Is this post intended to chronicle the cycle of those subcultures that are clearly 'movements', or is it intended to cover subcultures in general? Because I can think of any number of garden variety subcultures (skateboarding in the 70s and 80s, punk rock, D&D guys, etc) that had/have significant cultural traction that don't obviously fit this model.
If we're just talking about 'ism' cultures then it seems like a lot of this tracks, though even there I'm guessing that those 'ism' cultures where a critical number of the participants are clearly committed to making sure everyone knows how smart they are might be more susceptible. The Klan (in its many unfortunate incarnations) was/is definitely a subculture, but just as I don't see it necessarily fitting this pattern I also don't suspect it's a subculture where the members were eager to tell you how bored they were in K-12, or what their SAT scores were.
Perhaps punk rock doesn't fit the model as its own subculture, but it fits well inside the larger rock-n-roll culture as a splinter movement during the involution phase.
Punk rock was interesting because it was marketed in one of two ways.
1) a "back to basics" return to old-school rock after the pretentiousness of the mid-70s
2) a nihilistic "year zero" destruction of popular music itself. (It was considered cool that punk rock songs were produced like shit, that Sid Vicious couldn't play bass, that the Ramones knew like 3 chords, etc.)
These two things contradict each other. You can't both lionize the past and want to destroy it, but somehow both schools of thought found themselves under the punk banner.
That may well be maximally basic and unpretentious. But I think what Coagulopath was getting at was that maximizing basicness and lack of pretense was just one of two competing and often conflated models of punk. That's model 2, whereas model 1 is about trying to revert to an earlier state of cultivation.
If you know Thomas Cole's much-memeified "Course of Empire" paintings, it's like both models are a reaction to the cultivated/decadent "Consummation of Empire" stage. (That is, to the early-70s "rock as 7-minute operetta" moment.) But the first wants to get back to a prior state of non-decadent cultivation, i.e., to sounding like Buddy Holly. (Representative group: Elvis Costello & The Attractions.) Whereas the second wants to push through to a state of uncultivated decadence, to a sort of catharsis in which "talent" and "craft" are subsumed by pure entropy. (Representative group: Sex Pistols, esp. with Sid Vicious.)
"You can't both lionize the past and want to destroy it"
Oh yes you can, if the goal of your joining/evangelizing any movement is to fight with/demonize other people. And that's exactly what most people with strong opinions mostly care about doing.
Contradictions? Hah. My mass movement laughs at your silly claims of contradictions.
there are the genre defining innovators (precycle), then come the classics (growth), after that the soulless cash grabs and their opposition aka punk is dead aka involution and, now we are in postcycle and have been for quite some time. Punk is an institutionalized aesthetic you can choose from the shelf as a 14 year old without shocking anyone and old people go to punk concerts on the weekend before returning to their office job. Noone wants to discuss your opinions on what punk really is and should be, at best they will point you to the authorities that institutionalized it decades ago.
The OSR has been *incredibly* infested with bona-fide Sociopaths who didn't care about or actively hated the Cool New Thing but wanted to make money off it and/or hitch their status-wagon to being A Creator in the Cool New Scene.
As someone pretty deep in the D&D subculture, I agree it's at an involution. I think most of the (new) cultural infighting is happening on tiktok, which targets the same demographic as the most recent growth phase, and to a lesser extent reddit.
In that ecosystem, the elites/"sociopaths" seem to be the content farms that regurgitate random obscure bits of lore that aren't actually part of the common canon, or wild theorycraft builds that would never fly at a real table, divorcing them of the actual context. But that gets you views. The "anti-elites" seem to be the people saying that "5e is okay, but please try playing literally any other TTRPG" (beggartok, apparently?), where the ttrpg of choice is often Pathfinder 2e.
> The "anti-elites" seem to be the people saying that "5e is okay, but please try playing literally any other TTRPG" (beggartok, apparently?), where the ttrpg of choice is often Pathfinder 2e.
Which is ironic, since PF2e is basically "what happens if you merge 5e D&D, 3e D&D, and 4e D&D." Just like PF1e is basically "3.5e, Electric Boogaloo".
I'd phrase it as "what would happen if you took all the lessons learned from (and general good ideas from) those previous editions and built the built the best version of D&D you could". PF2e is for the people who enjoyed 3.5 and wish WoTC hadn't been so scarred by the underperformance of 4e that they crippled 5e's character building options.
