Small Groups

Life of Brian – The People’s Front of Judea

Jesus was pretty astute, coming from a line of kings and all that. He had twelve disciples because he knew if he had any more than that, they would split into factions and start fighting.  For our purposes, though, twelve is just a maximum we set. Below are some things to consider when deciding on the size of group you want. 

Each recipient receives money directly from their own sponsors and is not dependent on any third party to hand out money to them. This is a necessary feature of the system because it ensures that no one has automatic leadership status, i.e., no one gets to influence the group solely by virtue of being the manager and distributor of funds. If someone’s good at some skill that’s needed, they can teach others and lead the way with that particular skill. Control (government) is kept at the individual level, and dependency, which is a human characteristic, is given voluntarily, not imposed by force or default.

Co-operation

In reality, for our recipients to make a change for the better, they need to cooperate with their neighbors. That’s how humans thrive. By working together, they can achieve far more than if each is just working away at their own problems. Shared problems can be solved by shared solutions, and this is what the group fund is for. We provide a mechanism for our recipients to cooperate on a joint venture of any size, whereby they can pool financial resources without having to become part of a large collective. They don’t have to use the tools we provide, but they are there if they want to. 

Group Size

• Small groups: good for getting things done and lots of other purposes.
• Large groups: good for entertainment but not so good (and even downright dangerous) for anything else.

Large groups for other than entertainment end in wars because no-one in the group has a grasp of the whole picture; not even the ones who rule the groups do. We get lost in large groups, and another mind takes over—a largely unconscious mind. It’s not just countries; corporations “compete” with each other ruthlessly—so much so that their mindset is entirely overrun by the “fight or flight” reflex (fear) and they cannot think at all. Everything that’s not an asset is a threat. Friends are nonexistent because they will stab you in the back at the first real opportunity and smile and say it’s just business. With this kind of mind, large corporations and governments must create war; there’s no other outcome.

In contrast, in entertainment, we have a large group of people with, e.g., a singer leading them all. A good frontman can lead many thousands of people into a blissful mass experience by encouraging, holding everyone together (the true meaning of entertain) and supporting them. It’s an easy job, though; lots of people are able to do it with varying degrees of success and the best ones get the most people. Unlike the political or military leader, all you need to do is to ensure joy. When the leader only leads in what he’s good at and is not a ruler, it all works fine. (Until someone throws up….)

Small groups and decision quality (feedback model)

Small groups tend to maintain stronger connection between discussion, decision, and outcome because:

• People know each other personally, so reputation is visible and persistent
• Communication is high-bandwidth (tone, context, history, trust)
• Feedback is fast: consequences of decisions are directly observable
• Coordination problems are simpler and less abstract
• Disagreements can be resolved through extended discussion and social correction rather than formal procedure

This allows more natural use of long-form reasoning and iterative correction, because the group itself functions as the feedback system.

As groups scale up, these properties weaken, and communication shifts toward standardized, compressed forms (policy, procedure, and jargon) to maintain coordination across distance and anonymity.

Systems of Control

Carroll Quigley, a professor of history and mentor of Bill Clinton, said that our rulers recognize that it’s not possible to rule people directly, one-to-one. Instead, they have to take control of the groups we form. It’s in our nature to cooperate and extremely difficult to do anything without forming groups.

As we form these groups, we inadvertently open ourselves up to having those groups manipulated. A small proportion of the population has a defect that causes them to be parasitic on the rest when these opportunities emerge. The solution is simply to prevent such opportunities from cropping up. The design of our groups must take into account such things so that they cannot be used by external forces to control us.

The Quigley Formula — G Edward Griffin reveals the Cecil Rhodes legacy

Representative Democracy

For our groups to work together on a larger scale, for example, to pool resources for the restoration of an entire watershed, we need to provide mechanisms whereby they can do so without losing their control over their own projects. A group of 12 families can easily do ‘representative democracy’ by having one representative from each family attend group meetings. 

If you put me in charge of an entire country, I would immediately look after my friends and family first. Regardless of the virtue of such tendencies, this is how things are. Wishing humans would be different doesn’t make it so, and designing systems based on highfalutin notions of how you think humans ought to be will always end in disaster. Our history is the story of how badly that has worked out. 

If we have a large valley project where 12 groups are collaborating to create a lake and extensive earthworks to turn arid land fertile, sending one representative from each group is unlikely to work well without ensuring that restrictions on those representatives are built into the system. 

Built in, not just written down! 

Just like our rulers, we are not at all interested in the expression of the will of the people. Unlike the rulers, when we design our systems, we are interested in the implementation of that will. There are some people who want to be ruled over, who want to be told what to do and to have others around them forced to do things the way their owners want. Such people are irrelevant to a free society; they are welcome to boss each other around but they are not who our systems are designed for. Our systems are designed for those who want the freedom to live in abundance and must not be compromised by those who fear such things.

It’s not enough that our system merely states that your representative should not act against your interests; it must be designed in a way that he can not. This is achieved by ensuring that money does not leave your control until the time comes to pay a contractor and that when the payment is made, the transfer comes from your own group’s fund, where you have some control, and not from some mega-multi-group fund over which you’ve already relinquished control.

So, no matter what the project, no matter how big, there is no fund above the group fund. Contractors who do not want to accept, e.g., 20 payments from 20 different customers (our groups), preferring to only accept one payment from a nominated ‘representative,’ have simply excluded themselves from the bidding process. This does not present a scenario where the contractor has any more likelihood of not getting paid, because each group has entered into the contract and is bound by it. The difference is that nobody can enter into the contract on behalf of all. That’s where the corruption can come in.

Can not, in contrast to should not. You should not drive through someone’s garden without their permission. You can not drive through a brick wall. This is at the core of our design.  Our system may be used by many different people in different circumstances. The environment can alter the shape of the tree, but not its nature. That’s determined entirely in the seed. 

The above is not what our groups have to do; it’s what our system provides. The difference in our system is that users are not automatically subsumed into some non-human collective entity. They are able to do so if they wish to or have to, as the tree will bend to the winds and make the most it can of where it finds itself.

Dispute resolution

Our system doesn’t have to solve disputes. Ultimately each individual recipient has up to 12 sponsors and that is all they have to satisfy. If a recipient falls out with their group and wants to go it alone, the only people who have any say in that are the recipient himself and the sponsors. The system could provide some mechanisms to help prevent such incidents, but it would be morally wrong for it to have the power to dictate anything to anyone. Our system is built on voluntary cooperation. People who want to introduce elements of coercion to the system are always free to stop using it and go elsewhere to create their own systems.

The system is designed to help people cooperate. If they do not want to cooperate, the system should necessarily be useless to them; otherwise, there is a fault in its design that needs to be fixed. To make this even clearer, because it is of the utmost importance, if people can use the system to form a hierarchical on-the-ground system with an organization in control of the funds of the people, then we have made a mistake in the design.

Research, etc., is in part 2