Characteristics of Healthy Human Groups

Photo by Mario Purisic on Unsplash

Healthy human groups are vital for our survival as a species. By “healthy” I mean healthy for a group’s individual human participants and for our non-human environment. So the three most important attributes of a human group are

1. Understanding of and respect for the non-human environment in which the group exists.
2. Voluntary membership — ability of members to leave the group if it becomes unhealthy for them as individuals or for the environment.
3. Longevity — persistence of the group as long as it is beneficial to its participants and the non-human environment on which they depend.

Secondary attributes follow from those:

1. Cohesion — sufficient interactions among members of the group to prevent it from destructively fragmenting at the cost of the longevity of the group and its fragments.
2. Internal cooperation — sharing of energy, material, and information resources among members of the group to support its cohesion and the health of its members.
3. External cooperation — sharing of energy, material, and information resources with other externally cooperative groups, for the mutual benefits of their members.
4. Minimization of destructive internal conflicts — having mechanisms and practices for dealing with conflicts that threaten the health of its members or the longevity of the group.
5. Minimization of destructive external conflicts — having mechanisms and practices for dealing with external conflicts that threaten the health of its members or the longevity of the group.

Sometimes healthy groups can grow too large to maintain their internal cohesion, in which case they may be able to fragment into healthy groups that maintain external cooperation. At other times healthy groups whose longevity is threatened may be able to combine with other, externally cooperative healthy groups to increase the longevity of the combined group.

As we seek to implement bottom-up solutions to the collapse of large existing human institutions, it should help to use the foregoing attribute descriptions to assess the smaller groups that may form important parts of the solutions.

See

https://eand.co/the-age-of-collapse-e606bfc1b46d

https://medium.com/@jmason37_80878/human-supra-organisms-and-language-an-outline-445fbf2530bf