Meanwhile, the people who are only interested in the *roleplaying* part of the ttrpg are looking at 5e and say "y'know, 5e can bend over backwards trying to say it's a game with more focus on roleplay over crunch with three core pillars, but it's pretty clear that 'combat' is the load-bearing one based on the 90% of the rules devoted to it", recognizing that it's still fundamentally carrying the legacy of being a tabletop war game with roleplaying bolted on top. And these are the people that are begging these new players that *don't* just want to play a crunchy combat simulation to play anything else. Usually a Powered by the Apocalypse game, which has a *really* great design philosophy.
None of this has anything to do with what you're talking about, though.
TSR went down because of poor business practices. The 3e/4e edition war was also due to poor business practices. None of this had anything to do with any sort of macro level thing.
TSR printed too many books; so did 4E. In TSR's case, they simply were bad at advertising. In 4E's case, the game was designed around having digital tools and the guy in charge of that murdered his wife then killed himself around the time 4E was released. Meanwhile the fact that they had made it possible for anyone to make a knock-off 3rd edition product meant that D&D was actually competing with itself, with Paizo making a knock-off 3.5 product that the grognards could cling to.
5E's popularity was because they made the game massively simpler and used social media to promote the game.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees here.
I'm no expert on early TSR but my understanding that the "poor business practices" you describe was caused by an unhealthy culture at TSR, which in turn was caused by a rapidly growing company hitting a ceiling, forcing the employees to turn from creative work to backstabbing and fighting over the remaining resources, just like how Scott describes. In a way that was remarkably similar for both early TSR and 4e, if I remember correctly.
5E's popularity was of course based on good ideas and good execution, but the popularity created the kind of growth phase Scott described, and when it plateaued, the kind of Involution phase Scott described replaced it. The dynamics Scott ascribe to Involution describes the current state of 5E pretty well as far as I can tell.
TSR had no coherent business strategy and was run very badly. They produced a ton of books no one cared about because they had no coherent plan, and they were not good at marketing.
4E, likewise, suffered from poor management - in that case, they assumed that releasing a book every month was a reasonable business model, but the problem was that:
* Customers got overwhelmed with the amount of content.
* A lot of customers are players who only care about the classes that they're playing, which means a lot of the books wouldn't be for them.
* On the DM side, you don't need tons of books to be able to play, and many books were so specific that they would never be used.
* The books that had the most interesting content (the PHB Xs, which had the new classes) only came out once a year.
* The campaign settings obviously would only be bought by people into the settings.
* There was an online monthly subscription IN ADDITION TO the flood of books
* They failed to deliver many of the digital products which they needed, and the ones that they did deliver often were not as good as they should have been.
The reality is that they just weren't good at the business end of things.
I feel like Scott has identified some genuine forces at work within subcultures, which doesn't quite amount to a one-size-fits-all model of how subcultures and movements grow and die.
I completely agree, but I wonder if there aren't weaknesses inherent in certain types of subcultures that make them more susceptible to this kind of cycle. Subcultures where the members place considerable value on intellectually differentiating themselves (both from the population at large, but also from each other) seem particularly susceptible, at least at first blush, but this can't be the only causal factor.
The most successful American subculture of all time might be the LDS Church; it's been around for 170 years or so, probably has at least an 11 figure war chest, and continues to experience high levels of growth while (IMO) still clearly retaining its status as a subculture. The Satanism subculture of the 1970s, by contrast, probably DID go through this cycle (or at least most of its stages). Why the difference? Is it just accidental, or is there something different in the nature/construct of these cultures that explains this?
For something like LDS, I would think the keys would be institutionalization and heritability--two things that, perhaps unsurprisingly, Satanists were not very big on. But then one could consider something like D&D. Despite the (possibly cyclical) mini-quarrels others have described here, D&D overall is still going strong without institutionalization or heritability. Well, on institutionalization, there's the book publishing, conventions, etc., but I don't think these actually create D&D's enduring popularity.
Look close enough and you get factions of anti-D&D people, spin-offs creating indie RPG subcultures, accusations of various improprieties by popular individuals and then accusations that other popular individuals shelter the improper group and should also be cast out. From a practical standpoint all these things may be various levels of true or useful. From a status framework it's infighting to create room for others to move up in status.
Just because infighting exists doesn't mean a subculture is dead. It also doesn't mean it isn't growing. Being possible to make marginal gains through growth effort doesn't mean there isn't incentive for some to make gains through infighting effort.
