The ideas underlying life in kin-based societies differ fundamentally from those underlying life in Western societies. The key differences involve wholeness and scale. Kin-based societies provide a life of wholeness and connectedness - people produce what they consume, live and deal with risk and hardship within a reinforcing system of mutual aid, and have a common set of values, life chances, and life expectations - an "economy of affection." The scale is small, local. Western industrial capitalist society provides simultaneously opportunities, risks, rewards, uncertainties and ambiguities. It celebrates individualism. In capitalist economies the features of kin-based societies become fragmented or destroyed. Individuals become interconnected
