back of a spreadsheet; back of the net

 Long before I met MLW I moved out of the house that I shared with Bluebird and Mother of Bluebird. The house was owned by MOB’s parents and for a while, before they moved to France, all five of us had lived there together.

 Living there was not a happy experience for me. It was not my home, I was not happy with most of the relationships I had in the house, and a machine for living in the house was badly designed and badly operated. Demands were made of my that I was very uncomfortable with.

 When I moved out I moved into a shared room in a house in Swindon owned by a pair of brothers who owned perhaps 50 houses in Swindon. As a branding thing one wall in every room was painted a deep purple / midnight blue colour. When, in time, MLW came to visit we started referring to it as The Little Purple Room. This is about how things were for me before MLW tho.

 The room was quite a large double bedroom. It has space for a double bed, a desk and chair, a comfortable chair, some plants and some book cases. It overlooked the railway line and a large sign for the M4 (the way out). It was in the red light district of Swindon, about five minutes walk from my current work, from the station and from the best kebab shop in the world. It was a simple place to exist and therefore a simple place to concentrate on being alive. It was not salubrious but it was mine.

 My housemates were not chosen by me. They were at best odd, at worst quite strange. Mainly they were very different from me. I was very much aware that I was a gentleman down on my luck and that my situation would change for the better. This helped. It helped to be reminded that I was in a state of transformation and that through my own efforts I would better my situation. I was also given an opportunity to define “better”.

 (For those that wish there are a fund of humorous anecdotes from my time in the Little Purple Room which may form the basis of my November novel if I don’t fancy doing the Elizabethan spy novel I have in mind).

 What mattered to me was that I could make the LPR a machine for living my life the way I wanted to live it. I had sufficient material comfort in the way I needed it in order to be comfortable doing what I wanted to do. I put a great deal of effort into designing the machine because I had very limited physical, social and financial resources. This really focused me on what made me happy.

 Over a few months the room came to be mine and to work in the way I wanted it to work. I could be alone there. I could entertain there. I could have some of my housemates in for a beer. I could, with some effort, have a girlfriend to dinner and make her feel special in Shakespeare’s Second Best Bed kind of a way. Bluebird could come and visit me there. People I did not want to speak to had to ask permission to come into my space.

 It was also very important that the room was mine. I was beholden to no-one except for the rent and for the social niceties of communal living. I could be the me that I needed to be at that time. 

 It helped that I was only ever passing through. The LPR was home, but only for now. Now would be defined by events but also by me. I took ownership of the room not by painting the walls but by deciding that I would buy purple bed-linen and purple napkins. It was not so much home as the promise of home to come.

 What I learnt from my 18 months in the Little Purple Room was that I could be happy in a one room bed-sit in a shared house. Not only were material things not something that made me happy by possessing them but I also learned exactly what material things made me most happy through my use of them.

 I learnt that I could be self-contained for a long time, that I could carry the promise of home with me for a  long time, that a simple life could be a rewarding life.

 I also learned that the thing that was constantly missing from my time in the LPR were other people.  The LPR was a good box to be alone in, an okay box to be with other people but relationships were important.

Inter alia this emerged in a fascinating conversation with star_tourmaline  last night. It’s primarily directed at her but, obviously, anyone can play.

We were talking about alpha males and pack behaviour, me from an improv status games point of view. Neither of us wanted to divert the conversation but here is the cul-de-sac that I was strolling up.

Pack behaviour is an evolved behaviour. As social animals it’s a behaviour we fall back into. People often behave as if they lived in a pack or a troop and not in a city. (Civilisation is the art of living in cities where you don’t know everyone). Through the application of reason and wisdom we can learn to live and work together better. I don’t mean we only tap into our reason and only deal with thoughts not feelings. I mean we consciously go about designing the society or organisation that we want to live in and set about encouraging the behaviours that support best living, rather than revert to instinctive behaviour.

Instinctive behaviour is often not your friend. Your instincts are largely designed for a small number of environments and a limited set of emergencies where your personal survival is only required on average.

 Here is why I think it might not serve us well to rely on pack instincts. Firstly, pack behaviour is about the strength of groups directed against other groups and individuals. It’s  about structured co-operation. Nothing wrong here. Mainly, it is about rationing access to sex and breeding opportunities.  Your position in the hierarchy determines how many breeding opportunities you have and how much group resource is put into supporting your breeding success.

I put forward the testable hypothesis that the closer the kinship relationships between group members the more curtailed access to breeding opportunities for non-alphas will be and the more rigid the hierarchy will be. If we are all related there is no need for all of us to breed.

I also think that the more opportunities there are for either functional specialism or different ways to make a living the less rigid the hierarchy and the more open access to breeding opportunities.

So in a pack where members are distant cousins rather than siblings and where there is more than one way to make a living there will be more individual freedom. I offer a comparison of mole rats and chimps.

I am wary of a placing reliance on a system which is mainly evolved for preventing fraternal bloodshed over access to sex for anything more complex than stopping us killing each other all the time. Constitutional democracies are a designed system for a reason (and with reason).

This is my second issue with relying on pack behaviour. It is an evolved system. So it has emerged from what has come before, which was not perfect. It hasn’t been designed from scratch to suit the current situation. It is cobbled together out of the bits left over from the last attempt to do something new. Evolution is also brutally indifferent to the wants of the individual. It follows a satisficing strategy (good enough with the resources we have) to get as many genes as possible into the next generation. It cares not a jot if you are happy, or even if you die. So long as on average some genes are passed on, the individual is not important.

I think pack behaviour is therefore unsuited for the large communities we live in with their rich and complex abundance of ways to get by and with our self-aware focus on the wants of the individual.

It’s why I am wary of any one who tries to lead by being an alpha male. As a way of leading a group it rather went out with the stone age.