You're right, but I'm struck by the fact that D&D is the sort of thing that flourishes in spite of or because of the fact that many/most of those involved don't much care about the infighting. I've been playing since the seventies, and I know almost nothing about what you're describing--and I *think* I'm the norm rather than the exception. My point is there are things (like, apparently, EA) that seem to exist by and through the cycles described in the essay, and other subcultures where, perhaps (or arguably) that is largely beside the point. Or maybe the impression of status-availability-driven cycles is just the impression created by looking at the leaders of any subculture, and meanwhile there are legions of pure nerdy fans? One could say the same about LDS or other religious groups: in these, there are clearly legions of believers (or at least adherents) who have no interest in getting ahead or making a name for themselves (beyond, maybe, their immediate circle) through it. In fact, a religion seems on the way to death when it seems to consist mainly of institutional staff, no matter how hard-working (perhaps this describes some mainline Protestant churches right now?). A religion, like a popular pastime, needs unambitious adherents as much as it needs hard-working professionals.
I mentioned in a comment elsewhere that I have seen a community mostly avoid the infighting. That community was the board game community, which recently saw an explosion of growth (and therefore status opportunities) in the last decade. I hypothesize that the method by which they avoided it is inbuilt competition. Board games are products on a market, and while you generally don't see people being cutthroat, and everyone wants the market to grow, they are naturally competing against each other in a healthy way that is expected by everyone in the community (in a community that engages in healthy competition as a hobby!)
D&D (and RPGs in general) is also a business and therefore benefits from healthy competition. It also has a MLM type structure where each gaming group (or multi-group community that shares members in a geographic region) is it's own sub-sub-culture. And each sub-sub-culture might fall victim to power struggles or it might not, but there are firewalls between groups. Power struggles might happen at higher levels in the community, but only the people who run conventions, employ staff, or read comments ever see it.
In the LDS, power struggles happen at an organizational level and lead to organizational change or potentially splinter sects like the various FLDS groups. At the local level they become the stuff of memes about bickering at bake sales and "_____ politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."
Perhaps you could model the status games as a form of drag/friction. With enough growth/acceleration they don't matter, without it you need some kind of organizational structure that is either low-friction or ablative.
Pretty sure structural factors are important. Building a robust memetic immune system, and then encoding it as self-replicating, self-correcting institutional procedures, probably isn't any easier than the biological equivalent. Delicate balance between letting the good ideas in and keeping the bad ideas out, lots of other necessary moving parts to work around. A potential subculture that gets the basics completely wrong never grows in the first place, one which gets enough factors almost right will grow for a while but then self-destruct. Really successful ones learn from early mistakes, find a niche where their culture-specific practices provide comparative advantage, and reinvest in expanding that niche before it gets too crowded.
Specific to the LDS church, to my (very limited) understanding it's notably careful not to over-promise in terms of advancement: while anyone can theoretically work their way up to any position, to get ahead requires actual work, proving that you can reliably produce useful results. Not necessarily big, heroic results - routine maintenance gets recognized and valued - but functionally almost nothing is guaranteed to prospective members just by virtue of them walking in the door and waiting on the next tier of a ponzi scheme.
If you look at the early history of Mormonism, I think you'll find the subculture wars *there*. Messy, really weird-looking ones, with murders, secret societies, secret murder societies, and a phase where every competing leader had to have his own set of metal scripture plates. The consequence is a half dozen plus subgroupings of Mormen, several of which survive to this day. As the others suggested, the main LDS most likely succeeded via institutionalization, rigid hierarchy and an associated heavy-handed top-down management. Personally I also suspect their fairly long period of comparative geographical isolation helped a great deal.
I think it’s land base and timing. They came at the right moment to settle an area the size of Utah when it was not yet owned by other colonists, still in Native American hands. Land base requires governance structures. And they lucked out with whoever designed those. Whole-town, whole-life, social programs built in. Antifragile in very clever ways (right down to the way missions take rebellious youth & send them off to do something extremely difficult in another language.)
Waco, Jonestown, Northern Idaho, is what you get when the land base is smaller due to being expensive, & the leaders crazier and more violent .
Is this post intended to chronicle the cycle of those subcultures that are clearly 'movements', or is it intended to cover subcultures in general? Because I can think of any number of garden variety subcultures (skateboarding in the 70s and 80s, punk rock, D&D guys, etc) that had/have significant cultural traction that don't obviously fit this model.
