We all know "anti-social" behavior when we see it - defecting against the commons, and enriching oneself at the expense of others in a way that leaves everyone worse off if generalized. (And conversely, we call behavior "pro-social" that does the opposite.) Even though it has "social" in the name, the concept nevertheless remains grounded in methodological individualism - we define it by the harms and benefits that accrue to specific individuals, even if their identities might not be known.
What I'm calling "anti-civic" behavior is trickier to pin down. This refers to anything that injures the connective tissue of the social egregore itself, whether by undermining the preference-aggregation process, or impairing its ability to act, or by bringing its very existence into doubt. Anti-/pro-civicality is difficult to explain or define under methodological individualism, because it deals holistically with the social aggregate as such and not merely with a sum of individuals. It is a concept that only makes sense in the context of a society possessing a corporate existence, such as a guild.
In a thriving culture of guild participation, people would learn experientially how to recognize anti- and pro-civic behavior from an early age. But in our present world, most of us have never been in a position where concerns about anti-civicality even come up at all, and so there are no shared background norms to refer to. People who are new to this game will therefore tend to blithely violate these "norms" without even a second thought, because in daily life they are accustomed to behaving in perfectly acceptable pro-social ways (according to the individualistic understanding) and receiving no negative feedback for it. It's hard to discourage certain types of behavior if you can't even articulate what the problem is, or if the very idea that it could be a problem has never occurred to any of the people involved.
Hence the following attempt at a (non-systematic and non-comprehensive) survey of anti-civic behaviors and attitudes. Perhaps by the end of this list you will begin to see the outline of what I'm gesturing at. However, I should caveat that the concept is still somewhat fuzzy even from my own perspective, and it may not be obvious how to apply it to real-world situations. This is only the beginning, not the end, of the norm-establishing conversation.
Conflating friendship with membership
The standards for deciding who you want to be friends with are going to be very different from the standards for having someone as a member of your organization. In some ways membership is more broad than friendship (being more inclusive of people you don't personally get along with); in some ways it's the opposite (requiring that someone be aligned with the group's mission). However, in a guildless culture, people will generally not understand this, and will think of the organization (and describe it to outsiders) as a "friend group" because they don't have any other concepts in their vocabulary. But it is impossible for the organization to maintain its collective identity if everyone is thinking like this, since each person will have a different circle of friends they run in, and so the organization will tend to dissolve into a diffuse mass of cliques.
Relatedly, there is a common pattern in cities with a large population of recent transplants (like where I live now): Someone new to the area will go to lots of different meetups in order to find a "crew" to hang out with, but once having successfully poached their favorite people from the meetups, they no longer have any reason to attend them. Thus, casual public meetups tend to be disproportionately attended by unlikeable people. If you want to avoid this, you need to have a group that does sufficiently interesting non-social things to motivate people to keep coming back even after their social needs are satisfied. In other words, it must be something more than a mere friend group.
Breach of parliamentary privilege
The actions collectively undertaken by an organization should be determined by a deliberative process that flows upward from the members' preferences. That is how the organization can remain responsive to its members and thus be seen by them as something worth pouring their time and effort into. However, the process is broken if influence is allowed to flow in the opposite (downward) direction also, because then this creates a closed loop that de-anchors the organization from its own membership. In other words, people acting on authority delegated to them by the group must not be allowed to turn around and manipulate the channel through which they were granted that same authority.
This idea is expressed in the principle of parliamentary privilege. ("[F]or any Speech or Debate in either House, [members] shall not be questioned in any other Place." - U.S. Constitution I.6.1.) As an example to illustrate (which is unlikely to come up in practice, because it is so ham-fisted), imagine that an organization has a debate and vote on its leadership, and then the newly-elected leaders set about tracking down all the people who opposed them and stringing them up with disciplinary hearings: "You tried to undermine this organization by supporting bad people [i.e. people who aren't us] for leadership. What do you have to say for yourself?!" Clearly this cannot be allowed, because it turns the group's decision-making into a Keynesian beauty contest. It then becomes possible, indeed likely, that the organization will end up making decisions that hardly anybody actually wants.
