Beginnings — The Individual Differentiation and the Smallest Society, by Michael G. Heller
Beginnings — Individual
A sketch ..
An attempt to explain something so complex as society is necessarily going to require simplifications. One might think the easiest simplifications would be those concerning the simplest societies. This is not the case at all. Societies are bordered and binding interactions, and it is true enough that the simplest society is the one that contains the fewest interactions. But these are the foundational interactions, the most elementary interactions we know, and they do not necessarily become simpler over time despite the layers of governance that have evolved or been built upon and around them over the ages.
We need only consider how far up the scale of complexity and controversy has become the debate about biological sex. Is a man a woman or a man? This is a question closely bound up with demands for the general freedom to identify oneself as one chooses rather than as society chooses. It is one of political components of what I call the depersonalisati…