A tale of two cities

As we continue to set the foundations of our development, we will have to confront implications of the philosophical bases immanent in those foundations but remain implicit and not given much thought.
The following is excerpted from the book, “Cities made differently” by Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber, in which they analogise societies to cities, of which we consider two: A City оf Runners and a City as a Family. We should reflect on creating a middle ground for Guyana.
“The people who live in the City of Runners city believe that real life is all about constant competition. They find it fascinating or even necessary to keep track of who among them is more important, who is richer, smarter, more beautiful, or more worthy. There are many ideas about how the city came to have habits like this.
One of the city’s revered philosophers, Thomas Hobbes, believed that the natural state of human beings is to seek violent domination over their neighbours, and that society without the authority of the sovereign would quickly turn into a battle of all against all. Constant competition between people is thus seen as an enjoyable game as compared to real war, which is always lurking around the corner.
Naturally, in cities like this, there must be some who are poor, ugly, and unhappy. Just as in some children’s games, there are winners and losers. People living in the city of runners foster an admiration for winning in their kids, and an ambition to surpass their peers in all areas. Children in the city of runners have no interest in learning together, sharing, or mutual aid. Helping someone pass an exam is considered “cheating” and is strictly punished. All their lives, adults are engaged in constant competition over beauty, skill, and wealth. Runners believe that people who live differently from them and who refuse to play their games simply choose to be losers
Then there is the City as a Family. Imagine a city without any strangers, where everything is shared, and everyone looks after each other. There are no shops, no money, and no danger at all. We think of the family as a group that practices “basic communism”: from each according to his ability to each according to his needs. Any family is thought to be protected by bonds of kinship from the cruel laws of the outside world. Unlike businesses, rarely will a family throw out a sick child or an elderly parent because they are no longer “revenue-generating assets.”
According to Roman law, which still underlies the value system of Western societies, a family was all those people living within the household of a paterfamilias or father whose authority over them was recognized as absolute. Under the protection of her father, a woman might be spared abuse from her husband, but their children, slaves, and other dependents were his to do with as he wanted.
According to early Roman law, a father was fully within his rights to whip, torture, or sell them. A father could even execute his children, provided that he found them to have committed capital crimes. With his slaves, he didn’t even need that excuse. The patriarchal family is also the model for authoritarianism. In ancient Rome, the patriarch had the right to treat his household members as property rather than as equal human beings.
The Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that humankind originally lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers composed of close friends and relatives until big cities and agriculture emerged, and with them wars, greed, and exploitation.
However, archaeology shows us numerous examples of how people in different times and across different parts of the Earth lived in large metropolitan areas while managing their collective affairs on a fairly egalitarian basis. At the same time, there have always been small communities where status inequality prevailed and a privileged minority at the top benefited by exploiting the rest.
We know from our personal experience that in almost every family there are elements of both authoritarianism and baseline communism. This contradiction never fully goes away but different cultures handle it differently.”

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