Outside of formal proceedings, it may be hard to see how this applies. Informally, the general idea is that free debate about the values and priorities of the group ought to be protected. Bad opinions should be countered with good opinions; bad votes should be countered with good votes; but they should not (so to speak) be questioned in any other place. That is not to say that the organization cannot take "official" stances on things - indeed, doing this is the very essence of collective decision-making - but it should acknowledge the right of members to disagree. If such members are willing, in spite of their disagreement, to continue playing their part in the organization by acceding to the legitimacy of the majority, then they nevertheless remain members in good standing. The organization owes them at least that much.
Refusing to advocate for oneself
In order for preference-aggregation to work, people have to actually make their preferences known openly. An organization can offer members a platform to make their opinion heard, but it cannot read their minds if they choose not to use it. Therefore it is ultimately the responsibility of individual members to find within themselves the courage to advocate for their own interests, even if others may disagree with them. This requirement should not be interpreted as hostility; it is not a failure of the system, but rather the system working as intended.
Lack of self-advocacy leads to widespread confusion and further Abilene-paradox dysfunctions. If the priorities of the group are determined by everyone trying to mind-read everyone else, its actions are likely to diverge wildly from the members' actual preferences.
This is a bit of a tough sell for people accustomed to non-confrontational clique-like environments, which these days is most people. They will need to have the experience of speaking up and having others disagree, and the world not ending. Then perhaps they will realize that this is nothing to be afraid of.
Thus, this norm and the previous one (parliamentary privilege) both feed on each other, but so do their respective violations. Therefore, both norms need to be built up step-by-step in tandem.
Personalizing from the inside
This is related to the usurpation problem in the previous article. It is when someone receives delegated authority from the group, but exercises it in a manner that suits their own interest instead of the group's. Described in this way, it may seem fairly obvious why this is bad, but for people inexperienced with guilds, it might not even be clear that "delegation" is what's going on. People are used to pursuing their own interests in daily life, and may even be encouraged to do so, so what's the problem now? The organization must therefore take care to distinguish between when someone is operating in a personal capacity and when they are acting on behalf of the group.
Personalizing from the outside
This, likewise, is related to reflexive contrarianism. Because there is no clear understanding of the distinction between personal and delegated roles, one may assume that everyone else in the organization is always acting in a personal capacity. This leads to "shooting the messenger" (and thus, to people unwilling to serve as messengers). One of the most difficult aspects of leadership in a guild is balancing conflicting interests; this is made even harder if the members falsely assume that the choices made by someone in a leadership position represent his/her personal preferences. Relationships are bound to be ruined on all sides; therefore nobody savvy enough to notice this will ever volunteer for such positions, and so nothing ever gets done.
Schismatic activity
At least before reaching Dunbar's Limit, a group's capacity for getting stuff done will scale supra-linearly with its size. This is because organizational capacity derives largely from complementarity among the group members - two or more people realizing that they can work together to accomplish something no single one of them could. Therefore, schism is immensely harmful to the social organism.
Besides the most obvious case of someone making a dramatic public announcement that they're quitting to start their own rival group, schismatic activity can encompass any attempts to take the social capital built by/for/within the organization and redirect it elsewhere to the detriment of the rest of it. Simply finding a group of friends within the community and hanging out with them separately is not really schismatic, because (up to a point) such hangouts are not rivalrous with contributing to the main group, and so nobody else has any reason to care what those people are doing in their free time. However, for example, if there are official not-merely-social events for the whole community, then it is schismatic (at least a little bit) to "counterprogram" these events by inviting members to something else at the same time. (Sometimes this is unavoidable due to scheduling constraints, but it should be done rarely and apologetically.) From the other side, it is also schismatic to make people think of quitting-and-doing-your-own-thing as the normative solution to all disagreements within the group (see embarrassed cult #6).
Untimely debate
Members ought to be free to support or oppose proposals, but at some point a decision needs to be made and action taken, which will generally become increasingly difficult to undo as time goes by. Therefore, debate should be concentrated during the time in which choosing alternative courses of action is actually on the table. And while some people may continue to disagree about the decision that was made, they should at least not obstruct the people carrying it out, and they should not regard the whole process as illegitimate simply because they didn't get their way on this one issue. This is important if the organization ever wants to accomplish any actions at all.
