More Equal Animals - Chapter 3: Rules of Relative Power (Unofficial Summary)

Does your vote really count? Democratic processes don’t scale well beyond communities of about 150, the number Dunbar found to be the biological limit.

Secession

One of the foundations of true democracy is the right for anyone to secede, but that right should also come with the ability to be self-sufficient. States such as NY, Rhode Island & Virginia ratified the right to secede when joining the United States of America.

It is also important to organize society into equal groupings of family, community, town, county, state whereby each grouping should allow both adding members and allowing secession. Any trend towards centralization and concentration should be resisted despite any economies of scale because the true cost to society is disempowering those who are outside the centralization.

Mimicking Biology

In nature, cells cooperate to create larger organisms rather than individually grow large. Animals group into herds among a diverse hierarchy of independent life forms working together and no cell or animal or herd can sustainably grow too big. Similarly societies should avoid large mono-culture governments.

Domino Power

One analogy of an ideal society is where one individual is a small domino that is part of a larger domino (ie. family) that are part of yet larger dominoes (town, county, state) that could eventually topple the largest ‘Empire’ domino. The smaller dominoes must be independent and not tied to larger dominoes to have an impact. ‘Empire’ dominos can try to weaken smaller dominoes by creating division by breaking the family unit and categorizing people by race or restricting independence by preventing states from seceding.