Thanks to shows like Doomsday Preppers, the recent Mayan calendar scare and the general apocalyptic malaise of the post-financial crisis world, I've recently taken an interest in the end of the world and what it would be like to rebuild society.
Survival guides and a few reality TV shows (including my favorite, The Colony) already show us what we'd need to survive an initial catastrophe, but I'm more interested in what comes next. What would it take to approach what we have today and what improvements, if any, could we make?
A society is by definition more than one person, so you'll need some help along the way. Naturally, the first thing my mind turned to was group dynamics. After you've secured your basic needs - and even during it unless you're going solo - a certain set of norms for group behavior must be established and serve as a foundation going forward.
Security
First and foremost you need to be sure that those in your immediate vicinity won't materially harm you. That requires one of the following:
Trust
This largely overlaps with security, but I feel that the word more extensively alludes to emotional and informational aspects. Trust is the concept that not only will someone refrain from materially harming you, but also that they are as they represent themselves to be and will maybe even help you in times of need.
Accountability
What will keep someone in my community from riding on the coattails of others? We've historically remedied freeriding and collective responsibility in a couple of ways. One is community-based, in which a population is small enough to collectively understand how much any given individual puts into and gets out of the system. This allows a community to decide who can manage what according to their known circumstances. Perhaps a seemingly capable person would get a lot of flak for skimping on their investment in their community, but we wouldn't expect the same for infants and we'd expect compassion to come into play for elderly or sickly individuals. In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell suggests the number at which this solution breaks down is 150 individuals.
After it is no longer feasible to effectively track who gets what they give by means of relationships and gossip alone, we've managed by implementing my formal systems: central governments and courts for enforcing property rights, credit scores and background checks for establishing reputation, etc.
Humans have an innate sense of fairness that they seek to realize whether through soft means, such as peer pressure and retaliation, or through a more officially-recognized vehicle. In the context of our scenario, accountability will come naturally to a certain scale as individuals specialize and recover a previous standard of living. Obtaining it will then require more sophisticated technology or forms of organization.
The above characteristics are interrelated and by no means an exhaustive list. However, it has got me thinking about what it takes to make any team - in a survival scenario or not - to function effectively. It also seems that a key to instilling relationships of this nature is some sort of central identity, suggesting that tribalism, by necessity, is deeply rooted into what it means to be human.
Survival guides and a few reality TV shows (including my favorite, The Colony) already show us what we'd need to survive an initial catastrophe, but I'm more interested in what comes next. What would it take to approach what we have today and what improvements, if any, could we make?
A society is by definition more than one person, so you'll need some help along the way. Naturally, the first thing my mind turned to was group dynamics. After you've secured your basic needs - and even during it unless you're going solo - a certain set of norms for group behavior must be established and serve as a foundation going forward.
Security
First and foremost you need to be sure that those in your immediate vicinity won't materially harm you. That requires one of the following:
- Physical separation from threatful individuals and groups
- An established history of peaceful coexistence or cooperation
- Some other reassurance that someone means or poses no harm. This could take the form of a larger population on your side, rendering individual outsiders or groups of outsiders innocuous, or some notional reassurance, such as strictly observed symbolic codes (think truce flag).
Trust
This largely overlaps with security, but I feel that the word more extensively alludes to emotional and informational aspects. Trust is the concept that not only will someone refrain from materially harming you, but also that they are as they represent themselves to be and will maybe even help you in times of need.
Accountability
What will keep someone in my community from riding on the coattails of others? We've historically remedied freeriding and collective responsibility in a couple of ways. One is community-based, in which a population is small enough to collectively understand how much any given individual puts into and gets out of the system. This allows a community to decide who can manage what according to their known circumstances. Perhaps a seemingly capable person would get a lot of flak for skimping on their investment in their community, but we wouldn't expect the same for infants and we'd expect compassion to come into play for elderly or sickly individuals. In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell suggests the number at which this solution breaks down is 150 individuals.
After it is no longer feasible to effectively track who gets what they give by means of relationships and gossip alone, we've managed by implementing my formal systems: central governments and courts for enforcing property rights, credit scores and background checks for establishing reputation, etc.
Humans have an innate sense of fairness that they seek to realize whether through soft means, such as peer pressure and retaliation, or through a more officially-recognized vehicle. In the context of our scenario, accountability will come naturally to a certain scale as individuals specialize and recover a previous standard of living. Obtaining it will then require more sophisticated technology or forms of organization.
The above characteristics are interrelated and by no means an exhaustive list. However, it has got me thinking about what it takes to make any team - in a survival scenario or not - to function effectively. It also seems that a key to instilling relationships of this nature is some sort of central identity, suggesting that tribalism, by necessity, is deeply rooted into what it means to be human.
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