Do they work for us, or for themselves?
By Bruce Rafnel
May 22, 2025
(Revision: 1.48; 2025/05/09 00:07:24 GMT)
($Revision: 1.71 $ $Date: 2025/05/22 22:23:16 $ GMT)
Introduction
A. Alien Entities
A.1. Emergent properties
A.2. Naming the Powers
A.3. Are the Powers good or evil?
A.4. How do the Powers keep their order?
B. The Entities' Environment
B.1. Organizations of Economic Production
B.2. The Capitalist Economic System
B.3. Politics
C. Controlling the Aliens
C.1. Challenges to the Social Evolution Story
C.2. You Do Not Matter
C.3. The Domination System and How to Change It
C.4. The Non-Violent Response
C.5. Restructuring
C.6. Dilemmas and Dialogue
C.7. Opposite of Unhealthy Organizations
D. Social Limits
D.1. Dunbar Number
D.2. Cell/Body Model
D.3. Structure
E. Community
E.1. Definition of Community
E.2. What destroys community?
E.3. Creating Communities
E.4. Boundaries, Transparency
E.5. Communication and Decision-Making Technologies
E.6. Maintaining Community
E.7. Common Elements of Successful Long-term Communities
F. Leader, Follower, Observer
F.1. Followers - Dangers and Duties
F.2. Observers - Dangers and Duties
F.3. Structure - selecting good leaders
F.4. Leaders - Dangers and Duties
Conclusions
Appendix A. Acknowledgments
Appendix B. Citation Style
Bibliography
We are in the middle of a Sixth Extinction event. Millions of species on this planet are disappearing. Humans could be included. The equatorial region of the planet could become almost uninhabitable for most humans by 2060. At 100% humidity, more than 15 minutes of exposure to temperatures above 87.8oF (31oC) is fatal for humans. At 0% humidity, 122oF (50oC) is likely fatal. That is our range of habitability, and, unfortunately, it's much harder to stay cool in such conditions than it would be to stay warm in an ice age. (Sources: {dickie-01}, {huber-01}, {cassella-01}, {bendix-01}).
But land species are not the only ones at risk:
It is obvious that it can be too hot or too cold for mainstream life, but not so obvious is the fact that the ocean becomes a desert when its surface temperature rises above about 54.6oF (12oC); when this happens, a stable surface layer of warm water forms that stays unmixed with the cooler, nutrient-rich waters below. This purely physical property of ocean water denies nutrients to the life in the warm layer, and soon the upper sunlit ocean water becomes a desert. This may be one of the reasons why Gaia's goal appears to be to keep the Earth cool.{lovelock-01:p16}
Clearly, humans are causing climate change.
But we have more problems than warming the planet. Even if we control the temperature by reducing our CO2 emissions, there are many other ecological problems caused by humans: deforestation, desertification, disruption of water cycles, plastic pollution, insect decline, fishery collapses, and fuel resource depletion. The list goes on and on. "It is no accident that the ruins of the world's oldest civilizations are mostly in deserts now. It wasn't desert before that."{yunkaporta-01:loc615}
Our human institutions are unwilling (or unable) to address these problems with real solutions. We created these institutions—corporations and governments, most notably—but we seem unable to control them. They seem to have morphed into alien entities that now control us.
We are probably long past many tipping points, and we are unlikely to stop the planetary changes we have put in motion.{michaels-02} But we can try to lessen the impact. Maybe we can show future generations how we learned to live with the planet that created us and how to control, and avoid creating, destructive social/economic systems.
The longer we hold off on the changes we need to prevent a collapse, the harder the fall will be. Will we wait until every last bit of oil, coal, and forest are used up? Or could we control this with downsizing? "Impossible," say the powers that be: "Our civilization requires continual growth." That is a good example of the problem: we have no effective controls over the organizations and systems that make it impossible to change.
The smallest effective human-powered unit is a community, not an individual. However, tight, effective communities have been hobbled. It is time to relearn how to build communities, and then to do the work of taking back our government. At the same time, large organizations can be reformed or broken up, with non-violent actions, to remind them that they exist for humans, not themselves.
The key to knowledge is relationship—personal relationship. It takes time, maybe years, to really know someone, their strengths and weaknesses, their reliability, whether or not we can trust their character—so that we know how to use them to help us in our own struggles. It's the same with books. Parroting something from a book is not the same as knowing the subject.{burgess-06}
I have read many books and articles on anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and related fields. In addition, I have worked for 24 years in two large corporations and 16 years in five startups, so I have seen and experienced the differences between organizations. Combining my reading with my experiences, I have tried to provide a useful description of the large problematic organizations I am calling "aliens,” and to describe some tools we can use to take back control, to prevent them from harming us and our world.
This is a long article, with many incomplete thoughts, so I am working on a book that will have more to say.
A. Alien Entities - We have created large entities—really "legal fictions"—that control us more than we control them: corporations and governments are the best examples, but any large organization can become problematic. They are not alive, and they have no human morals, so I am calling them aliens.
B. The Entities' Environment - Life lives in the physical environment. The entities "live" in mental or legal places that our cultures have created. Without us they do not exist.
C. Controlling the Entities - Individuals have minimal effect on changing large organizations, but organized communities can do what needs to be done, namely: Remind the organizations of their purpose, which is to serve humans in ways that cooperate with life on this planet. If they will not change, they must be broken up or replaced. Governments have the primary legal authority over many organizations. For that reason alone, we need to make sure that governments work for humans, not for organizations.
D. Social Limits - The communication and governing processes used in an organization should depend on its size. For example, majority voting is usually destructive to small communities, while consensus processes will paralyze large organizations. Our brains limit the number of people we can know and trust; that cognitive limitation (100 to 230 people) is called the Dunbar Number.
E. Community - 50 to 150 people is a basic size for a human community. Healthy communities are the key to controlling large organizations. However, large organizations and related systems have fragmented our society so that few "true" communities are left. Nonetheless, there are effective techniques for creating and maintaining communities, and many of these techniques can also be used by small groups inside large organizations.
F. Leader, Follower, Observer - In a healthy community, leaders are important, but we need good ones! Followers are important too. And their duty is to keep the leaders in line.
We are facing a multi-dimensional problem with many likely causes, and many points can be easily disputed. The most disingenuous way to do that is to treat each point, one at a time, as if it were a primary cause. This is a typical technique used to isolate people and discredit attempts at trying multiple solutions.
In Dr. Peck's In Search of Stones, he made the point that everything is "overdetermined."
"Anything of significance is overdetermined. Everything worth thinking about has more than one cause." Repeat after me: "For any single thing of importance, there are multiple reasons." Again, for any single thing of importance, there are multiple reasons.{berry-01:loc2785}
In other words, a problem with multiple causes requires multiple solutions. In this article, I propose one major structure that is at the core of most solutions: community. If we want to have humane solutions, for us and for life on this planet, the solutions must have healthy, diverse communities behind them. Community alone will not solve all problems, but if there are no tight communities, long-term solutions are unlikely.
My main message is to start at the bottom as we work through our culture's problems. We are divided and are kept from creating deep, long-lasting connections. Humans have the most "power" in healthy, tightly connected communities of 50 to 150 people. We need to build tight communities to regain control of our governments and use the governments to control the larger organizations. Also, we can build communities in big organizations to move them away from the mentality of "Why are you getting emotional? It's only business," or worse, "I'm just following orders."
Governmental processes can solve many issues. But governments must be controlled by humans, not by alien entities or by governments' own alien tendencies. Humans, with souls and ethics, are needed to suggest solutions. Communities are the lowest level of organizations that have the energy to organize around creating and pushing for such solutions.
The logical deductive process of premise, premise, premise, …, conclusion has a "lock-in" problem. Once a chain of premises and conclusions is accepted, it is hard to build up alternative premise/conclusion chains, because the alternatives will likely conflict with what has already been accepted. In other words, people who are sure their view is "right" will have no room to see alternate views that could be more right.
As Pema Chodron has said, "The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new."
One "truth" that is widely believed is that humanity is separate from and better than the rest of "nature." Charles Eisenstein, in The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self{eisenstein-01:loc264} puts it this way:
…the counterpart of technology is culture, which modifies and even supersedes human nature in the same way technology modifies physical nature. In thus mastering nature with technology, and mastering human nature with culture, we distinguish ourselves from the rest of life, establishing a separate human realm. Believing this to be a good thing, we think of this separation as an ascent in which we have risen above our animal origins. That is why we naturally refer to the millennia-long accumulation of culture and technology as "progress." It is separation, then, in the form of technology and culture, that defines us as human. As well, it is separation that has generated the converging crises of today's world.
In other words, the current dominant human cultures are "unhooked" from the planet that created us!
When I describe the elements in this article, most people acknowledge their feelings of isolation and despair. Then, when I mention authentic community as a first step, they light up. Yes, but where, how, and with whom? The rest of this article explores those questions. But first, let's look at the problem in more detail. This is a big complex problem—it will not be solved with "sound bites."
Note: I will often say "our culture." By that, I mean the "WEIRD" culture that I've grown up in. Many cultures, past and present, are very different, but the WEIRD cultures are causing the most harm.
WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) comes from the book The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, by Joseph Henrich{henrich-01}.
