A belief in Society
Humans are inherently social creatures, forming groups of varying size and complexity in order to experience meaning, and to foster productive cooperation towards shared goals.
Quotations
“All of us are trim tabs”
One guy, he had nothing to do with the movies, but I’ve taken a lot of direction from him. That’s Bucky Fuller. Bucky, he’s most famous for the geodesic dome, but he made a great observation about these oceangoing tankers. And he noticed that the engineers were particularly challenged by how to turn this thing, you know? They got this big rudder, it took too much energy to turn the rudder to turn the ship. So they came up with a brilliant idea. Let’s put a little rudder on the big rudder. The little rudder will turn the big rudder, the big rudder will turn the ship. The little rudder is called a trim tab.
Bucky made the analogy that a trim tab is an example of how the individual is connected to society and how we affect society. And I like to think of myself as a trim tab. All of us are trim tabs. We might seem like we’re not up to the task, but we are, man. We’re alive! We can make a difference! We can turn this ship in the way we wanna go, man! Towards love, creating a healthy planet for all of us.
Jeff Bridges, from the speech “Golden Globes Speech”, 06 Jan 2019
“The American cult of the individual”
The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical care.
Wade Davis, from the article “Rolling Stone”, 06 Aug 2020, © Rolling Stone, LLC
“A beast or a god”
But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state. A social instinct is implanted in all men by nature.
Aristotle, from the book Politics, 350 BC
“Capitalism as a Market Society”
Readers may be surprised by the absence of any mention of ‘capital’ or ‘capitalism’ in the book. I chose to leave out such words not because there is anything wrong with them but because, loaded as they are with heavy baggage, they get in the way of illuminating the essence of things. So, instead of speaking about capitalism, I use the term ‘market society.’ Instead of ‘capital,’ you will find more normal words like ‘machinery’ and ‘produced means of production.’ Why use jargon if we can avoid it?
Yanis Varoufakis, from the book Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works -- and How It Fails, 08 May 2018
“Capitalism works best in societies where there are high levels of trust”
Adam Smith, the great theorist of free trade economics, is revered for his The Wealth of Nations. His companion work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is mostly forgotten. Yet it is the more important of the two. In it, Smith sets out why capitalism works best in societies where there are high levels of trust between its participants. When social trust falls, the cost of doing business rises. Even in the late eighteenth century, at the dawn of modern growth, Smith grasped the psychological importance of possessing faith in a better future.
Edward Luce, from the book The Retreat of Western Liberalism, 2017, © Edward Luce
“Ceremonies are designed to”
In all cultures, ceremonies are designed to communicate the experience of one group of people to the wider community. When people bury loved ones, when they wed, when they graduate from college, the respective ceremonies communicate something essential to the people who are watching.
Sebastian Junger, from the book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, 2016, © Sebastian Junger
“Chaos and Mediocrity”
Is this one legacy of the sixties? That after flinging open the doors to a world previously known only at the margins of society, the pioneers would move on, leaving the masses to add drugs to the myriad forces pulling our society towards chaos and mediocrity?
Joe Boyd, from the book White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, 2006, © Joe Boyd
“The chicken experiment”
But the chicken experiments suggest that this logic is flawed – even for farm animals where eugenics is a common practice. It seems Francis Galton was deeply mistaken about the relationship between individual abilities and societal welfare. The number of eggs laid by an individual hen is not an individual trait so much as it is a social trait, because it depends upon how members of the group behave towards each other. If the individuals who profit most from a social group do not contribute to the group’s welfare, and if their traits are heritable, then selecting for them results in the collapse of the society.
David Sloan Wilson, from the interview “This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution”, 2019, © David Sloan Wilson
“Civilization was a thin and precarious crust”
We were not aware that civilization was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skilfully put across and guilefully preserved.
John Maynard Keynes, from the essay “My Early Beliefs”, 1938
“Cooperative communication”
What allowed us to thrive while other humans went extinct was a kind of cognitive superpower: a particular type of friendliness called cooperative communication. We are experts at working together with other people, even strangers. We can communicate with someone we’ve never met about a shared goal and work together to accomplish it.
Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, from the book Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding our Origins and Rediscovering our Common Humanity, 2020, © Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods
“Culture can be either mutualistic or predatory”
Culture can be either mutualistic or predatory – that’s our choice as a society. We can choose to create societies that prioritize what we consider good.
Victor Hwang, from the interview “Evolution, Complexity, and the Third Way of Entrepreneurship: A Capstone Conversation with Victor Hwang”, 06 Aug 2020, © Victor Hwang
“The economy is too important to leave to the economists”
This book grew out of my Greek publisher’s invitation, back in 2013, to talk directly to young people about the economy. My reason for writing it was the conviction that the economy is too important to leave to the economists.
Yanis Varoufakis, from the book Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works -- and How It Fails, 08 May 2018
“The encoding of the Tribe Drive in our DNA”
As we explore the natural history of tribalism, we will see that some three hundred thousand years ago humans chanced upon a revolutionary adaptation that led to the encoding of the Tribe Drive in our DNA. This was the evolution of nested groups, each with their own particular symbols – and enshrined shared myths and values – that bound participants together in trusting relationships.
David R. Samson, from the book Our Tribal Future: How to Channel our Foundational Human Instincts Into a Force for Good, 2023
“The eternal struggle between good and evil”
Cancer provides an example of multilevel selection and the eternal contest between the behaviors associated with good and evil. With cancer, the group is the multicellular organism and the individuals are the cells. Just as the traits associated with good are vulnerable to the traits associated with evil for organisms living in social groups, normal cells are vulnerable to cancer cells within multicellular organisms. In the same way groups of morally virtuous individuals outcompete groups crippled by selfishness, multicellular organisms free of cancer outcompete multicellular organisms riddled by cancer. The eternal struggle between good and evil takes place within our own bodies and has since the origin of multicellular organisms roughly a billion years ago.
David Sloan Wilson, from the interview “This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution”, 2019, © David Sloan Wilson
“Flexible cooperation with strangers”
To the best of our knowledge, only Sapiens can cooperate in very flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. This concrete capability – rather than an eternal soul or some unique kind of consciousness – explains our mastery of planet Earth.
Yuval Noah Harari, from the book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, 2017, © Yuval Noah Harari
“Freedom of Judgment”
Since we have the rare good fortune to live in a commonwealth where the freedom of judgment is fully granted to the individual citizen and he may worship God as he pleases, and where nothing is esteemed dearer and more precious than freedom, I think I am undertaking no ungrateful or unprofitable task in demonstrating that not only can this freedom be granted without endangering piety and the peace of the commonwealth, but also the peace of the commonwealth and piety depend on this freedom.
Baruch Spinoza, from the book Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 1670
“The freedom to enact other forms of social existence”
If something did go terribly wrong in human history – and given the current state of the world, it’s hard to deny something did – then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of human history.
David Graeber and David Wengrow, from the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, 2021, © David Graeber and David Wengrow
“Frivolous and fanciful distinctions”
So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distrinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.
James Madison, from the paper “The Federalist no. 10”, 1787
“The great primeval contract of eternal society”
Society… is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular State is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath whith holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place.
Edmund Burke, from the book Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790
“The group of people that you would both help feed and help defend”
Two of the behaviors that set early humans apart were the systematic sharing of food and altruistic group defense. Other primates did very little of either but, increasingly, hominids did, and those behaviors set them on an evolutionary path that produced the modern world. The earliest and most basic definition of community – of tribe – would be the group of people that you would both help feed and help defend. A society that doesn’t offer its members the chance to act selflessly in these ways isn’t a society in any tribal sense of the word; it’s just a political entity that, lacking enemies, will probably fall apart on its own.
