Hakka Thet
This is the basic Lego block of our society.
You are at the center of it. You lend your efforts to someone for their well being or borrow other’s effort for your own well being. And, there is a ledger you use to keep track of what you owe others, and what others owe you. Whether we are a parent taking care of a child, a newborn, a homemaker taking care of the household, or a worker in a factory — we all are constantly serving each other towards making all our lives safe and comfortable.
Sometimes, our efforts are directly delivered to the members of the society. For example, a barber offers his services to the members of the society for grooming their hair. But most of the time, our efforts go towards creating products that benefit society. The products we create serve as a store for our efforts, making it convenient to be consumed at a later time or consumed by someone far away. For example, a farmer’s hard efforts in farming the land get conveniently stored in bushels of grains.
“A product is a vehicle for us to store and deliver our efforts”
In a simple social structure like those of our forefathers, individuals directly interconnected with others, helping each other in finding food, shelter and partners. Our collective tribal memory served as the ledger of good deeds without requiring elaborate schemes.
As we advanced, our skills became very specialized: a farmer had to develop skills to predict the season to grow the corps, and a potter had to learn the art of working with the mud. With specialized skills came complex products, and with complex products came the difficulty of establishing relative value. How many gallons of milk does a sack of rice equate to? So we developed the ‘Market’, a place where we could negotiate and barter our goods and services. Then again, not all the producers had the produce at the same time or produced at the same rate. A farmer had to wait for the harvest to bring the fruits of his labor to the market, whereas a cowherd was able to bring gallons of milk every day. So, ledger became important. Cowherd was glad to provide milk in exchange for the product when the farmer would make the harvest.
When the industrial age dawned, transporting our produce and information to faraway lands became possible. As we started exchanging goods and services with faceless people in faraway lands, a simple trust-based relationship could no longer cope. We created elaborate systems to establish transact with strangers, and we created governments to enforce our contracts [Raghu Rajaram eloquently details the connection between the community, government, and the market in Third Pillar].
However simple the basic Lego block is, it still raises several questions:
Why do we collaborate? When do we compete? Why do we strive for safety and comfort? Do all animal societies exhibit this behavior? Do microorganisms exhibit cooperative tendencies? What is the role of memory? Are these forces of cooperation as fundamental as the physical forces that govern the world around use? Could a model be so reductive that it ignores love, altruism & evil?
While these questions remain open and ripe for many other journeys, we can set them aside. We do not need to understand the chemistry of plastics, nor the physical forces that bind the blocks together in order to build realistic and interesting models with Lego blocks. This journey is about discovering and appreciating the world through miniature models we could build this with a simple block.
