Xanthippa's Chamberpot

This is a series of posts which are part of The Big Picture – or what is happening in our society.

We can only care – truly care – about a limited number of people at any one time. 

Yes, we can ‘care’ about ‘all of humanity’ and ‘all on Earth’ and ‘all existence’ – but this type of caring is very philosophical, because we cannot possibly know every human being, or every being, or every ‘thing’ around us!  But, we care about all these issues in a more detached way than we care about our parents, kids, or closest friends.

Why?

Perhaps the answer is in how our brain is structured:  the Dunbar number is just about the limit of our ‘Monkey Sphere’ – the better we know someone, the deeper inside our Monkeysphere they get.  This is the reason why the death of a loved one affects us more than the death of someone we have never heard of before – and whose name or specifics we do not know.  My take on this is in Scaling up communities – Part 1. 

As our small, primitive communities grew to larger ones – culminating in our current political structures, called states.  These are much larger than our original communities, so we have had to find new ways of administering our societal structures.  I explored this in Scaling up communities – Part 2.

Yet, our modern ‘states’ are just social and philosophical constructs – and are unable to ‘affect’ anything without the aid of people who act on their behalf.  In Scaling up communities – Part 3, I look at the general concept behind being ‘an agent of the state’.

What happens when the state contracts a class of citizens to perform a certain collection of tasks on its behalf?  Scaling up communities – part 4 looks at what happens when a whole class of citizens who deem themselves ‘independant professionals’ are contracted by the state – as in the case of physicians in a state which provides socialized medicare – and how these professionals are not free to act according to their conscience while they are forced to be nothing other than ‘agents of the state’.

The story is ‘to be continued’ – and updated as it is continued.