Joe Brewer
1 min readApr 7, 2016

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That’s an important question. I have many thoughts on this — will just offer one now for the sake of brevity. The idea I think can help is to understand how hunter-gatherer societies dealt with bullies (see the work of Christopher Boehm), how they used a combination of accountability and transparency in their social networks to morally sanction behavior.

If someone took more than their share, they were publicly shamed or humiliated. If this didn’t work, they were eventually removed from society (ostracism or in rare cases, execution). This was how the society enforced cooperative behaviors.

If we mirror these criteria at the planetary scale using digital and social systems of transparency and accountability, we can achieve “pro-social” outcomes in our complex 21st Century world.

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Joe Brewer

I am a change strategist working on behalf of humanity, and also a complexity researcher, cognitive scientist, and evangelist for the field of culture design.