Having a society in which an artist can mingle as social equals with the billionaire and admit the Nobel scientists and the philanthropist is fundamental to our mental health! If I’m a programmer, I don’t need to be competing with 7 billion people, and the few hundred billionaires, for self-esteem. I can just consider the computing community. Better yet, I might only have to consider the functional programming community, or perhaps just the
Haskell programming community. Or to take another example: if I decide to commit to the English Wikipedia subculture, as it were, instead of American culture, I am no longer mentally dealing with 300 million competitors and threats; I am dealing with just a few thousand.
It is a more manageable tribe. It’s closer to the D
unbar number, which still applies online
. Even if I’m on the bottom of the Wikipedia heap, that’s fine. As long as I know where I am! I don’t have to be a rich elite to be happy; a master craftsman is content
, and “a c
at may look at a king”.
Leaving a culture, and joining a subculture, is a way for the monkey mind to cope with the modern world.