Understanding Society
Why Do We Believe the Stories Our Leaders Tell Us?
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Why does the number 150 recur in social life? Doug introduces Russell Hill and Robin Dunbar’s Christmas-card study, ‘Social Network Size in Humans,’ then follows Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History beyond that apparent cognitive limit. Myths allow strangers to imagine common membership in nations, religions, and institutions: no one can meet ‘France,’ but millions can behave as though they belong to it.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
“Some historians say it’s because we’re naive and that just might be our superpower as a species. Simply put, the story goes like this: if you want to get thousands of strangers to work as a team, you need something to hold things together. This glue has to be stronger than friendliness, because also Homo puppy’s social network is the biggest of all primates, it isn’t nearly large enough to forge cities or states.
Typically our social circles number no more than one hundred and fifty people. Scientists arrive at this limit in the 1990s when two American researchers asked a group of volunteers to list all friends and family to whom they sent Christmas cards. The average was sixty-eight households, comprising one hundred and fifty individuals.
When you start looking, this number turns up everywhere. From Roman legions to devout colonists and from corporate divisions to our real friends on Facebook, this magic threshold pops up all over the place and suggests the human brain is not equipped to juggle more than a hundred and fifty meaningful relationships.
The problem is that a hundred and fifty guests make a great party, it’s no where near enough to build a pyramid or send a rocket to the moon. Projects on that scale call for cooperation in much larger groups, so leaders need to incentivize us.
How? With myths. We learn to imagine kinship with people we would never meet. Religions, states, companies, nations—all of them only exist in our minds, in the narratives our leaders we ourselves tell. No one has ever met ‘France’ or shaken hands with the Holy Catholic Church. But that doesn’t matter if we sign on for the fiction.