See "Appendix A. Citation Style" for a description of the reference notation style used in this article.
From: The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium, by Walter Wink{wink-03:p1}
All of us deal with the Powers That Be. They staff our hospitals, run City Hall, sit around tables in corporate boardrooms, collect our taxes, and head our families. But the Powers That Be are more than just the people who run things. They are the systems themselves, the institutions and structures that weave society into an intricate fabric of power and relationships. These Powers surround us on every side. They are necessary. They are useful. We could do nothing without them. Who wants to do without timely mail delivery or well-maintained roads? But the Powers are also the source of unmitigated evils.
Walter Wink's statement about "the Powers That Be" is the first insight that inspired this article. We have created these powers or entities, and we think they have all the values of the people that are "in" them. But that is a mistake.
In his book The Powers That Be, Walter Wink points out that Paul's letters to some early churches were addressed to the "angel of the church." When you go to different churches, even ones in the same denomination, they will have different levels of friendliness. Each church feels different. That difference comes from their different collective identities, or "angels."
Scientists have known for some time that when you have "interacting actors," they can lead to "emergent properties" that could not be known by considering each "actor" individually. ("Actors" can be anything from microbes to squirrels, trees, or people.{feldman-01}) Those emergent properties become the characteristics of the organization as an "entity."
Any organized group larger than 150 people should be considered a "power." 150 is the "Dunbar Number."{lafont-01} This number is derived from a limitation of our human brains. When a group grows larger than 150, people start to become strangers. (For more information, see section "D.1. Dunbar Number.") Even groups with a membership above 50 people could be a "power," while groups with a membership under about 20 people will probably not be a "power."
Why am I calling large groups "aliens?" Because they are not human. They have become something quasi-independent of the humans within them. Although they were created to serve humans, they are not alive, and they do not have morals or feelings. Currently, corporations have been granted legal personhood by a Supreme Court ruling. This interpretation has gone too far. Corporations are not living beings. They exist in an economic/legal ecology, not in a living ecology.
"Game Theory" has shown that when "actors" only serve themselves, with no "concern" for others, that will, in the short term, usually lead to lose/lose outcomes for all the players, even though the individual who acts for himself alone may gain a brief advantage.
However, game theory has also shown that, in the long run, cooperation strategies usually work better than competition strategies. Be trusting, but not too trusting. Be slow to punish, and have some forgiveness, so that misunderstandings and mistakes do not lead to zero trust forever.{veritasium-04} This strategy works for open-ended games, where you will interact with others for an unknown amount of time, for example, ecosystems and communities.
The limits on large organizations need to be reevaluated. For example, maybe organizations with more than 100 people should not be allowed to participate in politics.
I'm not talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI). While AI is "alien," organizations of people have more reasoning depth and breadth than any AI software. The main problem with the current AI implementations is that they are "owned" by large corporations, who will use them for their purposes. AI can destroy truth and trust between people and groups.
AI can generate lots of plausible false narratives. Eventually, even true stories will not be trusted. Truth and trust are required for the connections that hold organizations together. For one solution, see my Medium article "Photographic Evidence is Dead."{rafnel-09} Trying to identify AI-generated text or images is looking for a solution in the wrong direction! What we really need to identify are things created by or verified by trusted humans or organizations. In other words, the reputation of the source is the important part.
It's important to "name the powers" because we cannot fight what we cannot identify. Here's a start: a few examples of the most obvious Powers:
This is a complex question, but here are some basic considerations:
Good organizations serve people (or life). They try to find a cooperative niche to justify their existence.
Evil organizations only serve themselves. They try to eliminate competition so they can have control over everything.
Good people do not ensure a good organization. An organization's "culture" will often determine people's actions. If you try to change the culture too much or too fast, you will be ejected from the organization.
"Only making money" is not a valid purpose for any organization to exist.
People or organizations who are sure they are "right" will cause more harm than those who are willing to discuss issues, in civil ways, to try and find the truth.
Large organizations are sometimes good. The problems start when organizations are not transparent or monitored, or when people start to think an organization is entirely trustworthy. However, organizations do need "privacy boundaries." How can we have both transparency and privacy? This is addressed in section E.4.
You might think that the Powers That Be would be easily overturned once we recognize them, but there are many ways in which they amass and keep their control over us. Here's a summary of some of them, which I discuss in more detail in my book.
According to the eighteenth-century philosopher of capitalism Adam Smith, businesses exist to serve the general welfare. Profit is the means, not the end. It is the reward a business receives for serving the general welfare. When a business fails to serve the general welfare, Smith insisted, it forfeits its right to exist.{wink-03:p30}
Life lives in the physical environment. The entities "live" in mental or legal places that our cultures have created. Without us they do not exist.
The entities I'm calling "powers" (or "aliens") live in a system of beliefs and assumptions. The most common system in 21st century America is Capitalism. Here are some basic characteristics of that system.
Individuals in markets follow price signals, as Adam Smith wrote long ago in An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations (1789). This has been the wisdom of Capitalism for centuries. But it fails when businesses get "too" large. At that point, monopolies and collusion can distort the "free market" to the point where Smith's formulation is no longer true.
In Ronald Coase's "The Nature of the Firm," 1937{coase-01} Coase explains how and why businesses coalesce into "firms." A "firm" is a large business that contains internal "businesses" whose functions are controlled by managerial command systems instead of being performed by external businesses. For example, a computer manufacturer can have an in-house printed circuit board group, an IC manufacturing group, and a publications group to create manuals for their computer. Coase's paper explains the main reason for the existence of firms: it is cheaper to do some things in-house, because the overhead of making and managing external contacts and contracts is expensive. At some point, the internal groups can become so large and bureaucratic that it does make sense to "outsource" the work to other companies.
This is a new organizational model. See: "Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm" (2002). {benkler-01} Commons-based peer production started in the 1980s and 90s with shareware and freeware. It continues with the names "Free Software" (from: "The GNU Manifesto" 1985 {stallman-01}) and "Open Software" (from: "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" 1999, by Eric S. Raymond). This new form of organization appears to violate the economic theories that explain the Market and the Firm.
It's worth knowing something about the history of corporations. Initially, they were created to serve a public need that would be too hard for a small group to implement. The corporations were chartered by states so that their power could be monitored and controlled, and their charter contained time and project limits. Before the American Civil War, corporations were routinely dissolved.{grossman-01}
After the Civil War, corporations were not dissolved. They were mostly left alone, because it takes some effort to create a company. Most likely, the shareholders pushed to keep companies going. That led to the corporations mostly existing to make money for the shareholders, not to fulfill their initial reason for incorporating: to make things for people.
Now, corporations have become multi-national, and the capitalist system needs continuous growth. But natural resources are not inexhaustible! Sure, as resources become scarce and more expensive to extract, innovation will be used to make better use of limited resources. But innovations are expensive, so only "just enough" is done. Also, the largest companies can swoop in and quickly extract a resource before smaller companies have the chance to compete. And they use cheap extraction processes (for example, strip mining) that destroys habitats. In other words, they cheat. See "The Tragedy of the Commons" section below for more on this.
The capitalist economic system is a root problem. In a college accounting class, I learned:
If these are the foundational assumptions of accounting, it looks like corporations are explicitly anti-human. And their extraction processes are often anti-life.
(As an aside: In college I frequently visited my accounting class instructor's office for help with the asset or expense categories. In exasperation, he said I currently had a C- for the course, but, if I got at least a D on the final, he would give me a C for the class—if I promised to never take another accounting course.)
U.S. capitalism is a debt-based economic system. Most money is created through debt, in the form of interest-based loans. Growth is needed to pay off the debts.
The biggest criticism of capitalism is that it leads to wealth concentration and abuse of the system by the wealthy. "He who has the gold makes the rules" is a cliche. One example: The wealthy are okay with complex tax laws because they offer many loopholes, and the wealthy can afford the financial staff needed to use them. Could this be why they help elect people who refuse to make simpler laws that would close the loopholes?
Other cultures saw debt as a problem. They would occasionally have "Jubilees" (about every 20 years) to forgive all debts.{graeber-10:p390}
The Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada and the United States had a custom of "gift giving," which is most visible in their Potlatch gatherings.
The status of any given family is raised not by who has the most resources, but by who distributes the most resources. The hosts demonstrate their wealth and prominence through giving away goods.
…
Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1884 in an amendment to the Indian Act. To some extent, this was at the urging of missionaries and government agents who considered it "a worse than useless custom" that was seen as wasteful, unproductive, and contrary to 'civilized values' of accumulation.
…
The potlatch ban was repealed in 1951.{wikipedia-68}
Clearly, Indigenous People understood the problem posed to community well-being by wealthy people. Their solution was to praise the wealthy for giving back to the community. This also strengthened the connections between family groups.
Healthy economies need money to keep goods moving around, and that money needs to move around locally. One problem with franchises and big-box stores is that they transfer money out of a city to a company far from the city. If that money had stayed in the city, there would be many more jobs and businesses in the city. For that reason, some cities have banned extractive franchises and big-box stores.
Such stores are based on a centralizing model. Centralizing increases the efficiency of production and distribution, but it mainly benefits the owner of the centralizing organization. A centralized system is more fragile than a decentralized system which has more redundancy.
