Why Size Matters

Whatever caused homo sapiens to evolve for higher intelligence and innovative thinking, those qualities were necessarily invested in individuals not in groups. Eventually, some individual geniuses invented agriculture and animal husbandry. That resulted in populations exploding; the same fertile land that could support only a handful of hunter-gatherers could support hundreds if not thousands of people when put under cultivation. 

But that led to a social revolution from which there is no going back. People were no longer living solely in intimately small, continuing groups of individuals to whom they were bonded by ties of blood and love (or at least marriage). They found themselves living in settlements, then towns, then cities, in which many or most of the people they encountered and related to were not close relations, but people whom they merely knew, or total strangers. As populations grew, the proportion of strangers or near-strangers in people’s lives grew larger and even predominant. New ways of organizing groups for the common good had to be developed.

Agriculturalization occurred 5,000-10,000 years ago, a small amount of time compared to the hundreds of thousands of years of hunting-gathering life that preceded. Humanity has been struggling to reconcile their long-evolved mode of being with their relatively new way of living ever since. There has been a huge variety of groups of various kinds - family, geography-oriented, religious, social, commercial, and many more, up to and including the establishment of nation-states. Today, two such states, India and China, have well over one and a quarter billion citizens each, and sustain their identities despite manifest divisions and conflicts within them. So far there has not been any upward limit on how large a functional human group can be. 

Yet the size of intimately bonded groups can form is necessarily limited to, at most, a few hundreds: How many people is it possible to be that intimately bound up with? Human relations to and within groups significantly beyond the size of a hunter-gatherer clan must necessarily be different in character. Size changes everything, but the emotional makeup of humans does not change.

This becomes a problem when a group essential to individuals’ needs grows too large for those making decisions affecting the group to get feedback necessary for good decisions because they do not know everyone in the group, and especially when they do not share everyone’s needs and interests.