Sebastian Junger, from the book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, 2016, © Sebastian Junger
“Humans are the tribal animal”
Humans … cooperate based on kinship and friendship, but we also have more powerful forms of social glue that other species lack. From the early Stone Age, we started evolving specialized brain systems that facilitated sharing knowledge in groups. If someone in your foraging band figured out how to dislodge coconuts from a tree, you would learn by watching, and soon the whole group would share the skill. Then you could work in closer coordination with each other by following this shared script. In this way, groups living in different ecologies developed different pools of common knowledge: different cultures. Members of each group gained increased mutual understanding; even if the topic wasn’t coconuts, the common ground of shared coconut expertise could help in learning other survival-relevant skills. Group membership became increasingly manifest in behavior, making peers more similar, predictable, and sympathetic. Our forebears began to experience the elevating sense of “Us,” an expansion of identity beyond close kinship and direct friendship to a broader group. In these larger clans, they began to highlight their membership through distinctive styles of dress and self-adornment. At the same time, human brains kept evolving to share new kinds of knowledge, such as reputation in these broader groups, all of which further boosted our fitness as social animals. In time, interactions using new forms of knowledge, such as ritual, coalesced across clans to forge broad networks of sharing in mates, resources, and knowledge. Humans began feeling solidarity with these large communities (thousands of other people living in small groups nested within larger groups) held together by the glue of common cultural knowledge. This form of social organization is not a hive or a troop but a tribe.
Surviving through sharing knowledge in these solidaristic, nested groups is tribal living. With apologies to Aristotle, it’s misleading to call humans “the social animal.” We are more accurately “the tribal animal.”
Michael Morris, from the book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together, 2024, © Michael Morris
“If you'll just rattle your jewelry”
For our last number, I’d like to ask your help. Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands. And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry.
John Lennon, from the comment “Royal Variety Performance in London”, 4 Nov 1963
“I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city”
The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out. But this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss’s daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even have got rich – small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader’s Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I’ll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.
Raymond Chandler, from the book The Long Goodbye, 1953
“Individualized lifestyles deeply brutalizing to the human spirit”
Most primates, including humans, are intensely social, and there are very few instances of lone primates surviving in the wild. A modern soldier returning from combat – or a survivor of Sarajevo – goes from the kind of close-knit group that humans evolved for, back into a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, and personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good. Even if he or she is part of a family, that is not the same as belonging to a group that shares resources and experiences almost everything collectively. Whatever the technological advances of modern society – and they’re nearly miraculous – the individualized lifestyles that those technologies spawn seem to be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit.
Sebastian Junger, from the book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, 2016, © Sebastian Junger
“Investing in other people's children”
All of the great advances in our society have come when we have made investments in other people’s children.
Robert Putnam, from the book WTF: What's the Future and Why It's Up To Us, 1968, © Timothy F. O'Reilly
“It's the rich class that's winning”
There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.
Warren Buffett, from the interview “New York Times”, Nov 26, 2006, © The New York Times Company
“Labor is the Superior of Capital”
Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
Abraham Lincoln, from the speech “Speech to Congress”, Dec. 3, 1861
“The legitimate object of government”
The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves – in their separate, and individual capacities. In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere. The desirable things which the individuals of a people can not do, or can not well do, for themselves, fall into two classes: those which have relation to wrongs, and those which have not. Each of these branch off into an infinite variety of subdivisions. The first – that in relation to wrongs – embraces all crimes, misdemeanors, and nonperformance of contracts. The other embraces all which, in its nature, and without wrong, requires combined action, as public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased, and the machinery of government itself. From this it appears that if all men were just, there still would be some, though not so much, need for government.
Abraham Lincoln, from the article “Fragment on Government”, 1854
“Living in small groups has been baked into our psyches”
Living in small groups has been baked into our psyches by thousands of generations of genetic evolution, and small groups need to remain “cells” in the cultural evolution of larger-scale societies.