"The Tragedy of the Commons"{hardin-01} is an oft-quoted essay by Garrett Hardin. Hardin claimed that a "commons"—a resource shared equally by many people who are free to use it as they see fit—would inevitably "bring ruin to all." But Hardin was wrong, as Elinor Ostrom points out{stone-04}. His argument assumes that individuals will only be in it for themselves and that no one will try to stop them if they extract too much from the common resource. The reality is that others will step in and enforce "rules" so that the commons can be used and replenished at a sustainable rate. But some organizations use their power to prevent others from stopping their destructive extractions. The problem is not the commons per se: it's that organizations do not have any inherent reason to care about the commons. They have no feelings.
"None of the world's top industries would be profitable if they paid for the natural capital they use."{roberts-01}
Elinor Ostrom describes the rules that makes a commons work:{smith-09}
In the book Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons,{barnes-02} Peter Barnes's solution to managing the Commons is to create trusts to manage them. The trusts would put increasing costs on a resource to ensure it lasts. The increased cost would lead to recycling or to finding alternatives. Of course, as a resource gets close to being used up, the cost of extraction will naturally go up. But a trust will move that future cost closer to the present time, to force creation of new technologies that uses the resource better, rather than just using existing technology to extract more of a dwindling resource.
If our cognition limits our ability to work in groups, then Dunbar's Number suggests some interesting conclusions about political processes. For instance, groups larger than 150 people can use some small-group processes, but they need different organizational structures and decision-making processes for creating and enforcing rules.
For large groups like nations, the main organizational choices are
Authoritarian (or domination) systems use conditioning and violence to maintain their power. Democratic systems rotate representatives, and they try to "balance" powers so that a group or individual cannot gain absolute power.
Tweedism - Corruption in how candidates are picked and supported
Gerrymandering - Corruption in how voting district boundaries are drawn
Voting Problems - Corruption in how we choose representatives
In Tweedism, named for the corrupt 19th-century boss of a New York political "machine," large organizations, or the governments currently in power, select the candidates they want, and those candidates usually get elected. In the 21st-century U.S.A., Tweedism takes the form of large donors funding the campaigns of candidates of their choice. Money plays an outsized role in deciding elections, because the current system requires so much money for ads, paid organizers, and travel.
In the video "Our democracy no longer represents the people. Here's how we fix it,"{lessig-03} Larry Lessig describes why money needs to be removed from the candidate selection and campaign processes, and how that can be done.
One approach is to make all contributions 100% transparent at ALL levels. Publish the names of all donors, whether individuals companies or Political Action Committees (PACs).
Many will say this would be too hard. But with computer databases (DBs) and all the existing bank accounting software, this is very easy. With a DB, a simple report can list all the top donor companies and individuals and the people they support.
Also, the organization building the DB should look for loopholes that might be used to get around the tracking. For example, who buys overpriced products from companies that give significant donations (and who gets the profits from the products)? Wealthy people can hide a lot with MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) complexity, but computer tools don't get tired.
Here is a start: "List of Donald Trump 2024 presidential campaign endorsements"{wikipedia-66}
How the boundaries are defined for political districts matters. Gerrymandering is one blatant abuse. Tricks: Draw the boundaries of a district to include the people you want ("packing"), or split up districts with high representation of groups you don't want. Most any criteria could bias the boundaries, but the ones most often used are race, political voting record, or wealth.
Here are some techniques for combating gerrymandering:
Use algorithms to measure the amount of overlap between (for instance) the U.S. Senate and House districts in a state, with the goal of drawing districts with the least amount of overlap.{brin-01} That will force a tension between the Senate and House groups, and the public could easily see the amount of overlap with different maps.
Usually, there are fewer senators than House representatives, so the Senate districts are bigger than the House districts. Now, imagine there are two Senate districts and six House districts.
Map A has no overlap between the Senate and House districts. Senator S1 would have a lot of influence over the House districts R1, R2, and R3, while Senator S2 would have a lot of influence over the House districts R4, R5, and R6.
Map C has a lot of overlap. The House districts are evenly split across the Senate districts, so influence is split up across the districts.
Map B has some overlaps. But until you add up the areas that overlap, it isn't clear who has the most influence.
Another approach is to algorithmically define districts, with simple rules that do not take into account factors like race, party registrations, etc.
It's entirely possible to define objective rules that use census data and computer algorithms to generate boundaries that will not have forced biases. For example, see: "Impartial Automatic Redistricting"{olson-02}. Olson used population groups that are clustered only by distance and natural boundaries.
Here is an example with Illinois' districts. Figure 2, below, shows the weird house districts for 2024.
Figure 3, below, shows a map of possible districts generated by Olson's algorithm using the 2020 census data.
Olson's sample maps have been available since 2011. One person, Olson, created maps for all Senate and House districts for all 50 states using only a PC—it is not hard! So why are state and federal governments not using Olson's method? Are they incompetent? Or are they admitting that they do not want fairly drawn districts?
Fair voting is a concern. Who is allowed to vote? Are the voting times, locations, and rules defined for fair, equal access? Also, will the voting method ensure people will feel they have some representation? There are a number of ways of counting votes, and many have big problems.
Most of these voting methods only apply to very large groups of people. For an excellent description of the above procedures and their problems, see the YouTuber Veritasium's video: "Why Democracy Is Mathematically Impossible"{veritasium-05}
or Taming the Evil Aliens
Organizations need to put people first. If an organization puts itself first, or exists only to make money, then the reason for that organization to exist needs to be questioned.
But questioning powerful Entities is often hard, or frowned upon. Our reluctance to challenge the status quo is often based on our assumptions about society and our place in it. So let's look at some new ideas about social structures, which can shake up our assumptions and give us a wider field of freedom in which to question and challenge the Powers That Be.
Many of us assume that our current Western civilization is obviously the best one humans have developed after thousands of years of creating societies. But if that were true, why did the "European powers spend the last 500 years aiming guns at people's heads in order to force them to adopt it?"{graeber-11:loc9550}
Also, many think our governments and organizations are the best ones that have been tried because they are the end product of organizational evolution over a long period of time. Wrong. The supposedly typical progression of hunter/gatherer tribes to centralized agricultural settlements and then into hierarchies, city states, and nation states, is not the only path humans have followed. Archaeologists are finding new evidence of decentralized cultures doing agriculture and then switching back to being hunter/gatherers. There is even a modern group that alternates between hierarchical rule (a chief) during dry parts of the year and decentralized rule (no chiefs) during abundant parts of the year.{graeber-11:p99}
In The Dawn of Everything{graeber-11}, the authors describe new research findings:
Also, in The Dawn of Everything{graeber-11:loc8284}, David Graeber and David Wengrow describe the basic freedoms that have existed across many cultures, past and present:
These freedoms are very much curtailed today:
Freedom to disobey - Nonviolent protests and strikes are examples of this freedom. But for individuals working in corporations or autocratic institutions, the dictatorial owners will say: "If you disobey, you will be fired or imprisoned."
Freedom to move - Now that all parts of the planet appear to be "owned" by someone or some nation, moving is very hard.
Freedom to experiment with different social relationships - Co-Ops, clubs, volunteer groups, and intentional communities, that try loose or no-structured organizing, are examples of this freedom. But most don't last because they lack good communication tools.
If you don't have these freedoms, are you effectively a slave? David Graeber writes:
…how could [the] most basic element of all human freedoms, the freedom to make promises and commitments and thus build relationships, be turned into its very opposite: into peonage, serfdom or permanent slavery? It happens, we'd suggest, precisely when promises become impersonal, transferable—in a nutshell, bureaucratized.{graeber-11:p426}
One could also say that our promises and commitments have been "monetized" or "commodified." In other words, money has made relationships optional. Once convinced to use money for all your needs and wants, to the point where everything becomes a "transaction," you will be in real trouble when you don't have enough money.
Let's look more closely at the freedom to disobey. In past cultures, individuals could decide to not obey others, and making them obey through force or the threat of violence took considerable effort. Now, with modern weapons, force is easy to exert. In the past, only a few people who refused to obey a leader would be enough to topple him. Now, in order to change a government, a lot of people need to refuse to cooperate, possibly risking mass death, in order to bring about change. This is the crux of the problem: technology has given individual rulers a massive power advantage that allows them to ignore the ruled, even if the ruled are cooperating in their refusal to obey.
The people at the top need the people at the bottom, and non-violent tactics can remind them that cooperation is how life works on this planet—but only if the people at the bottom can organize effectively! The problem is, how can a group coordinate non-compliance in numbers large enough, and fast enough, to matter to those at the "top"? How can we free ourselves from their domination?
Overwhelmed by the incomprehensible size of corporations, bureaucracies, universities, the military, and media icons, individuals sense that their only escape from utter insignificance lies in identifying with these giants and idolizing them as the true bearers of their own human identity.{wink-03:p69}
You do matter, but not in the way our culture says you matter. We are made to feel guilty for our actions or inactions. But this is just a way of keeping us divided and focused on our individual virtues or lack of them. It is true that if enough individuals "did the right thing" there would be fewer problems. But who decides what the "right thing" is? Do all people have the time and resources to do the right thing? Does every person need to be a hero or else feel like a failure?