If we're just talking about 'ism' cultures then it seems like a lot of this tracks, though even there I'm guessing that those 'ism' cultures where a critical number of the participants are clearly committed to making sure everyone knows how smart they are might be more susceptible. The Klan (in its many unfortunate incarnations) was/is definitely a subculture, but just as I don't see it necessarily fitting this pattern I also don't suspect it's a subculture where the members were eager to tell you how bored they were in K-12, or what their SAT scores were.
Perhaps punk rock doesn't fit the model as its own subculture, but it fits well inside the larger rock-n-roll culture as a splinter movement during the involution phase.
Punk rock was interesting because it was marketed in one of two ways.
1) a "back to basics" return to old-school rock after the pretentiousness of the mid-70s
2) a nihilistic "year zero" destruction of popular music itself. (It was considered cool that punk rock songs were produced like shit, that Sid Vicious couldn't play bass, that the Ramones knew like 3 chords, etc.)
These two things contradict each other. You can't both lionize the past and want to destroy it, but somehow both schools of thought found themselves under the punk banner.
That may well be maximally basic and unpretentious. But I think what Coagulopath was getting at was that maximizing basicness and lack of pretense was just one of two competing and often conflated models of punk. That's model 2, whereas model 1 is about trying to revert to an earlier state of cultivation.
If you know Thomas Cole's much-memeified "Course of Empire" paintings, it's like both models are a reaction to the cultivated/decadent "Consummation of Empire" stage. (That is, to the early-70s "rock as 7-minute operetta" moment.) But the first wants to get back to a prior state of non-decadent cultivation, i.e., to sounding like Buddy Holly. (Representative group: Elvis Costello & The Attractions.) Whereas the second wants to push through to a state of uncultivated decadence, to a sort of catharsis in which "talent" and "craft" are subsumed by pure entropy. (Representative group: Sex Pistols, esp. with Sid Vicious.)
"You can't both lionize the past and want to destroy it"
Oh yes you can, if the goal of your joining/evangelizing any movement is to fight with/demonize other people. And that's exactly what most people with strong opinions mostly care about doing.
Contradictions? Hah. My mass movement laughs at your silly claims of contradictions.
there are the genre defining innovators (precycle), then come the classics (growth), after that the soulless cash grabs and their opposition aka punk is dead aka involution and, now we are in postcycle and have been for quite some time. Punk is an institutionalized aesthetic you can choose from the shelf as a 14 year old without shocking anyone and old people go to punk concerts on the weekend before returning to their office job. Noone wants to discuss your opinions on what punk really is and should be, at best they will point you to the authorities that institutionalized it decades ago.
fits on any music genre really
D&D definitely went through a couple of rounds like this. First the breakup of the original TSR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSR,_Inc.#TSR's_demise Then the decline of 3e and the edition wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons#Wizards_of_the_Coast Currently 5e is at involution, having had an explosive growth phase driven by streaming and 80thies nostalgia. You can also observe this in RPG subcultures, e.g. the OSR.
The OSR has been *incredibly* infested with bona-fide Sociopaths who didn't care about or actively hated the Cool New Thing but wanted to make money off it and/or hitch their status-wagon to being A Creator in the Cool New Scene.
As someone pretty deep in the D&D subculture, I agree it's at an involution. I think most of the (new) cultural infighting is happening on tiktok, which targets the same demographic as the most recent growth phase, and to a lesser extent reddit.
In that ecosystem, the elites/"sociopaths" seem to be the content farms that regurgitate random obscure bits of lore that aren't actually part of the common canon, or wild theorycraft builds that would never fly at a real table, divorcing them of the actual context. But that gets you views. The "anti-elites" seem to be the people saying that "5e is okay, but please try playing literally any other TTRPG" (beggartok, apparently?), where the ttrpg of choice is often Pathfinder 2e.
Pssh, if you want indie cred, I play FantasyCraft, ever heard of it?
But for real, I've been playing Monster of the Week and loving having an actually story-driven game.
> The "anti-elites" seem to be the people saying that "5e is okay, but please try playing literally any other TTRPG" (beggartok, apparently?), where the ttrpg of choice is often Pathfinder 2e.
Which is ironic, since PF2e is basically "what happens if you merge 5e D&D, 3e D&D, and 4e D&D." Just like PF1e is basically "3.5e, Electric Boogaloo".
