Thanks for all of your interesting thoughts on this. I definitely see that when resources are scarce, competitive behavior becomes more likely and that in a complex society like we have now, it would difficult to recreate all of the upsides of a cohesive 10,000 person village. But, there are also a lot of partnership style behaviors that are gaining traction, most notably in the business world.

Getting the elites to be willing to give up that status is one of the biggest impediments. In Peter Block’s book Stewardship he talks about a major pet food manufacturer that went to a completely partnership-style management in one of their plants. Different departments were in charge of everything related to their particular function, did their own purchasing, etc. It worked great but was never generalized to the entire company because no one else wanted to give up power and status.

Catal Hoyuk was an early agricultural society the flourished peacefully and cooperatively for 2000 years before the northern tribes overtook it, either by invasion or assimilation, so I don’t know that it’s only the hunter-gatherer aspect. I think it’s more what you decide the ethos of the society is. When we were going to swinger’s clubs, the atmosphere was very much women in control and it felt very safe. This was because if anyone transgressed that, they were thrown out. We’ve built our society around cut-throat competition and bullying. It will take us deciding as a culture to shift that before it truly can.