David Sloan Wilson, from the interview “This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution”, 2019, © David Sloan Wilson
“Many humans just don't like their families”
There is an obvious objection to evolutionary models which assume that our strongest social ties are based on close biological kinship: many humans just don’t like their families very much. And this appears to be just as true of present-day hunter-gatherers as anybody else. Many seem to find the prospect of living their entire lives surrounded by close relatives so unpleasant that they will travel very long distances just to get away from them.
David Graeber and David Wengrow, from the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, 2021, © David Graeber and David Wengrow
“Mass Movements and Boredom”
There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom. In almost all the descriptions of the periods preceding the rise of mass movements there is reference to vast ennui; and in their earliest stages mass movements are more likely to find sympathizers among the bored than among the exploited and suppressed. To a deliberate fomenter of mass upheavals, the report that people are bored stiff should be at least as encouraging as that they are suffering from intolerable economic or political abuses.
Eric Hoffer, from the book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, 1951
“Model II Decision-Making”
Model II encourages the individual to maximize his uniqueness. If, in doing so, he should arrive at goals that differ from those developed by others, he will have done so under conditions of openness, trust and risk-taking. The individual would therefore feel free to discuss his differences openly with the group. Moreover, if the individual is in a subordinate power position, and if he feels he had adequate opportunity to dissuade the group and that the group publicly confronted and tested all differences, then the individual will probably be motivated to work toward the group goal but still be motivated to generate new information that may change the group’s decision. This means that one can be externally committed to a decision and internally committed to the decision-making processes that produced the decision yet simultaneously monitor the consequences of the decision thoroughly to seek new, valid information to reconfront the decision without being considered disloyal. In the model-II world, conflicts do not disappear–indeed, the illusion of conflict disappearing is more typical of the model-I world, in which conflicts are settled by power plays based on sanctions, charisma or loyalty.
Chris Argyris and Donald Schön, from the book Theory in Practice: Increasing Personal Effectiveness, 1974, © John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
“Model II Values”
Clearly, Model II touches on values that are central to social life and to the traditions of moral philosophy: freedom of choice, truth and testability, the nature of commitment, the possibilities for and limitations on openness in communication among individuals, the basis for trust and cooperation among human beings, the sources of long-term personal effectiveness.
Chris Argyris and Donald Schön, from the book Theory in Practice: Increasing Personal Effectiveness, 1974, © John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
“The more they yearned for omnipotence”
Blackwell was a sad and troubled man, hardly competent to play God with anybody’s life. But the sadder and more troubled they were, the more they yearned for omnipotence. The really troubled ones believed they had it.
Ross MacDonald, from the book The Zebra-Striped Hearse, 1962
“My Life Belongs to the Whole Community”
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.
I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no “brief candle” for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
“No Philosophy of Family Life”
In other words, while social conservatives have a philosophy of family life they can’t operationalize, because it no longer is relevant, progressives have no philosophy of family life at all, because they don’t want to seem judgmental. The sexual revolution has come and gone, and it’s left us with no governing norms of family life, no guiding values, no articulated ideals. On this most central issue, our shared culture often has nothing relevant to say—and so for decades things have been falling apart.
David Brooks, from the article “The Nuclear Family was a Mistake”, March 2020
“Nurturance is a master variable”
One basic prescription is to do everything possible to re-create the ancestral social environment of small groups of nurturing individuals who know each other by their actions. Provide such an environment, and prosocial child development and adult relations will take place with surprising ease. In the absence of a nurturing social environment, the shaping of behavior will lead in a very different direction – survival and reproductive strategies that are predicated on the absence of social support, that benefit me and not you, us and not them, today without regard for tomorrow. That’s what Tony means by calling nurturance a master variable.
David Sloan Wilson, from the interview “This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution”, 2019, © David Sloan Wilson
“The only thing that's constant there is other people”
This is part of the model that we’ve developed called the social baseline model. When you average everything out that humans have experienced, over millennia, the only thing that’s constant is other humans. We’re so adaptable, we’ve been to so many places; we live in the arctic and the equator. We eat whale blubber and unrefined grains. We’ve been to the moon and practically at the bottom of the ocean. The only thing that’s constant there is other people.
