From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Fri May 23 2003 - 03:37:35 MDT
On Thu, May 22, 2003 at 06:55:20PM -0700, Lee Corbin wrote:
> gts writes
> > Yes, before agriculture there was no ruling class.
>
> I would say that from the standpoint of individual psychology, only
> *now* are most people free. Living in a small hunter-gatherer band
> would have meant for most people enduring the domination of a few
> particular (and doubtlessly loathsome) people. One of the glorious
> things of civilization is the individual's ability, by and large,
> to isolate himself from unpleasant people.
The glass is half full in this case. Before agriculture social
organisation did not have any class structure, and was usually
based on small bands of 2-4 families foraging together. Such
groups usually do not have much economic or power distinction
between members. They are simply too small and closely knit. But
once you get larger groups - villages, tribes, you get "big
men". Still, even here the power distances are very small. It
is when you move to larger organisations when the power
distances really start to grow.
One can make an information theoretic explanation for this: the
number of interactions needed to coordinate N people if
everybody needs to speak to everyone scales as N^2, and beyond a
certain point far too much time and energy is taken up by
discussing and seeking consensus. By putting this power in the
hand of a central coordinator the effort becomes linear. But
that becomes too cumbersome after a certain size; then it makes
sense to have a over-coordinator talking to a number of
sub-coordinators speaking with the rest. So we end up with a
pyramid of power with log(N) levels.
What is happening right now is that we - thanks to affluence and
technology - are finding ways of organising without coercion and
with less need for power distances. We can afford mistakes and
inefficiencies since the benefits of freedom are even larger; in
the farming village the opposite is true.
(The misspelling 'agrivulture' popped up; maybe this is a good term for gts'
position on it? :-)
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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