The stories of heroes in myths are meant to show the inner forces in a person, not to be acted out in the world.
Movies and other stories highlight hero-leaders more than community and cooperation. We are told it is their vision, leadership, perseverance, and will that makes them important. These flawed heroes usually incite others to rise up with violence to defeat their oppressors. When a group wins with violence, usually the result is just another group dominating with the threat of violence.
Even the stories of non-violent "heroes" can be misleading, because individuals mean nothing if others do not notice them or help them. What if Rosa Parks (the black woman who would not ”sit in the back of the bus”) had had no friends or family? Would her action have caused a change? Not likely. She caused change because others understood what she was doing and helped spread her story. She only started a change that was ready to happen. Not incidentally, she was part of an organization that was training people to bring about change. She knew she was not alone!
In no way am I disparaging Rosa Parks' role in the Civil Rights movement. The NAACP and the Montgomery protest movement highlighted her case. She humbly embraced her role and deserves all the honors during and after her life for her contributions to the Civil Rights movement.
But others were arrested before her for refusing to sit in the back of the bus. "The Women Behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott"{johnson-07} is an excellent audio podcast describing the decisions behind that boycott. For example, who would be the "lead" story for the boycott, Rosa Parks or a pregnant teenager? (The teenager was removed from the bus a week before Rosa Parks. She agreed that Parks was a better person to represent the boycott story.) The best part of the podcast tells how the women created carpools to get people to work without buses for over a year.
My point is, individuals can be catalysts for change, but they cannot dictate that there will be change. A non-violent hero like Rosa Parks did not rise up all by herself to challenge a racist society. She was part of a movement and a community that supported her actions and helped make them count.
There are many American stories of the "self-made man" who created businesses or opened new lands. But what about the education, infrastructure, manufactured goods, trained workers, etc., that contributed to their success? Glorifying individual actors can have the consequence of denigrating others and disrespecting their contributions to the "hero's" success. This helps lead to discouragement and isolation.
Isolated individuals and small groups are easily manipulated.
Organizations know how to handle individuals and small teams. For instance, managers will not let employees define their own work groups.
In our current American society, who will help you if you face a lack of money, major health problems, etc? If you have not planned for your future, or you don't have the resources to handle sudden major problems in your life, what will you do? The homeless numbers and the prison population are good indicators of whether a culture is humane. For prisoners: USA. 541/100,000 (2025), Netherlands 64/100,000 (2023).
What can we as individuals do? Work to create or strengthen real connections and communities. But don't waste your time with pseudo-communities. The "D. Community" sections provide more information.
A gross misunderstanding of this section would be to think it is saying "do nothing." It says, sure, do what you can as an individual, but if you are part of a group, you will have a bigger impact. (See Section E.1. for more on this topic.) This is why companies fear unions more than individuals.
Humans have power when in groups. And you DO matter, even if you're not a leader. After all, leaders have no power without followers. (See section F, below, for more about leaders and followers.)
David Korten has written some excellent books on the topic of the Domination System and the new stories that need to be created to replace it. He and others created Yes Magazine, which reports on positive stories related to the economy and ecology rather than only reporting on what is not working.
In The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community{korten-01}, Korten writes that a culture needs to have "stories" that address the primary needs for:
Prosperity - How does our culture prosper, and how can individuals be successful?
Security - How can people be safe and feel secure?
Meaning - How do we find meaning in life?
In his "Prisons of the Mind" chapter, he shows the stories implied by our current culture:
Prosperity - The elites and powerful companies will bring prosperity to all. Individuals can be rewarded and brought into the elite class.
Security - The laws, and police using potentially deadly enforcement tactics, will keep order in our society. A large, strong military will keep us safe from other nations.
Meaning - Korten describes two types of meaning: religious and secular. Religious meaning says: Live a life without sin and you will be rewarded in your afterlife. Secular meaning says: Humans are the peak of evolution. Successful people are examples of "survival of the fittest."
If you want to replace this culture, new stories must answer the three questions. Korten offers some stories that might work for an "Earth Community" culture. The hard part is how to transition to new stories. My own opinion is that some "transition stories" will need to be created.
Cultural stories are so important that Korten wrote a whole book on them: Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth.{korten-05}
In a number of books, articles, and a website, Riane Eisler describes the Domination System and the Partnership Culture that could replace it. (https://centerforpartnership.org/)
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future{eisler-01}
"Building Cultures of Partnership and Peace"{eisler-06}
The domination system is maintained with violence. It cannot be corrected with violence. Violent change of a domination system will just replace it with another domination system.
Change has to happen within an organization. But external non-violent actions can push the organization towards making internal changes.
Walter Wink says the primary approach to controlling "evil" organizations is to show them how they are not fulfilling their primary purpose for existing. He suggests the following elements of this approach:
In my opinion, a society that celebrates violent enforcement and vengeful punishments is a childish society. One important way of changing this characteristic of our society is to stop promoting the violent hero myth, as I wrote above.
Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) described his approach to controlling evil organizations—in his case, the British colonial government of India—as satyagraha, or "truth-force." Its goal is to convert the people in the enemy organizations into friends, using non-violence (ahimsa) rather than coercion or threats. The key elements of this approach are:
Hold to truth and transform the heart of the oppressor.
Expose inhumane actions by oppressors through nonviolent actions that can bring about accountability.
Favor persuasion and reconciliation. (And, I would add, Restorative Justice.)
Reject coercion, antagonism, embarrassment of individuals, or threats of revenge, which can only lead to lose/lose outcomes.
"Stand for the good rather than against the bad."
Civil disobedience is used to show how a law is immoral. Gandhi insisted on being arrested to show that unjust laws led to harming or imprisoning virtuous and non-violent protesters. Making those consequences visible and unmistakable was a way of shocking the conscience of those enforcing the laws (and of the public), forcing them to rethink their support of those laws.
(I got most of my information about Gandhi from the books Gandhi the Man, by Jo Anne Black{black-02} and An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth, by Mohandas K. Gandhi{gandhi-01})
Community Rights: First Steps in Dismantling Corporate Rule Since 2000, the Community Rights movement has been spreading across the United States, one city, town, and county at a time. Communities are passing new-paradigm laws that:
- strip corporations of all of their so-called constitutional "rights"
- ban a variety of corporate activities that are legal but harmful to people and environment
- declare the inherent right of a community to govern itself.
{macy-01:p12}
Technology can temporarily empower social movements, but only for a limited time. Eventually, corporations will learn how to use the technology for their own goals.{doctorow-10:loc6742}
Human values are the real driver behind social changes. Technology is just a tool that amplifies the goals of an individual or group.
One approach to controlling Big Tech is through regulation, but regulations can be tricky to implement well. For example, some regulations are so complex that implementing them requires a large organization. Small organizations could be locked out unless exceptions are designed in for them. Regulations structured to favor small organizations could be another incentive for an organization not to get "too large."{doctorow-13:loc1384}
Cory Doctorow has written many articles and books on the problems with Big Tech, for example, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism.{doctorow-13} You can find most of his articles at https://pluralistic.net/.
There should be more monitoring to ensure that corporations align with society's values. When they don't, they should be restructured, because restructuring corporations and otherwise ensuring that they do not become uncontrollable "powers" are crucial steps toward recovering control of our democracy.
For one thing, monopolies should be broken up or restructured as public utilities, regulated utilities, or non-profits. Defining when a company is a monopoly will be complex, but the threat of restructuring will cause them to work hard to not be labeled a monopoly. Some ways of avoiding the label are themselves problematic. For example, a corporation could split itself into smaller corporations. But if those smaller corporations are "owned" by the parent corporation, nothing has really changed. One way to prevent this ruse would be to forbid corporations from owning other corporations. This would also prevent another abuse: a company putting all of its "problem" products into a separate company and then having that company declare bankruptcy.
In general, corporations should be required to have more democratic structures. Bottom-up organizational structures should be encouraged. (See: The Democratic Corporation, by Russell L. Ackoff{ackoff-01}) Decentralized, community-driven organizations should also be encouraged, as they tend to be more resilient and beneficial than large corporations with top-down hierarchies.
…most of the evil in this world—the incivility—is committed by people who are absolutely certain that they know what they're doing.{peck-03:p91}
Civil dialogue is needed to keep an organization healthy. Dilemmas give a reason for dialogue. Dilemmas often revolve around how an organization meets its goals. Important and challenging goals will generate dilemmas.
If all the decisions in your organization seem "easy," that may be a symptom of an underlying problem. Look for a "shadow" element:
Is the organization becoming self-serving?
Is there a faction limiting discussion through fear or other motivations?
Are lower-level members just going along with leadership's proposals, with no critical thinking?
Has the organization become so bureaucratic, and so filled with specialists running obscure departments, that few can understand what the organization as a whole is doing?