[Part of Organizational Cultures sequence]
Overview
We all know "anti-social" behavior when we see it - defecting against the commons, and enriching oneself at the expense of others in a way that leaves everyone worse off if generalized. (And conversely, we call behavior "pro-social" that does the opposite.) Even though it has "social" in the name, the concept nevertheless remains grounded in methodological individualism - we define it by the harms and benefits that accrue to specific individuals, even if their identities might not be known.
What I'm calling "anti-civic" behavior is trickier to pin down. This refers to anything that injures the connective tissue of the social egregore itself, whether by undermining the preference-aggregation process, or impairing its ability to act, or by bringing its very existence into doubt. Anti-/pro-civicality is difficult to explain or define under methodological individualism, because it deals holistically with the social aggregate as such and not merely with a sum of individuals. It is a concept that only makes sense in the context of a society possessing a corporate existence, such as a guild.
In a thriving culture of guild participation, people would learn experientially how to recognize anti- and pro-civic behavior from an early age. But in our present world, most of us have never been in a position where concerns about anti-civicality even come up at all, and so there are no shared background norms to refer to. People who are new to this game will therefore tend to blithely violate these "norms" without even a second thought, because in daily life they are accustomed to behaving in perfectly acceptable pro-social ways (according to the individualistic understanding) and receiving no negative feedback for it. It's hard to discourage certain types of behavior if you can't even articulate what the problem is, or if the very idea that it could be a problem has never occurred to any of the people involved.
Hence the following attempt at a (non-systematic and non-comprehensive) survey of anti-civic behaviors and attitudes. Perhaps by the end of this list you will begin to see the outline of what I'm gesturing at. However, I should caveat that the concept is still somewhat fuzzy even from my own perspective, and it may not be obvious how to apply it to real-world situations. This is only the beginning, not the end, of the norm-establishing conversation.
Conflating friendship with membership
The standards for deciding who you want to be friends with are going to be very different from the standards for having someone as a member of your organization. In some ways membership is more broad than friendship (being more inclusive of people you don't personally get along with); in some ways it's the opposite (requiring that someone be aligned with the group's mission). However, in a guildless culture, people will generally not understand this, and will think of the organization (and describe it to outsiders) as a "friend group" because they don't have any other concepts in their vocabulary. But it is impossible for the organization to maintain its collective identity if everyone is thinking like this, since each person will have a different circle of friends they run in, and so the organization will tend to dissolve into a diffuse mass of cliques.
Relatedly, there is a common pattern in cities with a large population of recent transplants (like where I live now): Someone new to the area will go to lots of different meetups in order to find a "crew" to hang out with, but once having successfully poached their favorite people from the meetups, they no longer have any reason to attend them. Thus, casual public meetups tend to be disproportionately attended by unlikeable people. If you want to avoid this, you need to have a group that does sufficiently interesting non-social things to motivate people to keep coming back even after their social needs are satisfied. In other words, it must be something more than a mere friend group.
Breach of parliamentary privilege
The actions collectively undertaken by an organization should be determined by a deliberative process that flows upward from the members' preferences. That is how the organization can remain responsive to its members and thus be seen by them as something worth pouring their time and effort into. However, the process is broken if influence is allowed to flow in the opposite (downward) direction also, because then this creates a closed loop that de-anchors the organization from its own membership. In other words, people acting on authority delegated to them by the group must not be allowed to turn around and manipulate the channel through which they were granted that same authority.
This idea is expressed in the principle of parliamentary privilege. ("[F]or any Speech or Debate in either House, [members] shall not be questioned in any other Place." - U.S. Constitution I.6.1.) As an example to illustrate (which is unlikely to come up in practice, because it is so ham-fisted), imagine that an organization has a debate and vote on its leadership, and then the newly-elected leaders set about tracking down all the people who opposed them and stringing them up with disciplinary hearings: "You tried to undermine this organization by supporting bad people [i.e. people who aren't us] for leadership. What do you have to say for yourself?!" Clearly this cannot be allowed, because it turns the group's decision-making into a Keynesian beauty contest. It then becomes possible, indeed likely, that the organization will end up making decisions that hardly anybody actually wants.
