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Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.”
Africans didn’t coin the phrase “It takes a village to raise a child” for nothing.
In a healthy community people are not only looking out for each other; they are getting out of Facebook and into each other’s faces.
When family, community, and cultural and religious restraints are removed, or never present, suicide bombers can much more easily flourish.
embrace the immigrant, the stranger, and the loner, and inspire more people in more places to want to make things rather than break things.
“The ones I’ve seen that do it best, so far, are those that cultivate intense, thick community. Most of the time character is not an individual accomplishment. It emerges through joined hearts and souls, and in groups.”
“Interdependency is a moral reality,” explains Seidman. “It is a reality in which we rise and fall together; we affect each other profoundly from
great distances in ways we never could before. In such a world, there is only one strategy to survive and thrive: it is to forge healthy, deep, and enduring interdependencies—in our relationships, in our communities, between businesses, between countries—so that we rise, and not fall, together.
“It takes a planet to raise a child.”
At a time when America is becoming a “minority-majority” country, Canales has started her own little organization to widen the campfire—“to help others make the journey from the other to the all.”
As a social species, being part of a group has survival value. Evolution also may have adapted the brain to experience a sense of reward when we did things with and for other people—dancing together especially in synchrony can signal that you’re actually simpatico with lots of other people. The researchers think this is why so many cultures have synchronized dancing and why it might have health benefits.
When 250,000 people are killed in a civil war, roughly one-tenth of a country’s population, it is safe to say that Syrians forgot how to be human in Syria.
“When you look into the face of the person who is beside you, and you can see that person is your brother or your sister, then finally the night has ended and the day has begun.”
The eye of a hurricane moves, along with the storm. It draws energy from it, while creating a sanctuary of stability inside it. It
when people feel protected, respected, and connected in a healthy community, it generates enormous trust.
When people trust each other, they can be much more adaptable and open to all forms of pluralism.
They also don’t waste energy investigating every mistake; they feel free to fail and try again and fail again and try again.
When people trust each other, they take ownership of problems and practice stewardship.
“By contrast, people who do not trust one another will end up cooperating only under a system of formal rules and regulations, which have to be negotiated, agreed to, litigated, and enforced, sometimes by coercive means,” wrote Fukuyama.
trust “is the only legal performance-enhancing drug.” But trust cannot be commanded.
In human relations, trust creates diastole. It is only when people relax their hearts and their minds that they are open to hear and engage with others, and healthy communities create the context for that.
Many of them are forging local public-private partnerships—involving businesses, educators, philanthropists, and governments—to put in place the tools they know their citizens and kids will need to dance in the hurricane.
In this age of accelerations, he argues, we need to “reinvent the basic organizing unit of society.”
a column has to combine three things: your own value set, how you think the Machine works, and what you have learned about how the Machine affects people and culture and vice versa.
How did I come to this worldview? As I said, not by reading any particular philosophers. Rather, it emerged bit by bit from the neighborhood, the public schools, and the very soil of the community where I spent my first nineteen years.
