So what then are the rules for how humans best organize so that they are happy and successful?
A starting point is to remember how humans have lived for most of time.
At our deepest level, we are primates. We are intensely social. We feel best in groups. We love to be touched. In fact, when given the choice primate babies will take touch over food. Human babies that are not touched enough, can wither and die as we have found out in Romanian orphanages.
All primates groom and grooming limits the scale of the size of group that primates live in. Without grooming, the group loses cohesion and falls apart. Grooming is at best a one to one activity. As the picture shows group grooming is hard to pull off and if you have to forage for food, you need to be separated. So grooming is limited by group size and by food needs.
One of the huge breakthroughs for humans is that by developing speech we learned to groom at a distance and hence could expand the size of the social group. Robin Dunbar has done breakthrough work on this theory of language based in primate grooming and hence social scale.
In all primate groups there is a top male but the power brokers are females. The real group power is driven by the close knit team of lead females who support or depose the top male. Any man who does not understand this is blind to reality. This is why women use gossip - to build alliances. You would never see men posed like this. In primate group, women are the amps and men the volts. Men make the noise but women drive the process.
This is where the idea of "magic numbers" for ideal human social group sizes comes from. The ideal human groupings are seen in all military organizations.
- 8 the core group
- 15 the ideal team
- 30-50 the normal tribe or platoon size
- 150 - the maximum that can self organize
These are called Magic Numbers and they are the social scaling that is hardwired into humans. We see them in military units because you can't fake it in combat. Dunbar goes into great detail as to why these numbers work. Bottom line they represent scaling in social complexity. We can't handle more than 150 strong relationships.
Any human organization that does not use these building blocks is by design - dysfunctional. Which means of course that most organizations that we use today don't work well.
Ever wondered why there is so much bullying at high schools? Put 1,000 students into an undifferentiated body and you get the prison effect - where you have cliques and gangs.
If you ignore these natural laws for human organization, then you have to impose a structure. Hence the modern bureaucratic workplace and hence helplessness and dysfunction.
The really perceptive reader will have noted that the highly touted "traditional family" does not fit these numbers. It does not because the so called Traditional Family is a modern fantasy. Mom and dad and the kids is not the traditional family. Such a unit is too small to fit the needs of humans in raising the next generation and also making a living.
Ever wondered why so many families are dysfunctional? I made the point that I hardly knew of a person who did not claim some dysfunction to the head of the CIAR's human development program and asked him what was the percentage of families that coped badly. He said over 90%. I replied that there must be something wrong then. There is!
It is only in the last 150 years that some humans have tried on the fantasy of the nuclear family. 40% of North Americans are trying the fantasy of single parenting. I blame no one I am just saying that neither are part of nature's design for us. Imagine a wolf trying to raise cubs in a pack of two or worse one? Can you imagine a chimp or a baboon or a gorilla trying this? Of course not. Only we with our rational ability to create fantasies think that we can do this. It does indeed take a village to raise a child.
So Rob wants us to live like monkeys or go back to the past ignoring how modern life really works. No I don't and we can't. But if we look hard enough, we can see that tribal group life is returning, as it has to.
The new driving force is how some of us work today and the web.
More next week
Technorati Tags: Community, Culture, Family, Language, Magic Numbers, Natural Law, Organization, Patterns, Grooming, Gossip, Robin Dunbar, Tribe
