How to Start a Nation (Part 1): No Friends
Note: Many of the ideas in this article are directly inspired or drawn from the excellent book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari. Be sure to read Harari’s book for an even more in-depth exploration of imagined hierarchies and fiction.
This is Part 1 of a larger connected series: Part 2 and Part 3
You have come to this article seeking to start a nation. I am not a diplomat, a president, or a senator—but, I like books and thinking. So here’s what I think.
First, let’s do some math.
Imagine you are working on a big project. It might be a book, a podcast, a social media account, or building a business. There are many facets, problems, and obstacles to go through. In this sense, working with a team might be better than going solo. Now, let’s imagine we want to maintain equality in this team — there might be one leader, but every person is respectful and familiar with each other, so nobody feels jealous.
This approach relies heavily on emotional connections, such as friendship. In this scenario, balance is key. Planning is collaborative, and respect must be mutual. Let’s calculate, now, how many mutual friendships this would require. I will use different letters to demonstrate different two-sided connections between people (this means that “AB” is the same as “BA”)
For a 1 person team, it’s clear there are 0 interpersonal connections. In a duo, there’s only 1 mutual connection, “AB”. With a team of three, there are 3 connections: AB, BC, and AC.
In a team of four, 3 connections turn into 4*3/2 = 6 connections: AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, and CD, in a team of five, that turns into 15 connections, which I won’t write out here.
The way to calculate this for larger numbers is to use the combinations formula, often labelled “nCr.” nCr is defined as the number of ways you can get a group of r objects from n distinct objects — so, for example, out of a group of 20 distinct liquids, how many mixtures of 5 liquids can you make in the end? The same applies to teams, where we are trying to find the number of “pairs,” or, in our interpretation, mutual connections. With the combinations formula, we can continue the pattern past five. The following table and discrete graph contain the mutual connections for teams numbering from 1 to 15.
Notice, in the graph, that the number of connections does not follow a smooth line — they seem to be curving upwards. Examining further reveals that this graph follows the function f(x)=(x²-x)/2, a quadratic equation. If you were to analyze even deeper, you would find that the slope of this graph at any point is f’(x)=x-½, meaning that the slope is never constant: every time you add a person to the team, the number of mutual connections goes up faster.
If your team was only 2 people large, making it three would necessitate 2 extra mutual friendships — in comparison, if your team was 50 people large, for the team to be held together purely by friendship, a new team member has to be on friendly terms with 50 people. That’s a lot of people — and it is guaranteed that there will be at least some kind of jealousy or conflict inside a team like that. Now imagine doing this for a thousand people — it’s clear that a team held together only by friendship or close connections isn’t going to cut it!
The thing is, this kind of collaboration is precisely how primitive humans lived for many years. Early humanoids relied on emotional and physical connections, highlighted best by the structure of the familial tribe. The alpha male of the pack is trusted to lead everyone because of his emotional connections with the members of the tribe, and members decide to stay together because they know each other well. These tribes can get quite large — but it turns out, there is a limit. This limit is known as Dunbar’s Number and is estimated to be around 150. Robin Dunbar, the anthropologist who first observed this limit, writes:
It is suggested that the number of neocortical neurons limits the organism’s information-processing capacity and that this then limits the number of relationships that an individual can monitor simultaneously. When a group’s size exceeds this limit, it becomes unstable and begins to fragment. This then places an upper limit on the size of groups which any given species can maintain as cohesive social units through time.
In short, our brains simply are too small to handle that many friendships. Cohesion falls apart when we begin to forget. So, if we pre-historically relied on small tribes to survive and reproduce, how in the world did we end up where we are now? In a world where thousands of people work together in unison on massive projects, such as constructing a skyscraper or even producing a nuclear bomb, where does this mass collaboration come from?
On an even higher level, if we interpret countries and their citizens as massive “teams,” what binds citizens to each other and the government?
Similarly, religion can be considered, if not mass collaboration, but at least mass connection. If I am Christian, I transcend location and time to be connected with every other Christian that has ever existed, even if I have never met them in my life. How?
In Part 2, we will answer this question with a general sketch of social fiction — and illustrate in Part 3 multiple examples of how rhetoric and complexity play into all of this (including in the musical Hamilton).
