| 1 |
Dunbar's Number
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Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. Jason Pargin/(David Wong) (satirically) construed Dunbar's Number as the Monkeysphere, proposing that each of us lives within a cognitive bubble which encourages us to act in the best interest of those within our particular bubble, and dehumanize those outside of the Monkeysphere:
"Most of us do not have room in our Monkeysphere for our friendly neighborhood sanitation worker. So, we don't think of him as a person. We think of him as The Thing That Makes The Trash Go Away." ...
"Listen to any 16 year-old kid with his first job, going on and on about how the boss is screwing him and the government is screwing him even more ("What's FICA?!?!" he screams as he looks at his first paycheck). Then watch that same kid at work, as he drops a hamburger patty on the floor, picks it up, and slaps in on a bun and serves it to a customer. In that one dropped burger he has everything he needs to understand those black-hearted politicians and corporate bosses. They see him in the exact same way he sees the customers lined up at the burger counter. Which is, just barely. In both cases, for the guy making the burger and the guy running Exxon, getting through the workweek and collecting the paycheck are all that matters. No thought is given to the real human unhappiness being spread by doing it shittily (ever gotten so sick from food poisoning you thought your stomach lining was going to fly out of your mouth?) That many customers or employees just can't fit inside the Monkeysphere." |
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| 2 |
Scale
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Marc Widdowson's conceptual framework for societal transformation as Eigenmodes [Friends, Acquaintances, Strangers] of Ensembles [Segmentary, Chiefdom, State] at corresponding Scales [Low, Medium, High] attests that the divergence between friendship-dominated society and stranger-dominated society is scale-dependent. Widdowson noted:
| "Thus, as scale varies, one passes from a friendship-dominated society to an acquaintanceship-dominated and then strangership-dominated society. Since friends, acquaintances and strangers behave towards each other in different ways, the type of relationship that dominates a society determines the type of behaviour that is characteristic of that society." |
The manner in which friends, acquaintances and strangers relate with respect to the three types of relationship (political, economic, social):
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Friends |
Acquaintances |
Strangers |
| Political |
Equality |
Prestige |
Domination |
| Economic |
Sharing |
Credit |
Exchange |
| Social |
Personal contact |
Community |
Abstraction |
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| 3 |
Polyhierarchy
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