Behavioral Code

Every people has a code by which it conducts itself, and it exists on four layers — two written or spoken, two unspoken. The work of a culture is the slow traffic between them.

Every tribe, people, and society has forged some code governing how its members behave. Only a fraction of it is ever written down. The canon names four layers, and the distinction is what makes the concept usable:

Explicit, written — the formally adopted laws and norms, the ones a stranger can read (Law · Charter · Field of Agreements). Explicit, spoken — what everyone says and nobody has written; live, articulated, and unrecorded, so it varies by who is teaching it. Implicit, conscious — what people know they hold but have not managed to put into words; they can tell you a thing is wrong and not why. Implicit, embodied — what is evidenced only by behaviour, held without anyone being aware they hold it. This last layer is the largest in every society, and it is the one that actually governs.

The process the page names is progressively making the implicit explicit, and it runs in two directions at once. Upward: beginning in unconscious embodiment and ascending into mind and spirit as a people works out how to describe what it has been acting out, and why. Downward: beginning in spirit or insight and descending into embodied action as a people works out how to actually live what it has discerned (The Reciprocal Opening of Being and Doing · Embodiment · Praxis). Neither direction alone produces a living culture: articulation without embodiment is a document nobody follows, and embodiment without articulation cannot be taught, examined, or handed to the next generation.

That is why this matters for anything that intends to spread. A body that has never surfaced its implicit code will export its unexamined habits along with its explicit ones, and will not understand why its instances diverge (Drift · Culture). Surfacing a layer is also how a code becomes amendable: what has been said can be questioned, and what has never been said cannot (Current Best Articulation · Progressive canonization · Unlearning).

Codes rest on Values, and values on what a people actually holds as Value.

Also called: the layered Code · explicit and implicit code Stands on: Values · Culture · Law · Agreement Opens onto: Field of Agreements · The Rules of The Game · Ethics · Justice · The Reciprocal Opening of Being and Doing · Embodiment · Praxis · Current Best Articulation · Progressive canonization · Unlearning · Drift · Society · Tribe · The LIØNSBERG Book of Conventions · Naming In play: the table — a Cell meets it the first time it discovers an unwritten rule it has been enforcing Sources: Behavioral Code (root page, draft, twenty lines) · Provisional Code (root page — the canon's own worked example) · Values, Value (root pages) · Audit Ledger memo R-1 · lionsberg.wiki: Behavioral Code Open: The canon's Law and Culture rows carry adjacent ground and neither carries the implicit/explicit ladder. · The page asserts that the implicit "generally gets made more and more explicit across time" as an observed tendency, without evidence and without addressing the reverse movement — codes that fall back into the unspoken as a body ages. · No practice is given for actually surfacing an implicit layer, which is the only hard part.