Racial Templates, Educational and Cultural Templates, and Mental Traits

[vicky_molokh]

Greetings, all!

I'm sure we're all familiar with Racial Templates (or more sometimes Cultural Templates) involving mental traits. An example of such traits would be Code of Honour (Halfling), Sense of Duty (Nature) etc., and I'm pretty sure that many will agree that these traits are more properly seen as part of a Cultural Template, not a Racial Template (even if GURPS doesn't use the term). Likewise, an example of an Educational Template would be the Mode Training and the Qun.

Now I'm wondering about the 'proper' way to use such templates and including mental traits on them - in such a way as to avoid any non-obvious plot holes associated with them.

Here are some of my thoughts; I really welcome additions:

Advanced discoveries in Teaching, Propaganda, Sociology, Memetics and possibly even Brainwashing generally make the ubiquitous existence of such templates fit into a setting better. Otherwise, these templates need to be some sort of emergent memes that are highly virulent among certain populations, and totally not virulent among others; they also should be resistant to change, or should undergo a limited number of memetic mutations and then become more-or-less constant.

If these templates are relatively easy to custom-tailor through Sociology or similar skills, then it makes brainwashing dictatorships with zero resistance from population too easy to engineer. It is probably more playable when these templates are emergent and resistant to editing.

Such templates are very useful to creating very alien societies (e.g. the Qunari, the Turians, perhaps even the future humans of 2150 AD, The Girl From Tomorrow etc.).

However, if even emergent templates are highly virulent and they involve some sort of SoD or CoH towards the society they are common in, then it becomes very easy for societies based on them to recruit enemy spies sent into their ranks to their side. However, even if they are not virulent (e.g. a person must willingly and without reservations accept such a template for it to truly apply), BUT it is possible to find out a person's template through use of Empathy and/or Psychology, it will still have an anti-spy effect, albeit a reduced one.

Comments? Opinions? Additions?
Thanks in advance!