21. From Family to Government

From Family to Government
Bob Komives
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Parents in our nuclear family, our elders in our clan, our council in our city, our nation's government--each makes decisions for the benefit of one of our groups. National government differs in scale and organizational complexity from a family council, but not in function. Each represents an organized effort to promote role playing by group members. Members, citizens, hope that roles are played well enough to improve group and individual well-being. We are members of several groups; several decision-making bodies represent us. As we invent and join new groups many old ones persist. We happen to call a class of broad-reaching groups, or their representatives, government.

We have such propensity to form government in our groups that among our deeply embedded cultural patterns there must be one that causes us to produce and reproduce government. Provided we remember that all genetic action must occur within our true cellular genes, we can think of cultural genes for government.

These genes are persistent yet imperfect. Some stable societies evolved with stable forms for government. Yet, as our species flourished and spread its influence around the globe, new circumstances tested old forms of organization. Changes had higher likelihood of survival if they enabled the group to better invest group knowledge. Government gains respect among constituents and also among rival groups if it enables the group to organize itself to produce and protect more knowledge than it invests. Such successful government is likely to be imitated--just as successful biological parents are imitated.

Pick any important company in a marketplace country such as the USA. Do a thought problem. Consider the impacts on the nation if we eliminate that company.

Pick any whole sector of a market economy and do the same thought problem. Choose the farming sector, for example. Eliminate it--a disastrous thought.

Now do the same thought problem, but eliminate only government. If that is too difficult to imagine, eliminate only governmental protection of property, and governmental guarantees of public rights-of-way.

Government is family,
the industry we cannot do without.

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:: Bob Komives, Fort Collins © 2006 :: Plum Local IV :: 21. .From Family to Government ::
With attribution these words may be freely shared, but permission
is required if quoted in an item for sale or rent

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