Spiky Laws

By TalkingHeadless

Note: This article was originally drafted a year ago. Although it is being published in an OGC publication, it was not written to critique or give advice to the OGC itself. It is intended as general advice for new organizations of all kinds and purposes.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

-L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

It is an unfortunate but unavoidable reality that any institution that persists for a long duration of time finds itself encountering problems that its founders could have never anticipated. If this is not readily apparent to you, invent a time machine, abduct George Washington, and introduce him to Representative Thanedar. The problem lies in the difficulty of crafting an organization that will maintain its core identity in the face of a culture and environment completely alien to the one in which it was formed. You might say “Well, I’ll just steer the ship”, and steer the ship you will, until someday you are dead and the next leader thinks just a little bit differently. 10 turnovers later and your organizational heads hold views completely alien to yours, perhaps ones you would have found reprehensible. They hollow out your founding precepts, replace them with their own, and your life work is worn like a skin-suit over something entirely unrecognizable; your only consolation is that you are too dead to witness it.

Any founder must accept that if they intend to craft a long-lasting organization, it will eventually be forced to operate and maintain its identity in a hostile unknowable world—that of the future. It must recruit from this world; it must pluck leaders out of this world, and it will, without flawless preparatory predictive power, become a mere label affixed to something born of that world. But how do you fight back against enemies which do not yet exist?

When William Dickson Boyce, inspired by Lord Baden Powell’s “The Boy Scouts Association”, founded the Boy Scouts of America in 1910, he did not bother to include a clause banning homosexuals from leadership roles or barring openly gay boys from membership. Why legislate against the inconceivable? (Would an organization formed in 2010 add in its constitution a clause requiring leadership to be human, rather than artificial intelligence?) In 1980, detecting a shift in the winds, the BSA made it official policy that open homosexual adults were not permitted to be leaders in the organization. The wind continued to shift. The BSA doubled down, entrenching its position. In response to growing backlash, it released an official statement in 1993: “We believe that homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the requirement in the Scout Oath that a Scout be morally straight and in the Scout Law that a Scout be clean in word and deed, and that homosexuals do not provide a desirable role model for Scouts.” In 1993, the BSA added that “We do not allow for the registration of avowed homosexuals as members or as leaders of the BSA.” In 2004 it tightened its grip even further: “In the unlikely event that an older boy were to hold himself out as homosexual, he would not be able to continue in a youth leadership position”.

So far so good. The BSA was doing what needed to be done. It was detecting trends and legislating against them to retain its core identity in a strange new world, so different from that in which it was founded. The Scouts were still the Scouts. The future was held at bay. W. D. Boyce would be proud.

Surely, this was an example of an organization doing the impossible. Right?….Right?

In 2013, the National Council of the Boy Scouts of America voted 61% to 38% to allow openly gay members into the BSA.

In 2015, the BSA Executive Committee, at the behest of BSA President Robert Gates, voted unanimously to end the ban on adult gay Scout leaders.

The BSA of today, (now called Scouting America so as to not exclude women) resembles nothing of what it once was. It has capitulated in all matters of spirit and identity, spreading itself thin into a permissive, modernized, and featureless glob. It is embroiled in perpetual financial troubles and controversies. Membership plummets year by year.

So. What did the BSA do wrong? They saw what was coming! They made all the right statements! They passed policy positions specifically to prevent this outcome!

The BSA’s mistake, like innumerable of other organizations, was forgetting to assume and legislate for one simple thing: that it would one day inevitably be controlled by a cabal of its enemies. You can pass all the laws you want. Someday, when those laws aren’t so popular, the people in your position will overrule them. It starts small. Someone on the leadership council, absorbed by the zeitgeist, expresses discontent. He points out that times are changing. He proposes changes and is shut down, but his ideas begin to spread. He convinces others. New people who think like him are voted in to replace the retired and deceased. Reluctant members start to capitulate, afraid of backlash. At this point, the little idea he had spreads into its own inter-committee revolution. The written rule stands like a stationary wall, barring what once was a single wave and is now the force of hundreds. The pressure grows. The wall can no longer withstand the weight. Leadership holds a vote. The new majority crashes through your defenses.