I'd phrase it as "what would happen if you took all the lessons learned from (and general good ideas from) those previous editions and built the built the best version of D&D you could". PF2e is for the people who enjoyed 3.5 and wish WoTC hadn't been so scarred by the underperformance of 4e that they crippled 5e's character building options.
Meanwhile, the people who are only interested in the *roleplaying* part of the ttrpg are looking at 5e and say "y'know, 5e can bend over backwards trying to say it's a game with more focus on roleplay over crunch with three core pillars, but it's pretty clear that 'combat' is the load-bearing one based on the 90% of the rules devoted to it", recognizing that it's still fundamentally carrying the legacy of being a tabletop war game with roleplaying bolted on top. And these are the people that are begging these new players that *don't* just want to play a crunchy combat simulation to play anything else. Usually a Powered by the Apocalypse game, which has a *really* great design philosophy.
(For the record, I am both of these :P)
None of this has anything to do with what you're talking about, though.
TSR went down because of poor business practices. The 3e/4e edition war was also due to poor business practices. None of this had anything to do with any sort of macro level thing.
TSR printed too many books; so did 4E. In TSR's case, they simply were bad at advertising. In 4E's case, the game was designed around having digital tools and the guy in charge of that murdered his wife then killed himself around the time 4E was released. Meanwhile the fact that they had made it possible for anyone to make a knock-off 3rd edition product meant that D&D was actually competing with itself, with Paizo making a knock-off 3.5 product that the grognards could cling to.
5E's popularity was because they made the game massively simpler and used social media to promote the game.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees here.
I'm no expert on early TSR but my understanding that the "poor business practices" you describe was caused by an unhealthy culture at TSR, which in turn was caused by a rapidly growing company hitting a ceiling, forcing the employees to turn from creative work to backstabbing and fighting over the remaining resources, just like how Scott describes. In a way that was remarkably similar for both early TSR and 4e, if I remember correctly.
5E's popularity was of course based on good ideas and good execution, but the popularity created the kind of growth phase Scott described, and when it plateaued, the kind of Involution phase Scott described replaced it. The dynamics Scott ascribe to Involution describes the current state of 5E pretty well as far as I can tell.
No.
TSR had no coherent business strategy and was run very badly. They produced a ton of books no one cared about because they had no coherent plan, and they were not good at marketing.
4E, likewise, suffered from poor management - in that case, they assumed that releasing a book every month was a reasonable business model, but the problem was that:
* Customers got overwhelmed with the amount of content.
* A lot of customers are players who only care about the classes that they're playing, which means a lot of the books wouldn't be for them.
* On the DM side, you don't need tons of books to be able to play, and many books were so specific that they would never be used.
* The books that had the most interesting content (the PHB Xs, which had the new classes) only came out once a year.
* The campaign settings obviously would only be bought by people into the settings.
* There was an online monthly subscription IN ADDITION TO the flood of books
* They failed to deliver many of the digital products which they needed, and the ones that they did deliver often were not as good as they should have been.
The reality is that they just weren't good at the business end of things.
I feel like Scott has identified some genuine forces at work within subcultures, which doesn't quite amount to a one-size-fits-all model of how subcultures and movements grow and die.
I completely agree, but I wonder if there aren't weaknesses inherent in certain types of subcultures that make them more susceptible to this kind of cycle. Subcultures where the members place considerable value on intellectually differentiating themselves (both from the population at large, but also from each other) seem particularly susceptible, at least at first blush, but this can't be the only causal factor.
The most successful American subculture of all time might be the LDS Church; it's been around for 170 years or so, probably has at least an 11 figure war chest, and continues to experience high levels of growth while (IMO) still clearly retaining its status as a subculture. The Satanism subculture of the 1970s, by contrast, probably DID go through this cycle (or at least most of its stages). Why the difference? Is it just accidental, or is there something different in the nature/construct of these cultures that explains this?
For something like LDS, I would think the keys would be institutionalization and heritability--two things that, perhaps unsurprisingly, Satanists were not very big on. But then one could consider something like D&D. Despite the (possibly cyclical) mini-quarrels others have described here, D&D overall is still going strong without institutionalization or heritability. Well, on institutionalization, there's the book publishing, conventions, etc., but I don't think these actually create D&D's enduring popularity.
Look close enough and you get factions of anti-D&D people, spin-offs creating indie RPG subcultures, accusations of various improprieties by popular individuals and then accusations that other popular individuals shelter the improper group and should also be cast out. From a practical standpoint all these things may be various levels of true or useful. From a status framework it's infighting to create room for others to move up in status.
