Relative prospects

Expanding on cars vs religion.

Major food companies always offer a wide variety of subtypes within their one specialty. Each company offers at least three types of soup or pickles or cheese or wine, often hundreds. As I noted last week, successful car companies did the same. One size fits all = bankruptcy.

Religions are the opposite. Sometimes a big church will have congregations of different flavors to suit local cultures, but eventually those local congregations will split off or get forced out. Even brands without written credos (eg Baptists or Church of Christ) have a firm and unyielding set of rules.

Politics used to be more like soup. The R brand and the D brand contained many local congregations to suit local tastes. Now everything is religion.

The web undoubtedly spawned this universal splitness. I was around in the earlier days of UUNET and TELNET and Compuserve and Prodigy. Splitness was absolute. Every discussion group on every topic, sex or religion or politics or technology, had Team A and Team B. If you played on one of the two Teams you were approved. If you tried to mix and match, you were OUT.

Car companies love mixing and matching. In the 50s each brand was expected to have three trim levels, for the relative status levels of Conservative, Step-up and Luxury Prospects within the absolute level of the brand itself. Chevy had 150, 210, BelAir. Plymouth had Plaza, Savoy, Belvedere. Ford had Mainline, Customline, Fairlane. Dealers saw parallel levels as 1:1 currencies. If you were a Savoy man, you could be converted to a Customline man. Converting a Savoy man to a Fairlane man took extra effort and expense.

BUT: You could also buy a trim package to make a 150 look like a 210 or make a Savoy look like a Belvedere. You could pay extra for the options that were standard on the upper levels.

This doesn’t work in religion, and now in everything. If you’re Team A, you can’t adopt ANY of the trim packages of Team B. One extra chrome strip or one extra horsepower and you’re OUT.

= = = = =

Later for fairness: I’m not saying exclusivity is automatically bad. If your group has a real purpose, whether business or social, you need to be fussy about important values or goals. Unfashionable religions need to be cautious about “converts” who are working for Deepstate. Medieval Jews were invaded by “converts” working for Rome’s Deepstate, and developed a set of tests and restrictions that have never gone away. Unfashionable political activists need to be equally careful about “former” CIA guys or “former” journalists.

If you’re just discussing or buying, exclusivity is absurd.