How to Grow a Group Part Two

So what are we trying to do when we say ‘grow’?

I’ve argued that the compulsion to grow commercially or economically is just that - a compulsion, driven by social, cultural and perhaps psychological pressures that we have become so used to that to question them seems heretical. It’s part of the general belief that modern life consists of being active, reaching for some kind of advancement, defeating competition, striving to be ‘upwardly mobile’, and so on. Unless one is engaged in a constant battle to grow and to accumulate wealth, so this thinking goes, one will slip behind, lose one’s place in society, end up in ruination and be cast off the social ladder into some kind of homeless abyss. And those who fail to live up to this model, in this day and age, are indeed made homeless and cast out, politically, socially and psychologically.

Was it always thus?</