Portable Wisdom

Wisdom on the Topic of society

We humans are innately social creatures.

What do I mean by this?

That we tend to get stuff done by forming societies of one form or another.

In other words, we come together with other humans to hunt, to forage, to farm, to cook, to eat, to share stories, and to do almost everything else that we think of as human.

When you think about it, this makes a lot of sense.

After all, as individuals, we humans are not very fearsome creatures. No thick fur or tough skin to protect us, no sharp claws or teeth with which to fight, no great running speed to chase down prey.

No, it is only by working together with other humans that we become a force to be reckoned with.

In fact, there is next to nothing that we accomplish on our own, as isolated individuals.

Even when there is no one else around, and we are enjoying a quiet moment to ourselves, we are almost always making use of things that were provided by others: knowledge, clothes, buildings, furniture, tools.

Lists

Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?”

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.’

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.

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.

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 guidelines; 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.

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.

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.

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