Evil is inherent in excessive specialization. …
So it was that in 1971 the entire Pentagon acted as if it didn't really have anything to do with the war. This phenomenon occurs in all large institutions with specialized departments and subdepartments—including business corporations, universities, and even churches—where there is a tendency for the group conscience to become so compartmentalized, fragmented, and diluted as to be nonexistent.{peck-01:p251}
For an excellent book on "civility," see A World Waiting to Be Born by M. Scott Peck{peck-03}
The idea that people need to be rescued and led by governments or corporations is fundamentally wrong. People are capable of coming together with what Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin called "Mutual Aid." For instance, in disasters, as Rebecca Solnit points out, "People preferred to care for each other rather than to be cared for by strangers or governed by others."{solnit-01:loc1522}
Should governments simply leave people to their own resources after a disaster like the Los Angeles fires of 2025? No, but any aid group should follow some guidelines researchers have discovered. For example, ask people in the affected area where they need help. Usually, just making resources and equipment available is enough. Elites fear that looting will become widespread in the chaos after a disaster, but a more likely problem is individuals or factions limiting (and profiting from) the distribution of resources, for instance, through price-gouging.
For an excellent book on how people behave in disasters, see A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, by Rebecca Solnit{solnit-01}
For another excellent book on this topic, see Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, by Kniaz Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin{kropotkin-01}
Organizations have no morals. Only the people in the organizations can have morals, and they must be reminded of that. Bureaucratic organizations have insulated the people inside them from seeing how their small actions lead to inhumane results. If people in an organization are allowed to organize and build "community," then they can reshape the organization.
For an excellent book on moral values, see Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.{haidt-03} Also, see his TED talk.{haidt-01}
In "Conservatives Live In a Different Moral Universe–and here's why it matters,"{jacobs-01}, Jacobs lists the morals that Jonathan Haidt defined:
Harm/care. It is wrong to hurt people; it is good to relieve suffering.
Fairness/reciprocity. Justice and fairness are good; people have certain rights that need to be upheld in social interactions.
In-group loyalty. People should be true to their group and be wary of threats from the outside. Allegiance, loyalty, and patriotism are virtues; betrayal is bad.
Authority/respect. People should respect social hierarchy; social order is necessary for human life.
Purity/sanctity. The body and certain aspects of life are sacred. Cleanliness and health, as well as their derivatives of chastity and piety, are all good. Pollution, contamination, and the associated character traits of lust and greed are all bad.
"Liberals" and "Conservatives" often agree that the first two are important (Harm/care and Fairness/reciprocity). The differences often begin with the last three: Conservatives give them more importance than Liberals, who often downplay their importance. The last three values can be good for community cooperation and coordination. Imagine driving where stopping at a red light is optional. Of course, there are exceptions: The harm/care value overrides the authority/respect dimension for emergency vehicles. Emergency vehicles are given more authority over the red light law. My liberal bias wants to add a caveat to the last three values: They can be good as long as they are not enforced with domination (shaming, fear, or violence).
Notice how these "moral values" are often at the foundation of arguments about how groups are organized. For example, hierarchy vs. distributed authority, majority rule vs. consensus, punishment vs. restorative justice, rule of law vs. higher power, group rights vs. individual rights.
"Morality is not just about how we treat each other, as most liberals think. It is also about binding groups together and supporting essential institutions."–Jonathan Haidt{jacobs-01}
Children are taught differently at private schools for elites than in public schools. (Note: in most of the UK the public/private school terms are reversed from how they are used in the USA.)
In a video "John Taylor Gatto: Elite Schooling - Part 1 of 2,"{gatto-09}, Gatto describes the lessons taught in preparatory schools for the "elite." From what he describes, the students are given a lot of independent work, with fewer classroom lectures. Overall, they seem to be given an education very much like that of a liberal arts college.
Their lessons include:
These are the skills we value in "leaders." These could also be good skills for any "employee." However, employees with such skills will be harder to "manage," because they will need to be treated as individuals, not as interchangeable parts. Could that be why these skills are not taught as much in public schools?
Sometimes, looking at the opposite of what you want can be helpful when looking for ways to make changes or to avoid problems. In an exercise to find the elements of a "good" community, we could take the definitions of Cults, Fascism, Domination Systems, Bureaucracies, and Mobs, to tease out some opposite elements. Identifying such negative elements might help a group steer itself in a good direction or serve as a caution if the bad elements start to appear.
For example, here are a few from the article "How Can You Tell if It Is a Dangerous Cult? Characteristics of Cult Groups"{lalich-01}:
"Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished." Opposite: Reward questioning. But make sure the questioning follows "Non-Violent Communication” rules: using "I” statements and taking responsibility for one's own thoughts and feelings.
"The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel." Opposite: Individuals are free to do what they want, but others also get to say how they feel about what has been done, but no one can dictate how anyone else should think, act, or feel (except, of course, in specific situations).
"The leader is not accountable to any authorities." Opposite: Everyone is accountable to the agreed-upon rules.
In "Fascism Anyone?"{britt-01} the opposites are obvious. Here are a few:
We all have to share the world's available resources, and we mustn't deplete them thoughtlessly. The human race needs to achieve an ecological balance with the organism of the planet, lest we be to it like a microbe that's gotten out of ecological balance and become virulent. We certainly do not want Gaia's immune system to mobilize to get rid of us.{johnson-03:p142}
"Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships"wikipedia-48}. It comes from taking the size of the human neocortex and comparing it to the social group sizes of other primate species relative to their neocortex size.
[in 1990, British anthropologist Robin] Dunbar predicted a human "mean group size" of 148 (casually rounded to 150), a result he considered exploratory because of the large error measure (a 95% confidence interval of 100 to 230){wikipedia-48}
I want to suggest that Dunbar's Number, and other limits on human cognition, can help us understand a lot about optimum group sizes for various purposes, and about the kinds of political and decision-making structures that groups should use.
Above the size of 100 to 230 people, for example, organizations can become inhumane because people become strangers to one another. According to Dunbar, 150 is an average upper limit for cohesive social groups. Lower group size limits are mostly determined by the "capacity" of the people to accomplish the work the group needs to do. External stress will also affect a group's size. For example, when there are disasters, people will form large groups (100 to 200) to address problems of rescue, food, shelter, and security. But when there is low stress, groups will be 100 or less.
Another group size to consider: teams. In every company and church organization I've been in, I've noticed that "teams" that work tightly together on focused tasks tend to be three to ten people. When a team gets above nine people, sub-groups start to form. This seems to be related to the limitations of our short-term memory: the human mind can only hold seven to nine things at any one time.{mcleod-01}
The "brain" of a cell is its membrane, not its nucleus. The DNA in the nucleus provides blueprints for "how" to do things, but the membrane defines "what" to do, based on its location in the body or organ and on the external things that bump up against it.
Without a membrane boundary, a cell will die. Also, the membrane must be permeable. Food comes in, and wastes go out. If the membrane is not permeable, the cell will die.
This gives some clues about how to make healthy organizations. They need a "boundary." If the inside of an organization is 100% transparent to outsiders, there is no boundary, so there is no organization. The entry and exit conditions for joining or leaving need to be defined. Also, what is the organization's nourishment? That is, what are its income and its expenses?
Inside an organization, there needs to be 100% transparency. However, some internal structures could also need a boundary. In a cell model, the nucleus and organelles are a couple of examples. In an organization, that could be a "board." In governments, the different "branches" have their own boundaries.
This is a simplistic model that works well for groups under 100. For a good government, we do want things to be transparent. But that doesn't mean anyone can walk into any committee meeting. A citizen can watch Senators discuss and vote, but he or she cannot just walk onto the Senate floor and start talking; there are "rules of order." That is a "boundary."
In my reading, I have come across these insights into the structure of groups:
Organizations need structure, but not too much. Simple connections are better than complex hierarchies.
Organizations need rules, but only a few. Simple self-organizing rules are better than a lot of "command/control" rules.
Sustainable systems self-organize. And they have redundant parts.
Size will also determine the structure of the group, the best decision-making tools, and the most appropriate conflict management tools.
Conflicts are needed. An organization with no conflicts can become self-serving. For example, the U.S. government has conflicts built-in by the "checks" between the branches.
Groups of about 100 people will have a lot more impact than individuals. To control large organizations, that have thousands of people, community groups will need to come together into strong coalitions. One approach would be to organize groups loosely under an umbrella organization, with representatives from each of the communities. Each level would be kept to about 100 people. This is starting to sound like a "government." Community-building practices can be used at each of the levels so that people will connect at a human level. The Democratic Corporation, by Russell L. Ackoff{ackoff-01} describes a number of different organizational models that can be tried. These larger organizational structures are beyond the scope of this article; my main focus is first on building robust communities.
The only sustainable way to store data long term is within relationships–deep connections between generations of people in custodial relation to a sentient landscape, all grounded in a vibrant oral tradition.{yunkaporta-01:loc1761}
Community is a dynamic whole that emerges when a group of people share common practices; depend on one another; make decisions together; identify themselves as part of something larger than the sum of their individual relationships, and commit themselves for the long term to their own, one another's, and the group's well being.{kauth-01:p32}
The above quote from We Need Each Other{kauth-01} is a good definition of what I mean by "community." In what I would call a genuine community, connections are much tighter than the typical loose groupings of neighborhoods, clubs, or other social organizations. A test: How "deep" is the caring for the well-being of individuals in the community? For example, will members feed and shelter other members in need? For how long?
The second insight that inspired this article is that large organizations are controlled by other organizations, not by individuals. Individuals are most effective in their local communities, and those communities can organize to change the larger organizations.
