Steve,
Have you ever read David Sloan Wilson’s Darwinian Cathedral? The idea here is that religions originate as systems for the capture and equitable distribution of non-zero gains arising from community action and become corrupted when some individuals capture the system for their own gain. Nick Nicholas Thompson Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology Clark University [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Stephen Guerin Sent: Saturday, May 16, 2020 12:08 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] from 5/15 virtual FRIAM Dave West writes: Thirdly, we talked about charity and the gap between personal and institutional. Contrary to Steve, who noted he grew up absent any kind of religious charitable context, I grew up in a culture where personal charity, awareness, and mutual aid was ubiquitous and constant. Welfare was distributed with every Bishop (roughly equivalent to parish priest - responsible for 100-150 families) had full authority to grant food, clothing, housing, etc. assistance to anyone within his Ward. Social contact, both in church services but also via activities like Family Home Teaching, meant that everyone in the Ward was aware of the needs of everyone else and the Bishop was fully informed as well. When families, even communities, experienced disaster, it was rectified in a matter of days and months. Similar things have been observed in Mennonite and Amish communities. The social system integrated with the LDS religion (or Amish or Mennonite) can provide both the personal and the institutional support, and charity, that will forever elude bureaucratic government. Very interesting example, Dave! For the list, on Friday's VirtualFriam I brought up the pain the citizens of Paradise are in after the Camp Fire. As tragic as the event was in life and property loss in 2018, visiting the community on the anniversary on Nov 8, 2019, there was an almost equal tragedy around the frustration and depression around the failed distribution of massive federal recovery and charitable donations. And the community feels forgotten as so many events have happened since then. They are a community like Marcus describes at the end of the pandemic. So yes, agreeing on the fact that we can't rely on bureaucratic government. On the chat I asked about more decentralized mechanisms as a counter to the federal and appreciate Dave you bringing up the church which has provided this in the past. As a Catholic growing up, I certainly saw resources flow and the "privacy-preserving" role the priest (and more importantly lay staff hierarchy) played in gathering and redistributing resources/activity. I assert that we should turn over the collective intelligence and action around resource gathering and redistribution to Faith-based communities. .... pausing for the anaphylactic response of many FRIAM readers to subside from the use of "Faith-based". ... COVID is interesting as a rare global collective action event with the need for collective intelligence while maximizing privacy as well as much more intelligent routing of resources to those in need. People can understand that we are literally connected with COVID and are not isolated individuals. A collectively intelligent system is needed not only for resource distribution but for epidemic intelligence to know where the infectious locations are at any time (I don't need to know who). If you have a belief that a collectively intelligent system could be built and you could be a member, welcome to a Faith-based community.
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