Defining "sub-culture"

This post stems from recent thoughts and a conversation with fschmidt.

The goal of CoAlpha Brotherhood is to create a "sub-culture". Sub-culture is an extremely broad term though, broad to the point of even causing paralysis. From a practical standpoint "sub-culture" needs to be broken down into smaller parts. Breaking a sub-culture down into smaller parts allows us to identify what's most important. Knowing what's most important tells us where to invest and get the greatest return. This also makes the approach to building a sub-culture more straight forward. Theoretically a sub-culture could be built in modular parts, that eventually come to form a whole.

It's my opinion that all sub-cultures can be broken down into smaller parts. If you eliminate crucial parts, the sub-culture will die altogether. Equally if you maintain certain parts, a sub-culture will survive. There's a minimum threshold of core parts. Beyond these core parts a sub-culture develops excess parts. Excess parts enhance a sub-culture but won't enable a sub-culture to stand on its own. It's my opinion that the "core parts" are the same for all sub-cultures, regardless of being ultra traditional or hyper modern.

So when evaluating the offerings of religion vs. CoAlpha Brotherhood, you should evaluate each sub-culture based on the "parts" they offer. Some sub-cultures may offer complete solutions, with all parts intact. While other sub-cultures may be fragmented, forcing a person to subscribe to several sub-cultures to meet all their needs. CoAlpha Brotherhood by necessity will need to compete with other sub-cultures. In particular I mean religions.

It's my hope now that we can define the minimal "core parts" for making up a successful "sub-culture". These parts should be practical and concrete. Here's my list:

1. Socializing.
a. Outlet for women to socialize.
b. Outlet for children to socialize.
c. Outlet for men to socialize.

2. Location for socializing.

3. Dating outlets.

4. Education.
a. Pre-school.
b. K-12.

I'm starting to think that we should change our mission statement.  Creating a sub-culture feels too ambitious.  Looking at your list, things like "Outlet for women/children to socialize" and "Education" are completely out of reach right now.  Instead of listing what is needed for a subculture, I would list those things that we should try to provide for our members any way we can.  I can think of 3:

1.  Socializing - The Sunday Skype meeting addresses this somewhat.  We can plan physical meetings later.

2.  Dating - Since I am past the dating stage, I need thoughts from others.  I just posted about Mr Cupid's virgin brides as an example of a meaningful unique approach.  We could deal with this issue either by finding good services or by creating our own service.  This is one area where we could do something ourselves that is unique.

3.  Alternate Culture for Family - This is what motivated the whole CoAlpha sub-culture idea, but it isn't practical yet.  So here we just have to find the best existing sub-culture that we can and leverage that.

What can't be gotten from CoAlpha Brotherhood's sub-culture, by necessity should be outsourced to other sub-cultures. But for CoAlpha Brotherhood to stand the test of time, it must compete with these other sub-cultures. Which means eventually establishing these items itself. For the time being though I see no harm in subscribing to multiple sub-cultures and seeing which sub-culture wins out, especially if time is of the essence. So if someone needs an immediate sub-culture they should join a religion, while building CoAlpha Brotherhood's sub-culture on the side.

Another possibility is CoAlpha Brothhood serving in a relegated role, where instead of being an insular sub-culture itself, it can serve as a networking platform for connecting and promoting already existing viable sub-cultures.

As far as the list goes, I'm not sure the emphasis should be placed on what we can offer to members. If I was to reorder the list from most to least important it would be:

Outlet for women to socialize.
Outlet for children to socialize.
Education.
Outlet for men to socialize.
Dating outlets.

Women and children's needs are far more important to sustaining a sub-culture then men's needs. I don't say this out of chivalry, but as observation of CoAlpha Brotherhood itself. Our coming together has proven one thing. Men can survive in a decaying culture, women cannot. There is no "CoAlpha Sisterhood", or any group resembling a coming together of women whom hate modern mainstream culture. For a woman to remain good, she either needs to be led by men or surrounded by good women. But an individual women by and far will not stand on her own, she will submit to the dominant influence. Children are also more susceptible to influence, perhaps more girls than boys. The point I'm making is we can offer many things to men, but we won't secure our women or children.

In short to offer anything to women or children, we'd all need to be married and have children. This is a long ways off. But it's crucial to establish the most important criteria none the less so that these needs can be outsourced in the interim.

I enjoy the Skype meetings, but it's obvious women and children don't benefit from these.

What do you mean by "Alternate Culture for Family" specifically?

How do you think the mission statement should be changed? Would you like it changed to something like this:

wrote

The CoAlpha Brotherhood is an attempt to abandon feminist society and collectively live a sub-culture based on patriarchal values. The CoAlpha Brotherhood is not an attempt to reform society. Some religious groups like the Amish and Hasidic Jews already have such sub-cultures. We want a community where men can trust each other and our families are free from feminism.

I'll respond to Mr Cupid's virgin brides in that thread.

What I mean by "Alternate Culture for Family" is basically your "Outlet for women/children to socialize".

What problems are we trying to solve?  One could say that the problem is modern culture, but that is too general.  So let me give the concrete problems:

1.  Modern men can't be trusted.
2.  Finding a decent wife is hard.
3.  Keeping one's family from being corrupted my modern culture.

These 3 items correspond to the 3 things I suggested that CoAlpha provide in my previous post in this thread.  Does it really matter how we solve these problems as long as we solve them?  Maybe a new sub-culture would be ideal, but this is really hard to do.  We should only worry about this approach if we grow to the point where it becomes feasible.  We aren't close to that, so let's look at what we can do now.

Even though you put "Outlet for men to socialize" low on your list of priorities, this is important for 2 reasons.  First, it is one real way that we may be able to grow CoAlpha.  And second, because it is the only thing on the list that we even have anything of a solution to offer right now.

On dating, we have nothing right now.

On family socializing, I am really looking into this because I have an immediate need.  So while we have nothing yet, I will push this issue hard.  The solution here will be based on some existing subculture/religion since this is the only immediately practical options.

I don't think we should tamper with the mission statement yet.  Instead, I think we should focus on what practical things we can offer, and then change the mission statement later based on that.

I like that we're thinking on the same wave length, we've narrowed down the entire concept of sub-culture to "Outlet for women/children to socialize". This gives us a concrete marker. We can expand this "sub-culture" marker later, but we at least we know a minimum requirement.

My concern with focusing on dating or socializing is you'll get nothing in return. As long as your okay with that for the time being, I see no problem.