Yuval Noah Harari (author of Sapiens), in an interview, said:
If you really want to make a change you cannot do it as an isolated individual. The superpower of our species is not individual genius, it's the ability to cooperate in large numbers.{harari-02:36m13s}
Then he added: "Fifty people who cooperate, as a community, will make much bigger changes than 500 isolated individuals."
Creating more communities will provide people with more meaning and security than the current culture, and they can "tame" the larger organizations. That is why the Community section of my book will be bigger than the other sections.
Knowing what destroys community might help us to better see how to create community, or at least make community possible. Here are some factors destructive to community:
Money – Money removes the connections that come from obligations and the desire to offer mutual aid. When you have settled all obligations with others (using money), there is no need to stay connected to them. And yet money is also needed for a community to survive in our current culture.
Mobility - Individuals in our current American culture tend to move to wherever the jobs are. "Always move to a better job" seems like common sense.
Lack of Trust - It takes time to build trust and that is hard if people move around a lot.
Time - Hurry, get things done, don't take too long to make good decisions.
Individualism vs. Security - Individuals are on their own; communities can provide security. Most of U.S. culture seems to be pro-individual and pro-corporation, while discouraging small, effective communities. That is, it is anti-tribe. Tribalism has become a dirty word. Sure, there are problems with tribalism, but eliminating tribalism has led to more isolation and loneliness.
Too much sweetness - This can lead to pseudo-community. Communities need truth and trust; always being "nice" when you are actually upset is not being truthful. NVC (non-violent communication) and other communication tools can help you express your hurt without unintentionally hurting others.
Evil People - Some people, who are so damaged as to qualify as "evil," can actually make it hard for communities to form. If these people are leaders, that is obviously a huge problem.
Large organizations do not like tight, healthy communities in or around them. They are hard to manage. They have values that might be in conflict with the larger organization's goals.
As Scott Peck showed in his book The Different Drum{peck-01}, it is possible to create the beginning of a true community anywhere, using the community-building model developed by Peck and the "Foundation for Community Encouragement"{fce-01} (FCE). Groups as large as 60 people can achieve a genuine feeling of community in two to three days. Peck's model takes a group through the stages of pseudo-community, conflict expression, chaos, emptiness, and then true community. The model has been proven to work hundreds of times across many different organizations.
Communities can form around shared practices, mutual dependence, collective decision-making, and commitment to shared goals. But to keep a community going long-term, you need several additional factors and tools, including:
An economic engine (from Jamie Wheal){reculture-01:day5}
A "coherent spiritual practice" (from Jamie Wheal){reculture-01:day5}
Vision and goals that are bigger than what is possible for any one community to achieve on its own (from Tamera){tamera-03}
Aligned Values (from Miki Kashtan){kashtan-01}
A clear shared purpose (from Miki Kashtan)
Tension and dilemmas (from Scott Peck){peck-03:p305}
Stories (from David Korten){korten-01}. See above, section C.2. The Domination System: David Korten.
A good mix of communication and decision-making tools. The group decision-making tools that are assumed in WEIRD cultures are basically only two: majority voting and consensus. But there are many more options, and a tool needs to fit the situation it's meant to help. Looking at these two common options, we can see that majority rule hurts individuals more in small groups than in large groups, while consensus decision-making can paralyze large groups. See section E.5. Communication and Decision-Making Technologies, for examples of other communication tools.
When building intentional communities, how do you avoid the problems associated with unhealthy cults and tribalism? One way of answering this is to closely examine the opposite of what you are aiming at: unethical cults. Identifying their problems, and what causes them, can help you see how to keep your intentional community healthy. See section C.7. for more on this topic.
Another way to avoid problems is to experiment with different social structures and relationships by using "games.” Games put time limits and rule boundaries around the experiments. See: "F.1. Followers, The Dilemma of Obedience, Experiments" for experiments done by sociologists. A mature group can do its own experiments.
Transparency within a group needs to be 100%, so that problems can be quickly identified and addressed.
Transparency outside of a group cannot be 100%, or the group cannot function. It cannot be 0%, because a group needs to interact with other groups for things like money. The boundary needs to be "permeable": how do people outside of a group interact with the group?
Rituals (or rules) are needed to know who is in a group, their role, and how they can move into different roles. In other words, a group needs structures to define its different parts and how people can move among them.
See section "D.3. Cell/Body Model," above, for more on this topic.
I have tried to include here the most effective communication strategies and tools—I would even call them "technologies"—that I have found in my reading and my experience. Each has a different purpose and is appropriate in different circumstances, but all are useful to know about if you are trying to form a true community. Here's a list of them, followed by a brief explanation of each:
"Majority voting" is NOT in this list. Simple voting can be used, but it is only used to get a quick understanding of consensus; it is not used to lock in a binding decision.
a. Forum - From Zegg, Tamera
I first came across the Forum process when I attended a New Culture Autumn Camp in 2013.{event-01} The Forum experience was so powerful that I had to go away from others to cry. (For more about New Culture see {nfnc-01} and {event-02})
The goal of Forum is for an individual to reveal what is alive for him or her but not known to the rest of the community. The community members sit in a circle, forming a stage for one person at a time to stand and share. Facilitators may assist the person (or "presenter") to reveal themselves more deeply. Afterward, community members may offer reflections (mirrors) on what they saw.
The Presenter talks and moves in a circle of people (usually between 10 and 100) who only listen. The presenter's prime directive is to show themselves authentically. Everything is welcome–joy, sadness, confusion, amazement, even not knowing what you want to say or do. When in the center, the presenter is encouraged to keep moving and speak to the whole circle, to use first-person or third-person statements, and to avoid speaking directly to any individual listener.
This can be a very intense experience: Imagine talking to a whole group without interruption and with no direct rebuttal! Only the Facilitators can step in to help or control.
You can find a full description of the "ZEGG Forum Rules & Guidelines" at {devi-02}.
b. Non-Violent Communication (NVC) - From: Marshall Rosenberg
According to Marshall Rosenberg, language that is used to control, manipulate, or label a person is violent, because it often makes judgments and jumps to conclusions that may not be what the other person needs. One key insight of NVC is that arguments are often about "how" something is being done, not about what needs are driving the argument. Rosenberg suggests that we take a step back and try to find out the underlying "need" behind a person's actions or words. Offer a guess. Once a need is found, it is usually easier to see that there are many more ways to meet it than we first assumed.
There are a lot of resources for learning NVC. Mainly, it takes practice.
c. Convergent Facilitation - From: Miki Kashtan
While NVC requires practice and knowledge of the process, Miki Kashtan has come up with a facilitated structure that walks people through an NVC-like process that leads to unanimous decisions that everyone can agree with. She has documented this process in her book The Highest Common Denominator: Using Convergent Facilitation to Reach Breakthrough Collaborative Decisions.{kashtan-01}
The following is an outline of the steps:
Criteria Gathering - What is important to everyone in the group? The facilitator asks for statements that participants recognize as capturing the essence of what's important to them, while also being noncontroversial for others in the group.
Proposal Creation - Does anyone have a way forward that addresses all the criteria (needs) on the list? Participants are now shifting their intention to serving the common good rather than advocating for their own position or expressing their own needs.
Decision Making - Can the group reach a decision that everybody can accept as their own? The purpose of this phase is to convert one of the proposals into a decision, or find some other combination of strategies that will amount to a decision. This path brings forth, with amazing speed, the core issues that need to be addressed before a decision can truly be acceptable to all.
Outliers - Do some members stubbornly remain outside the group consensus? What gifts do these persons bring to the group? Consider the possibility that they have issues, concerns, or ideas that may be essential for the group to consider.
d. Consensus
Consensus means agreement or acceptance by all community members. It does not require 100% whole-hearted "yeses." But negative feelings and opinions need to be heard and addressed. If a discussion seems to go on and on with no resolution in sight, then there could be big issues in the group. An NVC or Forum might be needed to find out what is not being heard.
e. One-No-Vote - From: Morehouse
I investigated a community of 50 to 60 people called Morehouse{lafayettemorehouse-02}. Their decision process is consensus-driven. But only one person can "veto" a decision, and it will not pass, and the decision can never be brought up again. Also, a one-no-vote cannot be revoked once given.
Every time I have described this, everyone initially objects. They always say people will abuse it, that it gives too much power to an individual. Indeed, it could be abused. However, forcing decisions with majority rule can also be abused.
In Morehouse's "Basic Sexuality" course, the teacher pointed out that they see the one-no-vote as an expression of love for everyone in the community. Every person matters.
f. Do-ocracy - from Noisebridge{noisebridge-03}
Do-ocracy is a system in which individuals are encouraged to simply DO things, without waiting for the community to permit or approve their actions. It originated in the San Francisco hacker community, Noisebridge, where the prime directive was a quote from the Bill and Ted movies: "Be excellent to each other." And the do-ocracy poster states, "If you want something done, DO IT. But remember to be excellent to each other while doing so."
The main principles, as stated on the Noisebridge website, are:
g. Hot-Seat - from New Culture
I have not found a source for this, but here is how I have played this game with others.
A person volunteers to be on the "hot-seat."
People take turns asking a question. This can be round-robin or "popcorn” style.
The person can decide if they want to answer the question or pass.
