Communities and Work

We watched a documentary on the Hutterites wednesday night. I noticed several assumptions, made in the documentary as well as amongst ourselves that worried me. The most obvious one was about working together. Supposedly a large group of people working together means that the people love one another. This is totally not true. Just look at a prison detail, or watch a bunch of school children. They cooperate because the alternative is more unpleasant than cooperation.

Why then, is there such an emphasis on working together?

Every community has any form of communal property suffers from the free rider problem. Essentially, working together is a way to prove to one another that we are at least putting some effort into the group. Communities will also use things like uniforms, or at least drastic dress codes, and other public displays of being part of the group in order to cut down on the free rider problem. If you look like a Hare Krishna, then other Hare Krishnas can at least assume you have to put up with the same problems that they do.

None of this, of course, elicits great love. It merely places a barrier of entry, keeping the really lazy and/or the lukewarm believer out. Love comes about through personal relationships. We can't take shortcuts. Obviously, if we have great love for one another we will work together, but that will look like a family working together, not like a prison gang.

In addition, the way a group chooses to deal with the free rider problem directly affects scalability. Can we live in country and the city? Can we deal with a huge influx of new people? How do we handle different age groups and different levels of population density? I think the thing the Hutterites do best is creating new communities as their population grows. They are experentially aware of Dunbar's number even if they don't know it by that name.