This happens because laws of this type are passive. They cannot defend themselves. They can only stand as a static obstacle, stubbornly blocking the future until being inevitably bulldozed. To maintain the original spirit of an organization, what we need are living laws. Active laws. Offensive, rather than defensive laws. Spiky laws. Allow me to provide an alternate policy that would have, with the addition of just one sentence, preserved the BSA’s homosexuality ban in its original intended form:

“We do not allow for the registration of avowed homosexuals as members or as leaders of the BSA. Any member proposing, suggesting, or otherwise encouraging a change in this policy automatically forfeits any leadership roles they may have in the BSA, has their membership revoked, and is permanently barred from involvement in the organization.”

At one point, the push to make the BSA gay was just one guy. Then it was two. Then four, and so on and so on. If this one sentence had been added, that first guy would have, the moment he suggested a change, been immediately removed. Nobody else would have objected to this. Remember, he was the only dissenter. Momentum would have been completely halted, nipped in the bud. Anyone secretly holding sympathetic views would not have spoken up after that point, lest they too lose their position. Nobody would join the BSA with the explicit purpose of working their way into leadership to propose that the rule on homosexuals be changed; they would be well aware that doing so would be ineffective, as the moment the proposal was made their time with the organization would end. Leadership would thus be forever limited to people who either opposed the change or were ambivalent enough not to advocate for it.

This new hypothetical law fights back. To attack it is to harm yourself and permanently end your influence. Pressure can never build up, because pressure, which always starts small, can never gain a foothold.

Even if, somehow, the entire organization were to become composed of those who secretly desired to change the rule, who would dare speak up? Nobody knows if anyone else wants change, because expressing the desire for change immediately voids you of your position!

If, in a highly unlikely scenario, risk-tolerant subversives were present in sufficient quantities to manage the difficult task of silently coordinating a majority without accidentally cluing in a single disapproving member, they would be put in the unenviable position of then foisting their idea on the organization swiftly and suddenly while simultaneously technically disqualifying themselves from leadership, which would appear to external observers (who can’t see the writing on the wall) as a coup. In the worst case scenario, leadership becoming too feckless to enforce the law and permitting change agents to speak openly, the organization instantly exposes itself as illegitimate, providing ammunition for those who would re-form an alternative group that remains faithful to the spirit of the original.

Your goal, when crafting a group, should not be “How do we ensure future leaders carry on our vision, fighting against those who would change it?” They won’t. Once enough time passes, they themselves will be the agents of change. Future leaders of your own organization are your greatest enemy. Your only weapon against them is the structure of the organization in which they are forced to operate. Your system is your only friend, a tulpa crafted of your original intent that persists after your death. Instead ask “How do we ensure our organization will carry out its intended purpose despite its leaders?” To do that, you need a system that can react autonomously against them, going on the offensive and delegitimizing internal enemies when they begin to press against it.

I am certain more complex methods of achieving this can be thought up, presumably by those more immersed in law than I am, but the simplest “autonomous” system is what I have just described: the spiky law. One that includes a clause ending the membership of anyone who proposes it be changed. Rather than a locked door, it’s a mousetrap. Organizations need some degree of flexibility to survive, but bend too much and they become unrecognizable. List the components essential to your organization’s intended spirit and purpose. Things that you consider absolutely necessary. Things which, if changed, would turn the organization into something you would prefer not exist at all. Add the clause. Make those tenets spiky.

I used the BSA as an example, but the idea of spiky laws can be applied to any organization, whether it be something as vast as a government or as small as an after-school sports club. Forge your organizations with the anticipation that they will not only operate in a hostile environment but be run by hostile actors. Arm them with the power to defend themselves long after you are gone. Imbue them with your spirit. Fight back against the future with living codes. Create a ship with a built in autopilot.

You won’t be around to steer forever.

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