If they decide to answer, they can continue talking as long or as little they want, or until the person asking the question says "Thank-You." At that point they should stop–the question was answered enough for the questioner.
h. Community Building - From: FCE, Scott Peck
Use Scott Peck's community-building process for times when the group seems to be drifting apart. His process has been shown to be very effective with groups of up to 60 people.
There are usually four main stages in the process:
For details, see The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace, by M. Scott Peck {peck-01}.
i. Restorative Justice
Some harm has occurred in the group. How can harmony be restored? The Restorative Justice process has elements of NVC and Forum. The important part is that everyone involved directly or indirectly agrees to use this process. If not, the state's legal system may need to get involved.
From "Restorative justice"{wikipedia-42}:
According to Howard Zehr{zehr-01}, restorative justice differs from traditional criminal justice in terms of the guiding questions it asks. In restorative justice, the questions are:
Who has been hurt?
What are their needs?
Whose obligations are these?
What are the causes?
Who has a stake in the situation?
What is the appropriate process to involve stakeholders in an effort to address causes and put things right?In contrast, traditional criminal justice asks:
What laws have been broken?
Who did it?
What do the offender(s) deserve?
j. Plenary
This process is used to identify all the possible options. Unless all the people involved are present, this will likely be a multiple-day exercise.
For more on the Plenary process see: {schaub-01}, {schaub-02}, {schaub-03}
A flowchart can help with deciding which tool will work best for a particular problem. You can start anywhere in the process; make a guess. This is derived from: "Community Decision Making Processes–Part II"{rafnel-06}
Once a community forms, the next hurdle is its maintenance. The main questions it faces will be:
Here are some typical obstacles to community maintenance:
People will put a lot of effort into avoiding conflicts rather than bringing them up. They have seen groups break up over conflicts. Although groups do break up over conflicts, that is mostly an example of immaturity or a lack of good tools to work through conflicts.
Here are some typical avoidance behaviors that undermine a community:
Flight - running away from problems. For example, leaving the group or avoiding all disagreements.
Fight - being unwilling to discuss problems, being "nice" rather than expressing disagreements. This is similar to Flight, but this is a form of lying, by acting like everything is OK.
Dependency on a leader - group members being too dependent on leaders telling them what to do, because they are unwilling to be personally responsible for anything
Pairing - When couples (or cliques–not just two people) "disappear" from the group, problems can become hidden. Pairing off can give more comfort than the main group can offer, but rather than bringing things up in the group, people who "pair" form alliances, leading to hidden agendas, and an us/them dynamic starts.
Other common obstacles include:
Drifters and guests - They have no commitment and can take energy from the group.
Too many damaged people - Does the group have the resources to care for them?
When a community is in danger of drifting apart, the Forum process can help bring problems to light. Some regular rituals and games can also be used to remind people of the group's purpose.
Here are some of Scott Peck's ideas for maintaining community from his book A World Waiting to Be Born.{peck-03}:
Civility in discussions is essential.
The group needs to be self-aware, that is, aware of how is it perceived outside of the group. (This is called "Group consciousness.")
Maintaining community is an ongoing process - you are never done.
Dilemmas are welcome - they keep the discussions going.
Group longevity has been my main concern when joining groups. Will the group last? Will the time and work I put into it be worth it? Will others stay committed? That is why I have studied "healthy" communities, ones that have stayed functional for at least 40 years, ones where the founding leaders have passed the leadership to others. What are the common elements that keep them together?
I have taken courses and interacted directly with people in the communities of Tamera{tamera-03} and Lafayette Morehouse{lafayettemorehouse-02}. Both of these communities have been big influences on my thinking for this article, with their communication tools, structure, and community goals.
Here are my main takeaways from studying these successful communities:
There needs to be a reason for the community to exist.
Individuals must be able to see how they can participate in the community.
The group must have rituals and spiritual practices.
The group must have an economic engine, a way to feed, house, and care for individuals.
Conflicts need to be managed, not avoided. Use them to increase all members' understanding of each other.
Groups should be "hard to join, easy to leave." (I would question the "easy to leave" part. Yes, you don't want people who cause continual problems, but "Flight" is one of the Avoidances that breaks up communities. Let the discussions begin!)
What are the joining and exit processes?
Joining could involve some rituals or initiations to move to different levels.
Have only a small number of internal levels. For example: guest, member, board member.
Cliques are a potential problem that needs to be managed (see Pairing, in section E.6., above).
Malevolent individuals need to be managed, or ejected.
Physical and emotional connections between members need to be addressed and managed. Relationships, jealousy, and children need to be thought about seriously as important factors in the health of the community
Members need to be serious about the group. Good symptom: meeting notes and decisions are shared.
The group's purpose, rules, and other living documents are kept in places where anyone in the group can access them.
For Milgram, "the capacity for man to abandon his humanity" so as to comply with authority is what he called humanity's "fatal flaw," which, he concluded, "in the long run gives our species only a modest chance of survival."{levine-01:loc86}
"Lead, follow, or get out of the way"? Well, it's more complicated than that!
Leaders are needed, because they give direction. Followers and observers are needed, because that is where a community gets its energy. Observers seem to do nothing, but they keep a group moving. Our culture assumes leaders are the most important, so often, too much control is given to leaders.
Followers, by definition, follow directions from their leaders. But there is a difference between following and following blindly. We need to challenge unthinking obedience.
How can it be that Americans (U.S.) espouse their individuality, but when they are in groups, they become intolerant of individual actions by group members? This contradiction can be explained with this formula: You are free to pick groups to join and free to leave them anytime, but when you're part of the group, you must follow the group's rules and customs. In other words, you have the freedom to leave but not to disobey. ("America: Love it or leave it!")
John Taylor Gatto describes the implicit lessons that the American school system teaches—and fails to teach.{gatto-01} Mainly, it does not teach people how to be critical thinkers. What it does teach, implicitly, is that you must follow the rules laid down by your superiors (the teachers). You must obey the teacher and accept the teacher's explanations, directions, and judgments. Moreover, when you've had years of schooling, you learn to wait for the teacher to tell you what to do.
One good effect of being a follower is that it can give a feeling of inclusion and safety: you don't have to do everything on your own; you are not alone; your ego can "take a break." But be careful: you could end up doing things in a group that you would not do as an individual. Oh, you think you are immune to group influence? Several experiments show that people are influenced by authority and peers more than they would like to admit.
The Wave{jones-03} A Palo Alto high-school history teacher responded to students who said the Nazi kind of authoritarian control would not happen in the US—people would object. He set up an experiment for them. At the end of the short experiment, the students had unwittingly become perfect Nazi followers.
The Stanford Prison Experiment{wikipedia-50} - An authoritarian experiment in which students, playing the role of "guards," were put in charge of other students who played the role of "prisoners." The results were troubling. The "guards" became abusive. The "prisoners" became submissive. (A caveat: In the book /Corruptible/{klaas-01}, the results of this experiment are questionable, because the participant selection and directions were biased by using the word "prison," which could have attracted abusive people.)
Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes{bloom-02} - A discrimination experiment in which an elementary-school teacher showed eight- and nine-year-old White children what it is like to be Black in America by dividing them on the basis of their eye color and treating the different groups differently.
Milgram's Experiment{milgram-01} - Another authoritarian experiment. In this one, a volunteer "teacher" shocks a "learner" (supposedly another volunteer, but actually a collaborator with the experimenter) with supposedly larger and larger shocks. The experiment showed that many people would accept the experimenter's commands to increase the shock level even when the "learner" was begging them to stop.
These experiments showed that even ordinary Americans are capable of falling into a blind acceptance of authority, even when the authority requires them to perform cruel or immoral acts. Some of the experiments cannot be reproduced today because they would violate the ethical rules for participants. Participants are now told they are free to not follow the directions and they can stop and leave at anytime. However, we would do well to heed the results from these past experiments.
We have evolved to pay more attention to negative input than to positive input. It probably takes five positive comments to balance one negative comment. Pessimist: There might be a tiger over there in the grass. Optimist: No way, we are safe here.
We are also more concerned about losses than gains.
Organizations and authoritarians use that focus on the negative to instill fear in people. "Do what I say or you will lose your job, or your family will be hurt.” Similarly, social media algorithms keep us engaged by highlighting more and more upsetting things.
Followers can turn a good leader into a bad leader. For an example of this, see the documentary "Holy Hell"{allen-02}, which is about the Buddhafield cult.
Here are some ways in which followers can help leaders stay true to their responsibilities:
Stop being an "unthinking" follower! If it is not an emergency, ask for the reason behind a request or rule.
Give constructive feedback to leaders. If a leader does not accept criticism, recognize this is a serious problem!
Don't be a follower all the time or everywhere in a group; look for areas where you can be a leader. Find your own place in the organization!
Being an observer can pose many of the same dangers as being a follower, but the biggest danger is just going along with things. Many observers do not notice—or even try to notice—problems in a group, and they do not speak up when they do notice problems. That is a danger for the group, and a betrayal of the observer's proper function.
The Follower Duties also apply to Observers.
Also, do not always be an observer. Look for ways to help the group more actively.
Here are four ways for a group to go about selecting a good leader or leadership model:
Experiment with different organizational structures. Make the experiments a game with agreed-upon time limits. The experiments also provide a foundation for practicing different communication technologies. (See "E.5. Communication and Decision-Making Technologies.")