Just because infighting exists doesn't mean a subculture is dead. It also doesn't mean it isn't growing. Being possible to make marginal gains through growth effort doesn't mean there isn't incentive for some to make gains through infighting effort.
You're right, but I'm struck by the fact that D&D is the sort of thing that flourishes in spite of or because of the fact that many/most of those involved don't much care about the infighting. I've been playing since the seventies, and I know almost nothing about what you're describing--and I *think* I'm the norm rather than the exception. My point is there are things (like, apparently, EA) that seem to exist by and through the cycles described in the essay, and other subcultures where, perhaps (or arguably) that is largely beside the point. Or maybe the impression of status-availability-driven cycles is just the impression created by looking at the leaders of any subculture, and meanwhile there are legions of pure nerdy fans? One could say the same about LDS or other religious groups: in these, there are clearly legions of believers (or at least adherents) who have no interest in getting ahead or making a name for themselves (beyond, maybe, their immediate circle) through it. In fact, a religion seems on the way to death when it seems to consist mainly of institutional staff, no matter how hard-working (perhaps this describes some mainline Protestant churches right now?). A religion, like a popular pastime, needs unambitious adherents as much as it needs hard-working professionals.
I mentioned in a comment elsewhere that I have seen a community mostly avoid the infighting. That community was the board game community, which recently saw an explosion of growth (and therefore status opportunities) in the last decade. I hypothesize that the method by which they avoided it is inbuilt competition. Board games are products on a market, and while you generally don't see people being cutthroat, and everyone wants the market to grow, they are naturally competing against each other in a healthy way that is expected by everyone in the community (in a community that engages in healthy competition as a hobby!)
D&D (and RPGs in general) is also a business and therefore benefits from healthy competition. It also has a MLM type structure where each gaming group (or multi-group community that shares members in a geographic region) is it's own sub-sub-culture. And each sub-sub-culture might fall victim to power struggles or it might not, but there are firewalls between groups. Power struggles might happen at higher levels in the community, but only the people who run conventions, employ staff, or read comments ever see it.
In the LDS, power struggles happen at an organizational level and lead to organizational change or potentially splinter sects like the various FLDS groups. At the local level they become the stuff of memes about bickering at bake sales and "_____ politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."
Perhaps you could model the status games as a form of drag/friction. With enough growth/acceleration they don't matter, without it you need some kind of organizational structure that is either low-friction or ablative.
Pretty sure structural factors are important. Building a robust memetic immune system, and then encoding it as self-replicating, self-correcting institutional procedures, probably isn't any easier than the biological equivalent. Delicate balance between letting the good ideas in and keeping the bad ideas out, lots of other necessary moving parts to work around. A potential subculture that gets the basics completely wrong never grows in the first place, one which gets enough factors almost right will grow for a while but then self-destruct. Really successful ones learn from early mistakes, find a niche where their culture-specific practices provide comparative advantage, and reinvest in expanding that niche before it gets too crowded.
Specific to the LDS church, to my (very limited) understanding it's notably careful not to over-promise in terms of advancement: while anyone can theoretically work their way up to any position, to get ahead requires actual work, proving that you can reliably produce useful results. Not necessarily big, heroic results - routine maintenance gets recognized and valued - but functionally almost nothing is guaranteed to prospective members just by virtue of them walking in the door and waiting on the next tier of a ponzi scheme.
If you look at the early history of Mormonism, I think you'll find the subculture wars *there*. Messy, really weird-looking ones, with murders, secret societies, secret murder societies, and a phase where every competing leader had to have his own set of metal scripture plates. The consequence is a half dozen plus subgroupings of Mormen, several of which survive to this day. As the others suggested, the main LDS most likely succeeded via institutionalization, rigid hierarchy and an associated heavy-handed top-down management. Personally I also suspect their fairly long period of comparative geographical isolation helped a great deal.
I think it’s land base and timing. They came at the right moment to settle an area the size of Utah when it was not yet owned by other colonists, still in Native American hands. Land base requires governance structures. And they lucked out with whoever designed those. Whole-town, whole-life, social programs built in. Antifragile in very clever ways (right down to the way missions take rebellious youth & send them off to do something extremely difficult in another language.)
Waco, Jonestown, Northern Idaho, is what you get when the land base is smaller due to being expensive, & the leaders crazier and more violent .
I really could have used some examples in this essay