Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Hunting Party: Why uncertainty is making Hunters important again

The Hunting Party: Why uncertainty is making Hunters important again

Kempt B/Ssc, Chris

Paperback

ManagementGeneral SociologySelf-Help

ISBN13: 9798170785780
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 19 2026
Pages: 222
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.56 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Revised second edition, previously published as The Hunting Party by Chris Kempt, with a new foreword and substantially expanded material.

I wrote this book in six days. It took me 51 years.

It began with three establishments near my home. They were separated by a few dozen metres, drawing from essentially the same people, the same weather, the same economy and the same supply of late-night idiots. Yet they behaved like completely different social systems. In one, tension regularly spilled into the street. In another, remarkably young staff seemed able to hold a room together with almost no visible exercise of authority. I wanted to know why.

The Hunting Party is what happened when I kept pulling at that question. It moves through childhood, fifty years of watching people, building companies, games and technology, relationships, cancer, neurodivergence, organisational culture, propaganda and finally artificial intelligence. Along the way I began questioning some assumptions I had treated as obvious. What if there is no best human brain? What if characteristics we describe as deficits are sometimes strategies suited to a different environment? What if some people are naturally better at searching uncertain terrain while others are better at taking something valuable and making it stable? I call those strategies Hunters and Farmers. Neither is better. A group composed entirely of either eventually has a problem.

The more interesting question is what happens when they become afraid. Scarcity changes behaviour. A Hunter who once scanned for opportunity can start scanning for danger. A Farmer who once cultivated something valuable can begin trying to control it. People do this. Relationships do it. Organisations do it too. The book follows that idea into narcissistic behaviour, information control, organisational dysfunction, the strange power of stories to change what people genuinely see, and the point where systems designed to protect themselves begin defeating themselves.

This isn't a tidy theory of human behaviour. I distrust tidy theories. It is a collection of observations tested against one another, from pubs and games studios to Socrates, Vladislav Surkov, ferry companies and generative AI, asking the same question I've been asking for most of my life: Why are they doing this?

I ended up somewhere I didn't expect. Human beings may be powerful precisely because we are different. The useful unit isn't necessarily the individual. It may be the combination. A healthy hunting party doesn't contain five copies of its strongest member. It contains people who notice different things, solve different problems and are secure enough to let those differences combine. There is no best human brain. There may only be better ecologies for allowing different ones to work together.

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