Use "The rule of three" to select from things that "work." That is, always try something three times or three different ways before accepting or rejecting it. For example, have at least three different organizational structures been tried, before picking a "best" one?
The first and second tries rarely work; keep experimenting and discussing.
Whether a hierarchy is flat or deep isn't the important question. The important question is how the leaders are picked and evaluated. See section F.4. Leaders.
The wealthy and powerful will work to keep and increase their wealth and power. So the organizational structure and rules need to actively manage this tendency.
If you are looking to break out of the trap of authoritarianism, the first rule for leaders is: accept criticism! Dictators or kings need not accept criticism; they muzzle or eliminate their critics. Accepting criticism is not easy or fun, but everyone is wrong sometimes.
This is the foundation of the Scientific Method: Let's say we think theory X might be true. In a scientific paradigm, we say "Let's do some experiments. Form some hypotheses about observable results, and then test them. For instance, if X is true, Y is a likely observable result (this is a hypothesis). If Y doesn't turn out to be true, then either X is false, the expectation for Y is wrong, or there is a problem with the experiment. Keep checking. After enough different hypotheses about X are proven true, we can conclude that X is probably true, but there is still a chance X could be false. Or there could be different cases where X isn't true. So, be cautious about your conclusions, within the range of uncertainty. (This is from David Brin{brin-01}.)
Accepting criticism also applies to legal, ethical, and moral decisions. Questioning needs to be allowed. However, some triage is necessary to allow for quick decisions if delays could be life-threatening.
When there are no new leaders,
Everyone needs to take the lead in something and then listen to their followers. Having the experience of leading is valuable for every member of a community. Being able to lead well in something is probably one of the important parts of transitioning from child to adult.
The top leader is the primary determinant of an organization's culture.
Dirty Hands: The closer to the top, the harder the choices. Leaders frequently have to deal with lose/lose decisions, because all the easy problems have been handled by others.
Servant Leader and Higher-Power. Rules and laws are not enough. Leaders will need to make decisions that are best for the group, independent from what is best for the leader. The choice could even be illegal, and the leader will have to accept the consequences.
A leader needs periods of emptiness to contemplate.
A true leader discourages dependency on him or herself.
Leaders should focus on the group as a whole, not much on individuals.
A leader will point out examples of larger group issues.
In /Corruptible/{klaas-01}, Brian Klaas makes these recommendations for solving the many problems with leaders:
Lesson 1: Actively recruit incorruptible people and screen out corruptible ones{klaas-01:loc2975-loc3033}
Lesson 2: Use sortition and shadow governance for oversight{klaas-01:loc3082}
Sortition example: Randomly pick members of a "Citizen Assembly" from a large pool of ordinary qualified people. They will serve for a year. The Assembly could be used to come up with solutions or give advice on decisions.
Shadow Governance example: Randomly pick people to be a "shadow board" for a company. They would have access to all the same publicly available information as the actual board. The shadow board would have no power, but if their recommendations are very different from those of the actual board, then that could mean the real board is abusing its power—for example, by making private deals.
Lesson 3: Rotate leadership to reduce abuse {klaas-01:loc3153-loc3195}
Lesson 4: Audit decision-making processes, not just results {klaas-01:loc3206-loc3274}
Lesson 5: Create frequent, potent reminders of responsibility {klaas-01:loc3298-loc3355}
Lesson 6: Don't let those in power see people as abstractions {klaas-01:loc3388-loc3592}
Klass references Yaacov Trope (an NYU psychologist) who pointed out there are four dimensions to "decisions": social distance, temporal distance, spatial distance, and experiential distance (is it real or imagined?). To make "good" decisions, your "distance" can't be too close or too far away. {klaas-01:loc3528-loc3592}
Lesson 7: Watched people are nice people{klaas-01:loc3619}
Lesson 8: Focus oversight on the controllers, not the controlled {klaas-01:loc3760}
This reverses the usual use of "surveillance." Usually, the people at the top surveil the people below them. Instead, the people at the top should feel like they are under more surveillance than the people below them.{klaas-01:loc3804}
Lesson 9: Exploit randomness to maximize deterrence while minimizing invasions of privacy{klaas-01:loc3892}
Use random surveillance and testing to detect corruption in people who hold positions of power.
Lesson 10: Stop waiting for principled saviors. Make them instead!{klaas-01:loc3962}
Large organized groups, "Entities," can become "Powers," taking on a personality and goals that are independent from the goals of the individuals in the group. I'm calling the Powers "Aliens" because they are not living. As Wink points out, the Powers are needed; we have created them for a purpose. However, they can become evil when they only serve themselves and cause harm to us and life on our planet.
A. We have created fictional legal entities that have become so powerful that we appear to have no control over them. They control us, and we can't seem to stop their destructive behavior.
B. We have created a virtual ecosystem for these fictional entities. These entities do not exist without us. They exist to serve us. We do not exist to serve them!
C. Individuals have almost no impact on these entities or big government. The large entities can only be controlled by other large entities. Also, governments at different levels can control the entities.
D. Organized individuals can have an impact. The lowest level of effective and long-term groups is a "community" of 150 or fewer people.
E. We are not taught how to create effective communities. We are given flawed models and tools that only create fragile pseudo-communities. The appropriate tools and structures depend on the size of a group.
F. How we pick and manage leaders is essential. More importantly, if followers perform their duties well, they can help pick good leaders and manage them. Leaders are important, but not the Hollywood type of hero whose only tool seems to be violence.
Small local communities are the most important first step to control abusive organizations. These are other important steps.
Educate people. Teach them how to build and maintain healthy communities.
Recognize that communities need a lot of leaders (in different areas) and educated followers.
Better Civics education is needed for us to have a "civil" society.
More liberal education is needed with stories, tragedies, myths, history, philosophy, ethics, and morality.
Teach critical thinking.
Our government's failure could not be more complete. The total abdication of duty to protect humanity and all life has made the social contract between government and citizens a sick joke. But the government is not alone: Media outlets, universities, churches, museums, labor unions, environmental organizations, professional associations, and countless others have also failed to acknowledge and protect us from the climate emergency.{salamon-01:loc238}
The Dawn of Everything points out that new understandings from anthropology and archaeology teach us that our existing societies are not a necessary culmination from obvious deterministic paths:
[This] means we could have been living under radically different conceptions of what human society is actually about. It means that mass enslavement, genocide, prison camps, even patriarchy or regimes of wage labor never had to happen. But on the other hand it also suggests that, even now, the possibilities for human intervention are far greater than we're inclined to think.{graeber-11:loc10120}
This is one of the main outcomes that I hope this article (and my forthcoming book) inspires: that people will create radical solutions at all the different scales.
"Security comes not from independence but from interdependence."{eisenstein-01:p390}
Here's what I hope you will do after reading this essay:
Work to stop making Climate Change worse, to repair things, and to create ways of living that work with life.
Help improve existing communities by practicing and sharing some of the proven communication technologies described here.
Look for things that need to be done, small things you are good at, that you enjoy. Accept that your actions will be small, but know that in a community, your actions will be amplified by the support of others.
I want to thank Tom Devine for his many hours editing this article and an early draft of my book. His editorial guidance and contributions were essential to refining this article and the future book.
I am also grateful to the friends who took the time to review an early book draft and offered thoughtful feedback. Our time together, trying to build community, is a major reason for why I started this project.
Citation (NAME-NN) - This is not a typical citation style. The "NAME-NN" part is a unique identifier in my personal Bibliography Database, which can be found at: https://turtleengr.github.io/my-bib/
Page (NAME-NN:pN), (NAME-NN:pN-pN)
Location (NAME-NN:locN) (NAME-NN:locN-locN) - locN is the location in a Kindle book. N is incremented every 128 characters (including spaces), so it is independent of pages.
Time Location in a Video/Audio (NAME-NN:Ns) or (NAME-NN:Nm:Ns) - Number of seconds, or minutes into a video or audio file.
URL Links and Alt links - Web pages could go missing or be changed from when it was viewed, so the tinyurl Alt links will usually go to an Internet Archive page.
Append to Link (NAME-NN:+url) - If you see a reference like this, then append the text after '+' to the URL link or Alt link for the full URL. If the link is a tinyurl link then append the text after the URL is resolved.
Dates - For books or other printed publications, this will be the publication date. For web page URLs this will be the published date, or the date when the page was viewed.
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{cassella-01} Cassella, Carly. "Extremely Hot, Humid Weather Could Kill A Person Far More Easily Than We Thought." 2022-03-07. link. url:https://www.sciencealert.com/human-survival-in-hot-and-humid-conditions-is alt:https://tinyurl.com/4em98cw2+
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{coase-01} Coase, R. H.. "The Nature of the Firm. Economica." 1937-11-01. link. url:https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937.tb00002.x alt:https://tinyurl.com/y44mahy7+
{devi-02} Devi, Kamala, Adam Paulman. "ZEGG Forum Rules & Guidelines for Building Polyamory Community." link. url:http://www.kamaladevi.com/2998/zegg-forum-rules-guidelines-polyamory-community#.VjWdvHUViko
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{doctorow-10} Doctorow, Cory. Attack Surface. Ebook. url:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082RS7N3X
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