Blueprint Quotes

“At the core of all societies, I will show, is the social suite: (1) The capacity to have and recognize individual identity (2) Love for partners and offspring (3) Friendship (4) Social networks (5) Cooperation (6) Preference for one’s own group (that is, “in-group bias”) (7) Mild hierarchy (that is, relative egalitarianism) (8) Social learning and teaching”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

“The first kibbutzim were founded in Palestine in 1910, and, by 2009, there were 267 kibbutzim scattered throughout modern Israel. These groups account for only 2.1 percent of the country’s Jewish population but 40 percent of the national economic agricultural output and 7 percent of the industrial output.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

“Most human virtues, I would argue, are social virtues. To the extent that we care about love, justice, or kindness, we care about how people enact these virtues with respect to other people. No one is interested in whether you love yourself, whether you are just to yourself, or whether you are kind to yourself. People care about whether you show these qualities to others. And so friendship lays the foundation for morality.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

“Charles Mackay argued that people “go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

“I have held the hands of countless dying people from all sorts of backgrounds, and I do not think I have met a single person who didn’t share the exact same aspirations at the end of life: to make amends for mistakes, to be close to loved ones, to tell one’s story to someone who will listen, and to die free of pain.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

“The subjects were each placed in a functional MRI scanner and shown the same set of fourteen video clips (including a sentimental music video, a bit of slapstick comedy, a political debate), and the blood flow to various brain regions was individually measured as they viewed”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

“relations.50 The idea of collective child-rearing was not unique to kibbutzim. It has been periodically attempted as a desired social disruption since antiquity. Plato believed that raising children communally would result in children treating all men as their fathers and thus more respectfully.51 Communist societies have also been associated with collective child-rearing; the family is seen as a threat to state ideology because it fosters a sense of belonging to a family unit, and totalitarian ideology requires that family allegiance be subordinated to allegiance to the party or state. Liberal political theory has also struggled with the issue of the family being an obstacle to an egalitarian society (for example, because child care and family life generally impose greater constraints on women).52 But attempts to fundamentally restructure or minimize the bond between parent and child have very rarely, if ever, endured.53 While mild forms of collective child-rearing are found in cultures all around the world (and in some other mammalian species, as we will see in chapter 7), they typically involve forms of alloparental care, whereby relatives share child-care duties. Dormitory sleeping arrangements for infants (of the kind initially attempted by the kibbutzim) are extremely rare. A 1971 survey of 183 societies around the world found that none maintained such a system.54 As in many utopian communities, the organization of child-rearing was motivated largely by adult imperatives. If men and women were to be treated truly equally, collective parenting might be seen as an obvious structural necessity, regardless of its implications for individual children and their development. Historian Steven Mintz noted in Huck’s Raft, his sweeping work on American childhood, that almost every innovation in child welfare in the United States, including orphanages and subsidized child care, has been driven primarily by adult concerns. Of secondary importance were philosophical and pragmatic convictions about what was best for children.55 As radical as communes may be in some key respects, they generally play by adult rules in regard to children, whose needs and concerns have never been, as far as I can tell, the primary motivation for any utopian community (even though some of them had amazing schools and treated children kindly). Setting up utopias seems to be like sex in at least one way: it is oriented to adult satisfaction.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

“The challenges communes faced were generally internal, not external. As one study concluded, “Many more communes went under because the dishes never got washed than were ever forced out of town by hostile neighbors or zoning boards.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

“The arc of our evolutionary history is long. But it bends towards goodness”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

“In his classic work Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, published in 1841, Scottish journalist Charles Mackay argued that people “go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”1 People in crowds often act in thoughtless ways—shouting profanities, destroying property, throwing bricks, threatening others.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

“Think of how exposure to a foreign culture can be both a bracing and a reassuring experience. What starts as a heightened sensitivity to differences in attire, smells, appearances, customs, rules, norms, and laws yields to the recognition that we are similar to our fellow human beings in numerous fundamental ways. All people find meaning in the world, love their families, enjoy the company of friends, teach one another things of value, and work together in groups. In my view, recognizing this common humanity makes it possible for all of us to lead grander and more virtuous lives.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

“we carry within us innate proclivities that reflect our natural social state, a state that is, as it turns out, primarily good, practically and even morally. Humans can no more make a society that is inconsistent with these positive urges than ants can suddenly make beehives.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

“The fundamental reason is that we each carry within us an evolutionary blueprint for making a good society.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

“psychologist David Premack refers to as the “Russian-novel problem”—that is, when looking at the history of two animals (or humans), it is often hard to know what caused what, since the two may have interacted in so many ways over such a long time, and they may also remember events differently and act according to this subjective experience.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

“People in crowds often act in thoughtless ways—shouting profanities, destroying property, throwing bricks, threatening others. This can come about partly because of a process known to psychologists as deindividuation : people begin to lose their self-awareness and sense of individual agency as they identify more strongly with the group, which often leads to antisocial behaviors they would never consider if they were acting alone. They can form a mob, cease to think for themselves, lose their moral compass, and adopt a classic us-versus-them stance that brooks no shared understanding.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

“The experience most certainly changes your perspective. The things that we share in our world are far more valuable than those which divide us.”11”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

“Seeing people only as members of groups is, he says, “inherently reductionist and dehumanizing, a collectivist and ideological abstraction of all that is original and creative in the human being, of all that has not been imposed by inheritance, geography, or social pressure.” Real, personal identity, he argues, “springs from the capacity of human beings to resist these influences and counter them with free acts of their own invention.” 5”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

“Genes do amazing things inside our bodies, but even more amazing to me is what they do outside of them. Genes affect not only the structure and function of our bodies; not only the structure and function of our minds and, hence, our behaviors; but also the structure and function of our societies.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

“A key feature of awe, psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt have argued, is that it quiets self-interest and makes individuals feel part of the larger whole. 12”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

“If you take a group of carbon atoms and connect them one way, you get graphite, which is soft and dark and perfect for making pencils. But if you take the same carbon atoms and connect them another way, you get diamond, which is hard and clear and great for making jewelry. There are two key ideas here. First, these properties of softness and darkness and hardness and clearness are not properties of the carbon atoms; they are properties of the collection of carbon atoms. Second, the properties depend on how the carbon atoms are connected. It’s the same with social groups. This phenomenon, of wholes having properties not present in the separate parts, is known as emergence, and the properties are known as emergent properties. Connect people in one way, and they are good to one another. Connect them in another way, and they are not.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society