Keep This
Going
The Cultiness Spectrum is a free, public educational resource. If it has been useful to you, consider supporting its continued development.
The first manuscript started as a practical guide — using twenty-four of history's worst rulers to build the skills to evaluate what leaders and powerful people actually mean, not what they say. The second came from a frustrating argument. A complete absence of historical understanding and independent critical thinking on the other side of it made one thing clear: someone needed to write the manual that explains how America arrived where it did.
The questions How We Got Here raised about high-control organizations and America's odd comfort with them required more than argument. That became the Cultiness Spectrum Dataset — a systematic, evenhanded application of the Young-Reed framework across 370 American organizations, publicly available and free to use.
— Zachary S. Mays, U.S. Marine Corps veteran
Buy Me a Coffee
The Cultiness Spectrum Dataset is and will remain free to access, explore, and use. In an effort to continue providing and expanding this dataset to the public at no charge — covering research time, infrastructure, API costs, and the ongoing work of scoring new organizations and refining existing assessments — any contribution is genuinely appreciated.
Buy Me a CoffeeNew organization assessments
Each entry requires research, evidence review, scoring, and human validation. The dataset is at 370 organizations and growing.
Body text audit and revision
Roughly 25% of existing entries have placeholder content pending evidence-based body text. This is ongoing work.
Methodology refinement
Keeping the analytical framework current, internally consistent, and defensible as a research resource.
Infrastructure
Hosting, database, and API costs for the public dataset and this site.
Share the project
If the dataset or methodology has been useful, sharing it with others who study organizations, institutions, or political psychology is genuinely helpful.
Follow on YouTube
Discussion of the dataset, methodology, and findings. youtube.com/@mayszs
Follow Daniella Mestyanek Young's platform
The framework this project is built on comes from Young and Reed's work. Their platform is where the source framework lives. uncultureyourself.com
Engage with the GitHub repository
The dataset is public. Stars, forks, and issues on the repository help establish its credibility as a research resource. github.com/zacharymays-cpu/cultiness-spectrum