Our firm contention is that the fullest expressions of human potential requires a village. A village is, in fact, the proper unit of human thriving. This assertion is based on a deep understanding of our lineage history and our neurophysiology. Our lineage history was in small band hunter gatherer groups, the ancestral context in which humans lived and flourished for 95-99% of our lineage history (depending on whether you assert the lineage history to be 200,000 or 2 million years). The implicit goal/ role of culture in this period was to turn on and stabilize the human connection system as the neurophysiological and cultural baseline of community. Although rarely articulated explicitly, cultural activities, norms, organization, epistemology, and cosmology buttressed this realization. Maintaining connection and a ventral baseline among members as the collective field for the community was practiced and maintained by healers, ritualists, and through ceremonies, group activities, conflict resolution, and governance.
Members of these communities, therefore, while experiencing tremendous physical stress (life was very difficult) experienced almost none of the social stress (isolation, anxiety, depression) that undergirds modern life. Children had many allo-parents (second mothers, father), aunts and uncles and Elders, and what we in modernity have exalted as the nuclear family was ensphered by a context of a larger set of organizing relationships, including complex sets of social relationships with mentors, social societies, and those of community and the Living World itself.
Ancestrally villages did not form by choice. They formed by necessity. We contend that the forcing functions of the present moment, including various collapse scenarios, e.g., climate, social breakdown, and economic collapse provide the necessary forcings at this time to cause villages to emerge as a unit of greatest survival potentiality. We propose furthermore that whether you believe that the future is going to be better than the present (optimistic view) or that the future if going to be more difficult than the present (realistic view), the greatest optimization of human flourishing happens within the context of villaging. Our research, over the past three years, with 15,000 people in 50 countries has demonstrated definitively that human wellbeing correlates directly to the percentage of present time people spend in connection states.
