Intro to Collective Action: the course

Why cooperation fails, how it succeeds, and how it scales: from arms races and the commons to AI, climate and the metacrisis. These are the chapter pages of the course, led by Rufus Pollock. Each page holds the full argument, with the images, clips, footnotes and questions to think about; the live sessions cover less, so the pages are the place to catch up or go deeper.

The course runs as a ladder. First, a portable tool for diagnosing collective action problems. Then a climb through the scales at which humans have made cooperation work, from small groups to tribes to states. Along the way we test a claim: that culture leads each jump in scale (not always, not alone), and what that says about cooperating as a planet.

Chapters

1. Chapter 0: Intro and motivation – why collective action, and why now.
2. Chapter 1: The basics – what collective action is, and how to diagnose it.
3. Chapter 2: The village toolkit – how small groups make cooperation hold.
4. Chapter 3: The manufactured tribe – how we stretched kinship to strangers.
5. Chapter 4: Strangers and states – coming soon

Start with Chapter 0 →

About the course

The 2026 run is a prototype, five live sessions in late October and early November. Course page and sign-up: seedsofrenaissance.org/courses/collective-action.

The rest of this wiki holds the concepts the course draws on, such as the Prisoner's Dilemma, the Stag hunt and Patterns of collective action. Research behind the course (candidate examples and cases) is in research/.