reflection, synthesis
The Fellowship: A cautionary tale of the secretive Washington DC "politico-religious" society
Rajneeshpuram: 4 lessons from the commune the U.S. destroyed