Jim Coan, from the interview “This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution”, 2019, © David Sloan Wilson
“The Opposite of Popularizing Economics”
This is why this book is my attempt to do the opposite of popularizing economics: if it succeeds, it should incite its readers to take the economy into their own hands and make them realize that to understand the economy they also have to understand why the self-appointed experts on the economy, the economists, are almost always wrong. Ensuring that everyone is allowed to talk authoritatively about the economy is a prerequisite for a good society and a precondition for an authentic democracy. The economy’s ups and downs determine our lives; its forces make a mockery of our democracies; its tentacles reach deep into our souls, where they shape our hopes and aspirations. If we defer to the experts on the economy, we effectively hand them all decisions that matter.
Yanis Varoufakis, from the book Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works -- and How It Fails, 08 May 2018
“Our tribal instincts are not bugs”
Especially in a time of powerful and shifting politics, we shouldn’t ignore our quintessential human capacities to bond with our communities. Nor should we delude ourselves that the thin gruel of rationality and universalism will mobilize people to accomplish desired goals.
I write as a convert to the advocacy of tribalism. I used to consider group-related instincts as a detrimental force in human affairs. I was raised (as you may have been too) to see rationality, creativity, and morality as the hallmarks of humanity, and I viewed conformity, status-seeking, and traditionalism as fallibilities. But based on what I’ve learned from decades as a behavioral scientist, I’ve come to see my former humanities worldview as naive, or at least incomplete. Our tribal instincts are not bugs in the system that hinder an otherwise intelligent species. They are the distinguishing features of our kind that enabled its evolutionary ascent—and still drive many of its greatest achievements today. They are not human foibles that hold us back; they are human superpowers that create our distinctive cultures.
Michael Morris, from the book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together, 2024, © Michael Morris
“Paradoxes rationally serve as tribal loyalty tests”
Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss made the argument that the purpose of mythology is to create paradoxes (for example, the Holy Ghost is a paradoxical trinity where God the father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are one and the same). It is a mystery that must be believed nevertheless. Paradoxes rationally serve as tribal loyalty tests because the more logic-defying the premise, the stronger the tribal signal.
David R. Samson, from the book Our Tribal Future: How to Channel our Foundational Human Instincts Into a Force for Good, 2023
“Peace with Justice”
We look upon this shaken Earth, and we declare our firm and fixed purpose: the building of a peace with justice in a world where moral law prevails. The building of such a peace is a bold and solemn purpose. To proclaim it is easy. To serve it will be hard. And to attain it, we must be aware of its full meaning — and ready to pay its full price. We know clearly what we seek, and why. We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom. And now, as in no other age, we seek it because we have been warned, by the power of modern weapons, that peace may be the only climate possible for human life itself. Yet this peace we seek cannot be born of fear alone: it must be rooted in the lives of nations. There must be justice, sensed and shared by all peoples, for, without justice the world can know only a tense and unstable truce. There must be law, steadily invoked and respected by all nations, for without law, the world promises only such meager justice as the pity of the strong upon the weak. But the law of which we speak, comprehending the values of freedom, affirms the equality of all nations, great and small. Splendid as can be the blessings of such a peace, high will be its cost: in toil patiently sustained, in help honorably given, in sacrifice calmly borne.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, from the speech “Eisenhower Second Inaugural Address”, 21 Jan 1957
“People are finally finding out that the guy next door isn't a bad egg”
You mean to tell me you’d try to kill the John Doe movement if you can’t use it to get what you want? Well, that certainly is a new low. You sit there with your big cigars and think of deliberately killing an idea that has made millions of people a little bit happier. Why look, I’m just a mug and I know it – but I’m beginning to understand a lot of things. Why, your types are as old as history! If you can’t lay your dirty fingers on a decent idea and twist it and squeeze it and stuff it into your own pocket, you slap it down! Like dogs, if you can’t eat something – you bury it! Why, this is the one worthwhile idea that’s come along! People are finally finding out that the guy next door isn’t a bad egg. That’s simple, isnt it? And yet a thing like that has got a chance to spread till it touches every last doggone human being in the world – and you talk about killing it! Well, when this fire dies down what’s going to be left? More misery! More hunger and more hate! And what’s to prevent that from starting all over again? Nobody knows the answer to that one. The John Doe idea may be the answer though, it may be the one thing capable of saving this cockeyed world, yet you sit back there on your fat hulks and tell me you’ll kill it if you can’t use it! Well, you go ahead and try – you couldn’t do it in a million years with all your radio stations, and all your power.
