[MUD-Dev] Trouble Makers or Regular Citizens

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Sun, 9 Apr 2000, Jon Lambert wrote:

> I've always thought that diversity is antithetical to community building.
> Strong communities form because of commonly held values.  The more 
> diverse a community is the less commonly held values it has.  The less 
> commonly held values a community has, the less value individuals place 
> in being a member of that community.  The less value individuals place 
> in a community, the less productive that community becomes.  
> 'Productive' being defined as the rate a community produces anything 
> of value.  As diversity increases and commonly held values decrease a 
> community will reach a point where the only commonly held value is 
> diversity.  At that point it ceases to function as a tool of production, 
> it just exists.
> 
> Peer pressure does scale with size, it does not scale with diversity.
> So the issue is one of managing diversity, not necessarily size.

This is an excellent point I think. What comes immediately to mind is WWII
Japan. The country as a whole was an  _extremely_ strong community even
though it had 100 million people. The trick, as you correctly point out,
is that there was very very little diversity. Beliefs, etc came down in a
hierarchy from the Emperor and the country was united as has rarely been
seen in history by this fact. Peer pressure was extreme enough to cause
suicides, etc. The US forces often had to wipe out every last Japanese
soldier on the islands they assaulted, because the japanese simply did not
believe in surrendur. There were numerous reports of hundreds of japanese
civilians on these islands leaping to their deaths, sometimes holding
their children, from island cliffs upon the US takeover. There was
essentially no questioning the Emperor and His wisdom, and very very
little deviation from that mandated norm of behavior and belief.

--matt




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