The Substack Experiment: A True Community?
Seven Principles That Define Powerful Movements (And How Substack Measures Up)
Readers who have been here for a while know that I’ve been working hard on my new book, THE ONE AND THE NINETY-NINE: How the Dynamics Between Individuals and Groups Shape the World, which will be published by St. Martin’s Press early next year.
Deep beneath the most pressing questions related to technology, politics, institutions, family, religion, education, friendship, and others is a far more fundamental question about how humans associate—and how forms of association have been radically altered in the past 75 years. And this question has been almost completely overlooked in contemporary commentary.
As traditional rites of passage—which helped individuals mature, differentiating themselves from groups—have disappeared, the dynamics between individuals and the communities they are part of have been dramatically altered. More than that: they have gone completely haywire. As many people have failed to become what I call Solid Selves, due to a lack of appropriate formation of personality, they default to Pseudo-Selves which are always open to negotiation, and heavily susceptible to the the mimetic moment.
Eric Hoffer captured the beginnings of this societal change in his book The True Believer, but few have taken up the mantle to analyze the changes Hoffer identified. One of the few who did was the political sociologist Robert Nisbet, who published his Quest for Community two years after Hoffer’s The True Believer, and who deftly analyzed the shape of political movements into the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I’ve done a deep dive into Nisbet these past few years as part of my research to write The One and the Ninety-Nine, and I’d like to share just one of his contributions here that can help us understand in a more systematic way a very basic question: what constitutes a group? What constitutes a community? Everyone calls themselves a community, but few can answer the questions below.
Nisbet argued that groups are more than just loose collections of individuals. They have real structure, real meaning. In The Degradation of Academic Dogma, he laid out seven specific defining characteristics of a true community. For the past few years, I’ve found these seven characteristics extremely helpful in understanding the power of certain groups and the ineffectiveness of others. I’m going to share these seven characteristics below, and to illustrate them a bit more concretely I’m going to use the Substack community itself as an example of how to think about each of them.
The seven characteristics are: function, dogma, authority, hierarchy, solidarity, status, and superiority. These seven characteristics bind individuals together in groups when they cohere. But making that happen is incredibly difficult, and very few organizations actually think about the interplay of these seven characteristics in any kind of systematic way. This distinction between the individual who sees himself as independent and the one who sees himself as part of a group is at the core of my book, The One and the Ninety-Nine. I’m going to be sharing a lot of deep-dive material related to it, including the journey of the writing and publishing process itself, with paid subscribers in the coming months as the book approaches publication.
The primary question Nisbet’s framework can help us answer right now is this: Is Substack merely a collection of individual writers, or is it a true community?
Let’s find out.