– Down-and-out pitcher Long John Willoughby to industrialist D.B. Norton
Robert Riskin, from the film Meet John Doe, 1941
“Power and Privilege have been amassed”
I see instead a world of a permanent war economy, manipulation of money and credit, and rent-seeking society that privileges some at the expense of others – all of which distort and damage our politics, our markets, and our society. In essence, Power and Privilege have been amassed in an effort to govern over, rather than a self-governing democratic era where we dissipate power and deny privilege and seek to govern with each other as dignified equals. True liberalism in this sense would be seen as the emancipatory philosophy that it was written to be – seeking to eradicate the bonds of oppression imposed by the Altar, the Crown, the Sword, and from both crushing poverty and the protected privileges of the mercantilist class.
Peter Boettke, from the interview “A Conversation with Peter Boettke”, 18 Jun 2020
“The Power of Stakeholder Capitalism”
Stakeholder capitalism is not about politics. It is not a social or ideological agenda. It is not “woke.” It is capitalism, driven by mutually beneficial relationships between you and the employees, customers, suppliers, and communities your company relies on to prosper. This is the power of capitalism.
Larry Fink, from the letter “Letter to CEOs from Larry Fink in 2022”, 2022
“Public morality”
Moral guidance about what is right or decent can be found both in religious teachings and in our contemporary understanding of what we owe one another as members of the same society. As I have suggested, they overlap. A public morality that protects our democratic institutions, cherishes the truth, accepts our differences, ensures equal rights and equal opportunity, and invites passionate enagement in our civic life gives our own lives deeper meaning. It enlarges our capacities for attachment and love. It informs our sense of honor and shame. It equips us to be virtuous citizens.
Robert B. Reich, from the book The Common Good, 2018, © Robert B. Reich
“A raving demagogue counseling hatred”
So next time you hear a raving demagogue counseling hatred for other, slightly different groups of humans, for a moment at least see if you can understand his problem: He is heeding an ancient call that – however dangerous, obsolete, and maladaptive it may be today – once benefitted our species.
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, from the book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are, 1993, © Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan
“Relationships among groups”
In large societies that consist of many groups, relationships among groups must embody the same principles as the relationships among individuals within groups. This means that the core design principles are scale-independent….
David Sloan Wilson, from the interview “This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution”, 2019, © David Sloan Wilson
“Sacred values”
Sacred values differ from material or instrumental values in that they incorporate moral beliefs, such as the welfare of family, commitment to country, or identification with a particular religion that is thought to be absolute and inviolable. Sharing of these stories demonstrates honest reliable signals that an individual values the group and its goals. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the sharing of these sacred values is essential to the formation and maintenance of group identity.
David R. Samson, 2023
“Small groups are a fundamental unit of human social organization”
Multilevel selection theory tells us that something similar to team-level selection took place in our species for thousands of generations, resulting in adaptations for teamwork that are baked into the genetic architecture of our minds. Absorbing this fact leads to the conclusion that small groups are a fundamental unit of human social organization. Individuals cannot be understood except in the context of small groups, and large-scale societies need to be seen as a kind of multicellular organism comprising small groups.
David Sloan Wilson, from the interview “This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution”, 2019, © David Sloan Wilson
“Social resilience”
Recent studies of something called “social resilience” have identified resource sharing and egalitarian wealth distribution as major components of a society’s ability to recover from hardship.