Outside of formal proceedings, it may be hard to see how this applies. Informally, the general idea is that free debate about the values and priorities of the group ought to be protected. Bad opinions should be countered with good opinions; bad votes should be countered with good votes; but they should not (so to speak) be questioned in any other place. That is not to say that the organization cannot take "official" stances on things - indeed, doing this is the very essence of collective decision-making - but it should acknowledge the right of members to disagree. If such members are willing, in spite of their disagreement, to continue playing their part in the organization by acceding to the legitimacy of the majority, then they nevertheless remain members in good standing. The organization owes them at least that much.
Refusing to advocate for oneself
In order for preference-aggregation to work, people have to actually make their preferences known openly. An organization can offer members a platform to make their opinion heard, but it cannot read their minds if they choose not to use it. Therefore it is ultimately the responsibility of individual members to find within themselves the courage to advocate for their own interests, even if others may disagree with them. This requirement should not be interpreted as hostility; it is not a failure of the system, but rather the system working as intended.
Lack of self-advocacy leads to widespread confusion and further Abilene-paradox dysfunctions. If the priorities of the group are determined by everyone trying to mind-read everyone else, its actions are likely to diverge wildly from the members' actual preferences.
This is a bit of a tough sell for people accustomed to non-confrontational clique-like environments, which these days is most people. They will need to have the experience of speaking up and having others disagree, and the world not ending. Then perhaps they will realize that this is nothing to be afraid of.
Thus, this norm and the previous one (parliamentary privilege) both feed on each other, but so do their respective violations. Therefore, both norms need to be built up step-by-step in tandem.
Personalizing from the inside
This is related to the usurpation problem in the previous article. It is when someone receives delegated authority from the group, but exercises it in a manner that suits their own interest instead of the group's. Described in this way, it may seem fairly obvious why this is bad, but for people inexperienced with guilds, it might not even be clear that "delegation" is what's going on. People are used to pursuing their own interests in daily life, and may even be encouraged to do so, so what's the problem now? The organization must therefore take care to distinguish between when someone is operating in a personal capacity and when they are acting on behalf of the group.
Personalizing from the outside
This, likewise, is related to reflexive contrarianism. Because there is no clear understanding of the distinction between personal and delegated roles, one may assume that everyone else in the organization is always acting in a personal capacity. This leads to "shooting the messenger" (and thus, to people unwilling to serve as messengers). One of the most difficult aspects of leadership in a guild is balancing conflicting interests; this is made even harder if the members falsely assume that the choices made by someone in a leadership position represent his/her personal preferences. Relationships are bound to be ruined on all sides; therefore nobody savvy enough to notice this will ever volunteer for such positions, and so nothing ever gets done.
Schismatic activity
At least before reaching Dunbar's Limit, a group's capacity for getting stuff done will scale supra-linearly with its size. This is because organizational capacity derives largely from complementarity among the group members - two or more people realizing that they can work together to accomplish something no single one of them could. Therefore, schism is immensely harmful to the social organism.
Besides the most obvious case of someone making a dramatic public announcement that they're quitting to start their own rival group, schismatic activity can encompass any attempts to take the social capital built by/for/within the organization and redirect it elsewhere to the detriment of the rest of it. Simply finding a group of friends within the community and hanging out with them separately is not really schismatic, because (up to a point) such hangouts are not rivalrous with contributing to the main group, and so nobody else has any reason to care what those people are doing in their free time. However, for example, if there are official not-merely-social events for the whole community, then it is schismatic (at least a little bit) to "counterprogram" these events by inviting members to something else at the same time. (Sometimes this is unavoidable due to scheduling constraints, but it should be done rarely and apologetically.) From the other side, it is also schismatic to make people think of quitting-and-doing-your-own-thing as the normative solution to all disagreements within the group (see embarrassed cult #6).
Untimely debate
Members ought to be free to support or oppose proposals, but at some point a decision needs to be made and action taken, which will generally become increasingly difficult to undo as time goes by. Therefore, debate should be concentrated during the time in which choosing alternative courses of action is actually on the table. And while some people may continue to disagree about the decision that was made, they should at least not obstruct the people carrying it out, and they should not regard the whole process as illegitimate simply because they didn't get their way on this one issue. This is important if the organization ever wants to accomplish any actions at all.