At some scale, what does work "in our daily lives" ('our' meaning the two people speaking) can provably not work on the scale at which politicians at international conferences must work.
Take Communism. I don't mean Socialism under the name Communism, but actual free, equal, everyone shares everything equally and works hard for it Communism. It can, among a small family-sized or tribal-sized unit with willing participation, work quite well. It has never been shown to work at sizes much larger than that. The logistics alone of just making sure people in one geographic region get an equal share of fresh crops from another geographic region are daunting.
Take credit. Two friends can lend each other money at no interest, and close friends sometimes are okay with losing exact track of who owes what to whom. That doesn't work with the bank downtown. It certainly won't work at a national or international level.
As a final example, take school curriculum standardization. It works for local districts and maybe even states in the US. It works for some whole countries. Yet I doubt you'll see Sweden and the Philippines agreeing on a standard curriculum soon. It certainly wouldn't work between India and Iran. | [reply] |
Communism. It can, among a small family-sized or tribal-sized unit with willing participation, work quite well. It has never been shown to work at sizes much larger than that.I learned that a long time ago, and personally am convinced that humans are happier in tribes of roughly 100 or less....just about as nature intended. Numbers have to be low enough so that everyone knows the others( and their children) on a first name basis, and are related somehow.
If you read on the history of human tribes, at or about the 100 level, tensions and factions rise, usually resulting in a split.... now 2 separate tribes are happy. This all works well until the available land runs out.....then war and all hell breaks loose. It is interesting to note that modern civilization does whatever it can to stomp out tribalism, it leads to gangs, and an us-against-them attitude; and in the worst cases cannibalism. What this has to do with the French being easily mis-construed, is beyond me. :-)
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What I meant to point out is that perhaps the language was a barrier, but perhaps the difference in scale and context is also important in this case.
After all, once we get past our own tribe-sized groups, theory is largely all we have. It's terribly difficult to run a controlled experiment at a national size to see if the practice translates directly from the theory without additional factors. Who would be the control group?
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