Sebastian Junger, from the book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, 2016, © Sebastian Junger
“The Social Suite”
At the core of all societies, I will show, is the social suite:
- The capacity to have and recognize individual identity
- Love for partners and offspring
- Friendship
- Social networks
- Cooperation
- Preference for one’s own group (that is, “in-group bias”)
- Mild hierarchy (that is, relative egalitarianism)
- Social learning and teaching
Nicholas Christakis, from the book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, 2019
“Societies are not merely statistical aggregations”
Societies are not merely statistical aggregations of individuals engaged in voluntary exchange but something much more subtle and complicated. A group or community cannot be understood if the unit of analysis is the individual taken by himself. A society is clearly something greater than the sum of its parts.
Lester Thurow, from the book Dangerous Currents, 1983
“The stagnation of American middle-class living standards”
I believe that the rising intolerance and incivility and the eroding generosity and openness that have marked important aspects of American society in the recent past have been, in significant part, a consequence of the stagnation of American middle-class living standards.
Ben Friedman, from the book The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, 2005
“The systematic weaponization of the human Tribe Drive”
There is growing evidence that tribalism is the systematic weaponization of the human Tribe Drive and will be one of the twenty-first century’s greatest military tools in global competition. It may be the greatest threat humanity faces.
David R. Samson, from the book Our Tribal Future: How to Channel our Foundational Human Instincts Into a Force for Good, 2023
“The Tribe Drive”
The “Tribe Drive” is an ancient adaptation that has been a prerequisite for survival for 99.9 percent of our species’ evolutionary history. It is a critical piece of cognitive machinery – honed by millions of years of evolution – that gave us the ability to navigate, both cooperatively and competitively, increasingly complex social landscapes.
David R. Samson, from the book Our Tribal Future: How to Channel our Foundational Human Instincts Into a Force for Good, 2023
“A tribe is a creed”
A tribe is not a race, or even a population… a tribe is a creed; it is a team that has agreed upon a set of symbols – including sacred values – that identify membership. A creed is a mechanism that glues together disparate small camps and bands of cohabitating humans into a singular identity and shared purpose. Those who know the codes have in their possession a social passport.
David R. Samson, from the book Our Tribal Future: How to Channel our Foundational Human Instincts Into a Force for Good, 2023
“True Character”
True character arises from a deeper well than religion. It is the internalization of moral principles of a society, augmented by those tenets personally chosen by the individual, strong enough to endure through trials of solitude and adversity. The principles are fitted together into what we call integrity, literally the integrated self, wherein personal decisions feel good and true. Character is in turn the enduring source of virtue. It stands by itself and excites admiration in others. It is not obedience to authority, and while it is often consistent with and reinforced by religious belief, it is not piety.
E. O. Wilson, from the book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, 1998
“Very large social units are imaginary”
Very large social units are always, in a sense, imaginary. Or, to put it in a slightly different way, there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighbourhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of the time, in our heads.
David Graeber and David Wengrow, from the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, 2021, © David Graeber and David Wengrow
“We are what we pretend to be”
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
Kurt Vonnegut, from the book Mother Night, 1961
“We have the capacity to envision a better future and make it a reality”
Many people interpret the invisible hand concept as saying, we should just take our hands off the steering wheel like there’s nothing we should do. I don’t agree with that. Humans aren’t designed to accept the world as is, so to just say “whatever” is denying what makes us thrive as a species. More than any other creature on Earth, we have the capacity to envision a better future and make it a reality. We are askers of the question, “What kind of world do we want?” And perhaps even more importantly, we can ask the follow-up question, “How do we build that?”
Victor Hwang, from the interview “Evolution, Complexity, and the Third Way of Entrepreneurship: A Capstone Conversation with Victor Hwang”, 06 Aug 2020, © Victor Hwang
“The welfare of the whole human race”
The twentieth century will be chiefly remembered by future generations not as an era of political conflicts or technical inventions, but as an age in which human society dared to think of the welfare of the whole human race as a practical objective.
