by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright October 2015
In Neolithic Village environments there are hunters and gatherers. These activities are both helping the village prosper, but the thinking styles that make them work well are quite different. The result is that mankind has both a hunting mentality and a gathering mentality and different people are dominated by one or the other.
This section is about the ramifications of the hunting mentality, and its linkage to ambition and the willingness of some people in a community to migrate in service of their ambition.
Gathering is done mostly close to the village and is very much a communal activity -- the villagers tend to do their gathering in the same areas and all move from one area to the next as a particular area gets gathered-out. One reason to do things this way is safety, both for the gatherers and the children who are accompanying them.
Hunters are also cooperative, but in a much wider-ranging way. Some are scouting, some are ambush hunting, and team hunting takes place when the animals being hunted are too much for a single person to tackle.
The result is that hunting thinking is more about solo effort, and more about discovering new ways of doing things than gathering is -- gathering is comparatively monotonous.
These differences are the foundations for the differences in hunting and gathering mentalities.
One of the ramifications of this is that hunter mentality village members are more willing to migrate away from home. In the Neolithic Village environment they are willing to seek out new, fertile hunting grounds and gathering fields. In the Industrial Age environment they are more willing to leave the village behind and migrate to find productive work in cities and factories that are far away. An example of the converse of this is people saying, "I don't want to leave home. I would have to leave all my friends." This is gatherer thinking predominating.
And, related, these hunter-thinking people are the ambitious ones. They are the ones who are ready to explore new ways of doing things and ready to expend a lot of effort in return for reaping substantial benefits when they discover and accomplish something valuable.
In terms of instinctive thinking, what they have discovered and exploited can be thought of as a nice windfall of some nature. The ambitious thinker wants to keep much of the benefit for himself or herself, and invest much of it for future benefit after investing techniques are invented and become available. The converse, the gatherer way of thinking, is to use such a windfall to engage in a lot of celebrating with friends and neighbors until it runs out. Then life goes on as it did before the windfall happened.
Hunting and gathering support different styles of thinking. As a community enters the Industrial Age, these different thinking styles result in different lifestyles. The hunting style of thinking supports activities such as ambition, investing and migration. The gathering style of thinking supports fairness styles of thinking and using windfalls to celebrate more.
--The End--