A friend of mine recently wrote:
> At what point did
> someone say, “let’s all get jobs, and spend all of our time away from our
> family just to put a roof over our head that we could just build ourselves?
> And food on the table that we could have grown ourselves?”
Does the word “ourselves” mean:
1. Each person must fend for themselves in solitary confinement.
2. A group of people working together.
If #1 (I doubt it), then tell me your thoughts on trading skills in general.
If #2, then how large can the group become before there is trouble?
In other words, why are humans unable to ‘scale’ society (a group of people), and when does the breakdown begin? At what number of humans, or under what conditions does trade become a negative instead of a positive?
If we uncover the mechanical failure in our organizing, doesn’t it seem likely we could ‘fix’ that problem and then begin to outcooperate the capitalists?
Are food and shelter really as expensive as we are sold? If not, then where is the resource leak?
Hi Patrick,
I do not have the references for this, but roughly what I remember from the research of anthropologist Dunbar:
– 120/150 seems to be the cognitive limit for maintaining/managing individual relationships
– no group above 500 can socially reproduce itself without hierarchy
Now that we have a technology which can globally coordinate the work of individuals and small groups that stay below those limits, the kind of small scale peer to peer relationships characteristic of local small groups move from the periphery to the core of society.
See: http://p2pfoundation.net/Dunbar_Number
Michel
I think the trouble starts when the group extends the size of a big, big family – a clan. It is hard to misbehave within a family or a clan as the repercussions can be severe.
also the trading between groups like is usually within the realm of the positive.
But a job is simply to specialization of hunting, gathering and planting. So that’s not where the trouble starts.
A roof and food pose little problem for a whole family, as long as you have a hectare of land (roughly to and a half acres). Called a kin’s domain after a proposal by Russian writer Vladimir Megre – in his book series “Anastasia”. Trading skills would come as a natural among neighbors.
Communities are being advocated by David Braden in
The Story of How Humans Came to Live in Peace and Plenty
and by Sam Rose in
Collaboration Around Local Food Systems
In any case, your question is a good one: What keeps us from really making use of the easily achieved synergies of group production and life.
Wish I knew.
I have this image of people in our modern, densely populated societies belonging to a range of different clans, all at manageable sizes, all engaged in overlapping conversations and shared tasks, p2p fashion, getting stuff done that we need for our daily lives, centred on a few shared principles – things like ‘buy local if you can’ and ‘don’t throw away if it can be repaired or used by someone else’…
The first step is to learn how to talk constructively to strangers about things of mutual concern. People don’t stay strangers for long.
Calling conversations is something that should be taught in schools…
Mushin and Michel,
Thanks for playing.
I wonder what you envision occurring as a family/clan/group approaches and then reaches the magic Dunbar Number.
I think the problem starts much earlier, but on such a small scale it is considered not a problem at all, but is seen as a reward for those that organize to supply that specialized skill or product (good or service).
I’ll have to think about how to setup a conversation where we can “step through” the growth process starting at one human and adding just one more at each step so we can debug the situation.
I have my own pre-calculated notions about how this turns out because I have done that work “in my head” many times and it seems very clear to me now, but I want to approach this through the scientific method and help others arrive at their own conclusions – while hoping our results coincide at the end.
On a completely unrelated note: I was just looking at the right-side of the blog page and noticed the “Blog Roll” list was somehow hacked and is replaced with “Cialis professional”.
Hi Sepp,
hope you don’t take the Anastasia writings serious… and ‘back to the good old days – or forward to a backward way of living; I’m sorry, but you will have to do without me. I like modern society and the freedoms it allows us in Western democracies. (One of the reasons people leave the country in Germany is: “It’s utterly boring!”)
“What keeps us from really making use of the easily achieved synergies of group production and life.”
This question presupposes a doing; but the ‘easily achieved synergies of group production…’ are only easily achieved in some groups; in many groups it takes a lot of psychological (or spiritual, if you like) work and energy to come to a point where things are ‘achieved easily’.
There is a lot of romanticism in the idea that somethings keeps us from doing what we (mostly others, really) know is good. Actually most of us are doing as good as we can, and “really making use of … group production and life” is just to hard to achieve. And we know that. And because we do, we don’t…
And I very much agree with Helen, “The first step is to learn how to talk constructively to strangers about things of mutual concern.”
Love,
Mushin
Helen,
Thanks for the feedback.
Are you saying the problem is a lack of communication? I had never thought of it that way.
The price of grains are increasing to the delight of agri-business owners while houses are being foreclosed upon and the bankers celebrate.
Maybe you are right; maybe this strife would be missing if there were no strangers, but can we start from that direction?
Don’t get me wrong, I want to do *something*, but will talking to my neighbors and people at the market really fix this?
Sincerely,
Patrick
Sepp,
Thanks for the heads-up on David Braden’s work. I’ve now been reading it, and it has some of the same tones that I’ve been trying to sing.
The Anastasia work is beautiful, and I agree we would all be better off to get back in touch with the earth, but it seems to be skirting the issue of why our cities and neighborhoods fail to do “The Right Thing(TM)”.
I saw the post for Sam’s new OARDC project, and of course we all know there are hundreds if not thousands of groups that are trying and/or have tried to get this going, so this leads me back to the question of:
What is wrong with the us that we can’t seem to work together, and tend to either revert to working against ourselves, or finally end by failing to grow??
Is the scaling of human cooperation impossible without creating classes of haves and have nots?
I think it is possible, and I also think I have actually found the exact problem, but there appears to be such an enormous amount of psychological pain associated with that knowledge, that I am unable to communicate it directly, and will need to find a way – maybe with pictures or maybe even some kind of animation to show how the energy of the system accumulates into the hands of the few until that (mostly accidental because of ignorance) blockage finally implodes the organization and leaves most of those that contributed with little or nothing to show for their effort.
Hopefully I’ll be able to present something within a month or so.
Patrick