“We Need a Place to Stand”
Researching my latest book, Fourth and Long, I met Dr. Ed Zeiders, the pastor of St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in State College. He has seen what a college football team can do for a community in ways others might not.
‘We are desperately needy,’ he told me. ‘We need a place to stand, and a people to stand with, and a cause to stand for. That is not original with me. That came out of World Methodism. And those three propositions hold the key to healthy and value-oriented living. Our culture is devoid of these things.’
John Bacon and Ed Zeiders, from the book Fourth and Long
“We need governments to provide clear pathways”
Capitalism has the power to shape society and act as a powerful catalyst for change. But businesses can’t do this alone, and they cannot be the climate police. That will not be a good outcome for society. We need governments to provide clear pathways and a consistent taxonomy for sustainability policy, regulation, and disclosure across markets. When we harness the power of both the public and private sectors, we can achieve truly incredible things. This is what we must do to get to net zero.
Larry Fink, from the letter “Letter to CEOs from Larry Fink in 2022”, 2022
“We vastly underestimate the impact of our immediate environment on our behavior”
Most people tend to think that characteristics of a person drive whether someone is ethical or not. For example, one’s upbringing, religious values or even genetics must determine whether a person is a good apple or a bad egg. While those factors matter to some degree, my research and decades of science in social and organizational psychology tell us that we vastly underestimate the impact of our immediate environment on our behavior. Good people can do bad things in certain contexts, and the reverse is true as well.
Dave Mayer, from the interview “Changing the Frame: Family Photos on Your Desk Could Make You More Ethical on the Job”, 16 Oct 2020
“What would a new social compact look like?”
What would a new social compact look like? Since our crisis is political, the solutions must stretch far beyond economics. My own views do not always fit into twentieth-century pigeonholes. But I believe that protecting society’s weakest from arbitrary misfortune is the ultimate test of our civilisational worth. It seems blindingly obvious that universal healthcare ought to be a basic shield against the vicissitudes of an increasingly volatile labour market. Humane immigration laws should be enforced, and the link between public benefits and citizenship restored. Ours is an age of lawyers and accountants. Micro-regulation of the workplace ought to be replaced with broad guideines; free speech, in whatever form it takes, must be upheld on campuses and in the media; the tax system should be ruthlessly simplified; governments must tax bad things, such as carbon, rather than good things, like jobs; companies should be taxed where they conduct their business. Governments must launch Marshall Plans to retrain their middle classes. The nature of representative democracy should be re-imagined. Above all, money’s stranglehold on the legistlative process has to be broken.
Edward Luce, from the book The Retreat of Western Liberalism, 2017, © Edward Luce
“When racial or religious lines are drawn by the State”
When racial or religious lines are drawn by the State, the multi-racial, multi-religious communities that our Constitution seeks to weld together as one become separatist; antagonisms that relate to race or to religion, rather than to political issues, are generated; communities seek not the best representative, but the best racial or religious partisan.
William O. Douglas, from the decision Wright v. Rockefeller, 1964
“The yen to work drops in flat economies”
Writing in the 1950s, Daniel Bell, the great American sociologist, said ‘economic growth has become the secular religion of advancing industrial societies’. He was right. It follows that in its absence, many people lapse into the equivalent of atheism. That sense of listlessness shows up in many ways. In the labour market, it means falling rates of workforce participation. Much as the desire to worship falls in agnostic societies, the yen to work drops in flat economies. In the last decade, America’s share of people in full-time jobs has dropped to European levels, which used to be written off as a sclerotic consequence of the continent’s over-regulated labour markets. Now the US rate is bang on the European average. In some respects it is worse. There is now a higher share of French males in full-time jobs than Americans – a statistic that reflects poorly on America, rather than well on France.
Edward Luce, from the book The Retreat of Western Liberalism, 2017, © Edward Luce