Which just goes to show you we are not equipped by evolution to live in large, complex societies. We evolved to live in small bands, of primarily related individuals, just large enough to feed off the resources of a patch of ground which could be traversed on foot in a few days. Access to other bands living on the territory perimeter (for genetic exchange purposes) is the only other social requirement we have.

The physical advantages of larger communities in terms of growing food, specialization of labor, permanent settlement, etc were so powerful that this form of primate social organization had to be compromised, and we invented culture to help fill in the gaps created by larger, more complex societies. But this is only a stopgap measure, and I beleive it can be pushed too far. Human beings are designed by nature to live in communities small enough that every member is known to every member, i.e., if all the people we know do not also know each other, our village is too big.

Humans are adaptable, and clever, so we've been able to overcome this contradiction so far, but we've paid a heavy price and the price gets stiffer every day. It manifests itself in social unrest and conflict, and in forcing us to transfer more of our natural social organization to culture, and our cultural regulation to be taken over more and more by abstract institutions like markets, and the state. We used to be able to take care of the weak, entertain ourselves, distribute the workload, educate our children, give our seniors meaningful work to earn their keep and extend their useful life, influence our neighbors to adopt more appropriate behavior, defend the community, and a host of other functions we are now more and more forced to rely on the state or other large collectives to perform for us.

Going back to a tribal form of social organization is out of the question, but a recognition of our fundamental human traits and needs could be used to design more efficient communities that took advantage of our natural tendencies, not create mass neuroses by ignoring them.

I further believe the transition from our natural, neolithic social organization to the settled world of cities and agriculture is what the Garden of Eden story is all about. Civilization is not new, but our earliest civilizations all possessed racial memories of a time before, and they have survived as myth to the present day. It was the single most important event in our history. The "time before" is viewed with naive nostalgia (if it was all that great we never would have left it!), and the capricious, human gods and spirits of that time have changed into the remote and stern authoritarians of our present-day religions.