Socializing for Abundance

*You* hosting low maintenance events *in your apartment* is one of the highest leverage things you can do for the future of New York City // The blue tape scissors are in your kitchen drawer

Maximum New York’s central premise is that more people need to be technically trained in how government, politics, and law work, and that’s why classes are at the center of the enterprise. But technical proficiency in politics is not merely about legal knowledge—it’s also about socializing.

Even if you don’t know much about government or politics, one of the most effective things you can do to improve those domains is to socialize well.

Abundance politics needs more socialites. So host parties, bring people together, and attend events yourself to gain a good sense of who you can connect. I’ll help you.

CALL TO ACTION: Host an event at your apartment/space/office with your friends and someone you think they should know (an elected official, me, someone from the internet or government you’ve heard about). Have snacks. Have an activity. Don’t stress out about making it perfect, just do it. The results can be unpredictably good, so just trust the process. Ask for help if you need it. This is a highly effective thing you can do for the future of New York—the scissors to snip the blue tape are in your kitchen. We can put your event on the MNY calendar if you want.

Politics is socializing

From Politics & Civics, the Governmental Mechanics Lexicon:

Politics is social rule-making, and it happens in any group with two or more people.

There is politics for each friend group, and the rules that friend group makes are called norms. You socially negotiate these norms in a continuous way over time. Each friend group develops norm production with different levels of competence. Some of them fight all the time; some have patterns of dialogue, charity, and deference; and others break down completely.

There is politics for your job/office, and the rules your office makes are probably split between norms and a written code of employee conduct, with the code technically being the supreme set of rules. The norms and the code interact in interesting ways to produce the emergent, effective rules, and they can exist in a contradictory stand-off. Maybe the code says no jeans, but common practice is to wear jeans on Fridays. This allows for interesting interactions: a spoilsport could raise a fuss, hold up the code, and demand compliance with it. Either they would win and everyone would unhappily comply, or the norm of jeans Friday, once challenged, would make people change the code to allow it, thus harmonizing code with norm. The office reveals an important lesson: in any politics with multiple sets of rules, the multiple sets of rules compete for primacy. Or they can persist in a contradictory fashion if no one chooses to pick a primacy fight.

There is politics for the government (the government being the institution that makes and enforces rules in a given area). The rules that the government makes are special, because: (1) they are called laws, and (2) they apply to everyone inside and outside of government (nominally, anyway) at all times. When people use the word “politics,” they often mean some approximation of “government politics.” Further: government politics are split into two: internal government politics (the actual lawmaking process, and the social and codified rules that guide it), and external government politics (elections, law enforcement, and general relations with the governed).

Of course, there are politics for every social group, institution, corporation, and more. And they’re not isolated from each other! Humans can belong to many social groups, and social groups that share humans inherently share political (social rule-making) links. If you and your best friends all work at the same company, the norms that your friend group makes could come to challenge the norms of the office, and vice versa. The laws of the government will punish a lot of behavior, but could change with sufficient pushback from non-governmental politics.

Civics is the giant superset of overlapping politics in any area:

The emergent, sum total of all interconnected politics (rule-making social groups) in a given area is called civics. The important idea here is that social rule-making does not occur in a vacuum. Whatever one social group does affects the other social groups it shares members with.

You could imagine a friend group politics and an office politics as a Venn diagram. But the politics of a civitas (the citizens of a given area united by law), otherwise called civics, would look like a Venn omnigram.

The lesson here: connecting people together across groups and institutions changes civic ecology. This is easy to understand on the micro level: if you introduce two people and they decide to get married, you’ve radically altered both of their lives for the better.

But it is just as true on the emergent, macro level. If you introduce people across different groups and institutions regularly, you will alter their politics. You will change the law. You will change New York and America.

Lay the rails, connect them to resource depots

Go with me while I compare the social nature of politics to a railroad system (a power grid would work too).

Those who possess good knowledge of policy and law are like resource depots—where the lumber and manufactured products are.

Those who socialize lay the actual rails that connect various points on the map together.

Those who socialize well lay the rails from resource depots to population and manufacturing centers that can best use them. Those who socialize poorly build rails to nowhere, or to places that cannot productively use what the railroad could bring them.

Every productive railroad needs rails going to the right place, and resources to ship.

If you’re not going to be on the resource side of things, you can certainly be on the rail side of things (and to some extent everyone is a little of both).

When people think about being politically active, they tend to think they have to be resource depots (I must know who to vote for with fervent, technical conviction, I must know what laws are being considered and what I can do about them).

I’m telling you that you don’t have to be. You can lay the rails, and you can socially connect people to change our politics. Your primary role in improving New York City’s politics and law can literally just be throwing parties, hosting events, and connecting people. You need to make sure that, via knowledge proxies, you’re bringing in people who have good ideas about policy—you need to lay rails to and from the right places. But all you need to do is help good people get to know other good people by putting them in the same places.

Be a socialite for Abundance

At the most recent monthly Maximum New York meetup, the theme was “socializing for Abundance”:

I exhorted people to host events, and to do so regularly. My most recent abundance roundup has examples of events people have hosted, as well as some RFEs (requests for events). Most of those events were first time hosts. You can reach out to them or me if you want pointers.

If you don’t have time to take a class on government at the moment, or it’s just not your thing, I encourage you to think about taking on the role of “abundance socialite.” The “build things and make things work” political movement needs more rails! If you do it regularly, you’ll find you start to learn a lot of technical things about government and law anyway.

CALL TO ACTION: Host an event at your apartment with your friends and someone you think they should know (an elected official, me, someone from the internet or government you’ve heard about). Have snacks. Have an activity. Don’t stress out about making it perfect, just do it. The results can be unpredictably good, so just trust the process. Ask for help if you need it. This is a highly effective thing you can do for the future of New York—the scissors to snip the blue tape are in your kitchen. We can put your event on the MNY calendar if you want.