Years ago (early eighties) I was part of a discussion about building God’s Kingdom today. There were lots of undergraduates enthusing about how we could all live in communes and share everything equally.
I interrupted their warm and pious fantasies to ask “Who will shovel the shit?”
After a shocked silence – We’re in a church hall and he said ‘shit’! – someone said, very earnestly “Everyone will shovel their share.”
In practice, in most communes, this principle doesn’t work well. Some become free-loaders while others are grafters. Eventually the grafters get fed up with lonely shoveling and they leave. I’ve never tried living in a commune, but I have had many friends who set up communes, or joined them. Communes never seem to last more than a few years. Five years was about as good as it got.
As I said at the time “Everyone shoveling their share is not going to work if there are more than a dozen people. Look at Maggie Thatcher: you would have a hard time getting her to admit she ever had a shit, let alone persuade her to shovel her share.”
This Chondritics thing is meant to be a more constructive response to this key question about how societies work.
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