Member-only story
Human Beings: A Story
A brief tale about our roots, where things went wrong, our current awakening, how we can fix absolutely everything, if we can find the courage to rise to the challenge, and what that future might look like.
Edenic Origins
For most of human history, we have lived in close-knit communities of related families. We hunted, gathered and reproduced prodigiously, relying on cooperation for all of it in order to thrive together in a hostile world. We did these things because we understood that if we didn’t, we wouldn’t survive from threats we didn’t yet understand but always seemed to encounter, regardless.
Trust—the stitching together of tangled relationships within each community—was the glue that cemented our well-being. And our ability to confer trust had limits, because trust flowed from feelings of intimacy, and intimacy could only be built and maintained among so many people.
Today we refer to that limit as Dunbar’s Number, and that number tops out at around 150 human beings.
The Fall From Grace
Then, 10,000 or so years ago, a funny thing happened. A few inspired humans, driven by the discovery that they could bend Nature to their will, realized that doing so could lead to the production of excess resources for the very first time, and with it, relief from the continual hunting and foraging we’d always done without fail, to survive.
In short order, they developed means of doing exactly that.
The solution they envisioned necessitated expanding their close-knit communities, in order to avail themselves of the extensive human labor resources that taming Nature required. This stitching together of separate communities far exceeding Dunbar’s Number demanded new forms of large-scale cooperation between strangers no longer bonded by intimacy.
And so, these clever humans invented stories (more on this later), hierarchies, means of resource exchange, the appointment of distinct work activities, and a means of quantifying and rewarding the contributions those people made, distinguishing between each one by assigning it a value.
