Chart of group satisfaction by size, from Life With Alacrity
These days I'm thinking almost
exclusively about Love, Conversation and Community. In the last month
or so I've lost a sizable number of readers who think this new
direction in my thoughts and actions -- walking away from trying to
reform, or even worry about, civilization's dysfunctional systems, and
instead focusing exclusively on creating new models of how to live and
make a living through conversation in community with people I love --
is idealistic, irresponsible, or absurd. But I've also picked up a lot
of new readers who are at the same point in their thoughts that I am,
and ready to try, or at least explore, something new.
My infatuation with Second Life, despite its infuriatingly
non-intuitive and unreliable technology, is due to the ease and low
cost of finding like minds, conversing, and creating communities of
sorts within it. It's a Petri dish, a place to experiment with models
and tweak them and abandon them and try something else, before trying
to do the same more onerously in Real Life.
I have tried to organize my networks, my fledgling communities of
people I love, so that I can spend as much time with these people as
possible. It's a bit of a 'herding cats' exercise. Even though most of
these people now can communicate with me (and each other) anywhere,
anytime through GMail/GTalk, a lot of them don't like that particular
platform, or face technological obstacles using it. Some of the people
I've come to love in Second Life, or though this blog, or in Real Life,
won't use GMail at all. What's interesting to me is that the total
number of people with whom I now communicate with any regularity is a
little less than 150 -- the famous Dunbar number of the maximum number
of people with whom one can sustain a meaningful social relationship.
What's more interesting is the research that Christopher Allen has done
(see his chart, and the accompanying link, above) showing that, while
150 is perhaps the maximum, the optimal
is either 6 or 50. This jibes with my intuition and my experience. When
I wrote the story recently about a fictitious polyamorous community,
the number of intimate lovers in it was 6. The size of 'bands' in
prehistoric times was around 30-60, while 'clans' were around 100-150
people and 'tribes' 1000-2000. Just as there is a naturally occurring
number of electrons in each shell around the nucleus of atoms, this
suggests to me that 5-7, 30-60, 120-150, and 1000-2000 are 'natural'
levels of the circles within circles of human social association.
Over the next while I'll be writing about the research (primary and
secondary) I'm doing on intentional community. In the meantime I'd be
very interested in your thoughts on two subjects:
- What are the 'right' sizes for intentional communities? My hypothesis
is that the first circle (5-7 people) is optimal for intimacy, the
second circle (30-60 people) is optimal for enterprise/economic
activity, the third circle (120-150 people) is optimal for political
association, the fourth circle (1000-2000 people) is optimal for mutual
protection and security (with a buffer between each of the 1000-2000
person groups to ensure natural diversity between 'cultures' can
emerge), and that any human association with greater than 2000 people
in it will be inherently dysfunctional.
- What's the best way to deal with the issue of private
property in intentional community? My instincts tell me that it was
when civilization changed our worldview from us belonging to the land,
to the land (and its bounties) belonging to us individually, that we
got screwed up. But without private property, with everything as a
shared Commons, how do we avoid the Tragedy of the Commons? And how do
we liberate land that is currently private, so that we have a Commons
within which to develop model intentional communities in the first place?
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1:12:47 PM 
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
