"every piece of the few useful patches of land in the western and eastern settlements was owned either by some individual farm or else communally by a group of farms, which thereby held the rights to all of that land's resources, including not only its pastures and hay but also its caribou, turf, berries, and even its driftwood. hence a greenlander wanting to go it alone couldn't just go off hunting and foraging by himself. in iceland if you lost your farm or got ostracized, you could try living somewhere else-on an island, an abandoned farm, or the interior highlands. you didn't have that opportunity in greenland where there wasn't any 'somewhere else' to which to go.
the result was a tightly controlled society, in which a few chiefs of the richest farms could prevent anyone else form doing something that seemed to threaten their interests-including anyone experimenting with innovation that did not promise to help the chiefs...we shall see that this consideration may help us undrstand the eventual fate of greenland norse society."
Collapse by jared diamond p.236
elites positively sanctioning communal behavior that strengthen their positions and negatively sanctioning that which does not is nothing new anywhere. the long history of the stuggles of working people to organize themselves and have some degree of control over the terms and conditions of the work they do is well documented. the resistance to that organization by business and governmental leaders is equally well evidenced. it is partly what james madison had in mind when he cited the threat that an "interested and overbearing majority" posed to the rights of a small but economically powerful minority in Federalist X. the struggle goes on today and labor usually finds itself facing negative sanctions of their attempts to form reconized organizations. additionally there is today heated debate on the subject of climate change. those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo are usually climate change deniers, scoffing at the unsound science and arrogance of "warmers". entrenched and politically powerful due to the flourishing of the system of government by special interst enshrined in the constitution derived form the philosphical leadership of hamilton, jay , and madison, those deniers control multiple media outlets they use to proselytize their views and propagandize the masses even though real science and any small ammount of common sense tell us that things are indeed changing and not for the better. the greenland norse disappeared after a run of about five hundred years because the climate they exisited in was changing and the chiefs refused to recognize the need to change their culture in ways that would have undermined their positions. the inuit survived the change by hunting ring seal, whales, and fishing proving that adaptabillity meant survival. the greenland norse, clinging to a european culture and agriculture that they had brought with them in the face of obvious cliamte change vanished...perhaps it was a version of james axtell's "reactive change"...the english coming to america could no longer be english, but they refused to become native american and so , as a reaction, became americans...the greenland norse, in refusining to become inuit evanesced we are facing a similar dilemma with an elite that stands to lose significantly in terms of wealth and power if we undertake the necessary changes. are we going to make the same errors and suffer the same fate?
