The Birth of Community
19th May 2019
Freeberg nails it.
It happened long before the beginning of recorded history, so we don’t know if it was sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, or a bunch of cavemen still in the throes of evolution from monkeys. But it was undoubtedly profit-driven, motivated by the realization that a group can achieve in breadth & depth something that a lone individual cannot. And that had to be a meal because it could not have been anything else. It must have been meat, because the farmer labors in solitude when he sows and reaps.
So the most able hunters in a village, or in a locale that was later to become a village, pooled their resources together and brought down a mighty beast. They gathered to cook it over a fire, and divide the portions. They ate better and fed their families better than they had before, as a result of previous attempts in solitude, and so they resolved to do the same again and again.
The process of allocation must have become an issue very soon, likely within mere moments. The first liberal caveman who didn’t know how to hunt, or didn’t care to expend the effort, proposed that his contribution to the feast would be the knowledge of how to apportion the meat among the various other participants. Those stronger cavemen who brought down the beast then tore him limb from limb…and so, having anticipated this, he didn’t actually say anything, opting instead to keep the thoughts to himself. And probably starved, or survived on the scraps.
But the desire remained — the desire to make one’s living by way of dictating where the energies of better people should go, as a substitute for actual contribution. It was left to churn away, like an underground fire, for thousands and thousands of years before technology would permit it to see the light of day