A very good article, Benjamin. As mentioned before you are a gifted writer.

I like where you are going, and for me you are hitting the right spot exactly where we ourselves are capable of saying two different things about reality. Reality as it is and reality as we want to perceive it.

That is a human trait and it separates us from animals.

I am reminded of research that was done with people and apes, and the apes then outperforming the people in a game of having to retrace steps shown on a screen. The apes were far better at replicating the steps than the people were.

What I took away from that is that apes are closer in their minds to reality than we are. We have learned to create abstracts in our minds, and I only need to point to language to make that obvious. We are very skillful masters of abstracting reality. But the cost is that it makes us forget what actually took place in reality.

Same idea but then with counting apples. We have no problem recognizing four apples in a bowl as four apples. Yet as soon as there are more than seven apples, we actually have to count how many there are, we don't see it immediately. But what the brain does next is very clever: instead of counting the apples the mind thinks 'bowl filled with apples' and does not worry about the exact number in most cases. We stopped counting the exact reality because we put an abstract in its place, and it functions quite well.

Next, we empowered ourselves beyond our natural numbers. It is guesstimated that humans would live in groups of 60 to 100 people, and more than 120 would mean a splitting of the large group into two groups (or more).

We overcame our natural group size most likely because we retreated into the abstract realm even further. And low and behold there were indeed many benefits available to us if only we subjected ourselves to larger and larger groups. But the larger group also demands that we investigate less and less, that we accept society to be good, and move on with our own business.

Over time with greater populations, people will end up specializing because it is the specialist who contributes the most to society while everyone capable of doing the same things leads to a less beneficial society. In short, the disconnect is an automatic result of larger populations, while the disconnect was likely already in our human nature.

I'll finish this with moving to the ultimate abstract level of utmost importance, which is the power level. While soldiers can indeed establish a power ranking, it is most often the idea of power that already suffices to make folks organize themselves in a certain way. Besides, we got ourselves accustomed to having a power structure, and why worry about which one that is, right?

Human history is loaded with various forms of power structures, and while my favorite form is proportional voting, it has been interesting to see how proportional voting is subjected to the winner-take-all societies simply because the winner-take-all societies can suppress their own people deeper. As such, the winner-take-all nations can get more out of folks while handing the real benefits to the winners, if you allow me to say this simplistically.

For the US, I see one path and one path only and that is to bend this winner-take-all society toward a more proportionally infused voting system to make life better for everyone. Particularly at the local level, it is complete moronic to have a voting system in place that limits political expression. It is unhealthy suppression for no good reason, but the ones ending up getting the power tend to not give up on it by themselves. We need more Gorbachevs in the United States' political arena.

Thank you for your interesting article. Good job, and well said.