Reply #117: I'm highly influenced by what Jared Diamond said in "Guns, Germs and Steel" [View All]

(I don't know if it's derived from someone else) that small groups work by everyone having a basic idea of what all the other people are like - you know whether they're trustworthy, impulsive, cautious, wise and so on. But there's a limit to the number of people we can know like that. Beyond that, you have to have formalised mechanisms for conflict resolution and resource allocation - basically, the start of a state. And if you want the specialisation of technology, and long-range planning, you have to go beyond the numbers of people that you can know personally.

If you're proposing a formal state, but socialist, then yes, that might be possible. But I don't think that is "in tune with our genome", any more than capitalism is. "Working on a human scale" means working with people you know, rather than with formal laws. And even then, you get the problem of what happens in conflicts with other groups. Diamond says the murder rate in areas where everyone lives small groups is even higher than in large-scale civilisations, because the neighbouring groups are treated with extreme suspicion, and feuds and skirmishes with them are frequent.