Hope for the world

Over the last few centuries, our humanity has explored two major avenues to succeed in living together: right and left.

The first one says: if I take good care of my neighbour, my close friends and family, the 150 people of Dunbar, and everyone else does the same thing, from close to close, we should have social peace. The limit is quite obvious: these 150 are of my religion, my skin colour, my region, my social level... so that it is difficult in fact to make all these people coexist.

The second one says: no, it is necessary to come together at the national level, 10 million, 60 million people, and to manage, in order to live together, to coordinate so that a common direction emerges. The limit, this time, is that it is very difficult to empathize with 60 million people, and therefore agree to compromise for it, for this famous "common good".

In fact, it seems that this threshold of 150 people is related to the size of our neocortex, thus a physical limitation of our brain.

"But I have 2,000 friends on Facebook," you might say. Yes, but if I asked you to list them, how many would there be left? And in fact, you'll probably agree with me that these 2,000 aren't all really your friends. There are relationships, acquaintances, sometimes even quasi-unknown ones. So how do we qualify these 1,850? If "friend" is abusive, what do you call them? The term "Facebook Friend","Facebook Friend", seems to be becoming popular. Anyway, they're not complete strangers. You can see a bit of their lives, who are their loved ones, where they live, more or less full of other things. If you had to choose between lending 100€ to such a "Facebook friend", or to a complete stranger, the first one would probably have your favor, it's easier to find it.

If we rank all these people according to your level of collusion, we get a decreasing curve, a gradual degeneration of confidence. This is a well-known phenomenon in the digital world, the Long Taine. In a similar way, Amazon has 150 best-sellers in reference, selling millions of copies, then millions of books sold at 150 copies, most of which would never have had the chance to exist before the digital age. And the few that would have been printed, would be considered as flops, failures, errors.

So we all develop a "long trail" of friends, a population of several thousand people that we know to varying degrees but never intense. They are sometimes called our "weak bonds", or our second circle.