Society.....................

 

Society is concerted action, cooperation.

     Society is the outcome of conscious and purposeful behavior.  This does not mean that individuals have concluded contracts by virtue of which they have founded human society.  The actions which have brought about social cooperation and daily bring it about anew do not aim at anything else than cooperation and coadjuvancy with others for the attainment of definite singular ends.  The total complex of the mutual relations created by such concerted actions is called society.  It substitutes collaboration for the—at least conceivable—isolated life of individuals.  Society is division of labor and combination of labor.  In his capacity as an acting animal man becomes a social animal. 

     . . . The individual lives and acts within society.  But society is nothing but the combination of individuals for cooperative effort.  It exists nowhere else than in the actions of individual men.  It is a delusion to search for it outside the actions of individuals.  To speak of a society's autonomous and independent existence, of its life, its soul, and its actions is a metaphor which can easily lead to crass errors.

-Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics

choices................

 

Human cooperation under the system of the social division of labor is possible only in the market economy.  Socialism is not a realizable system of society's economic organization because it lacks any method of economic calculation. . . .

Socialism cannot be realized because it is beyond human power to establish it as a social system.  The choice is between capitalism and chaos.  A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death.  A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society.  Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

-Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics

without.......................

 

Intelligence without social skills and the regular practice of interacting and cooperating with others makes for a dangerous society.

-Kevin Ervin Kelley, Irreplaceable:  How to Create Extraordinary Places That Bring People Together

ruthless..........................

 

-from this Gaping Void post

intuit.........................

 All species struggle to survive and strive to reproduce.  A chance mutation about 200,000 years ago made early Homo sapiens more sensitive to social information.  This mutation increased the number of oxytocin receptors in the brain's frontal lobe, enabling out ancestors to not only understand what others were doing cognitively, but also experience the emotions of others.  This helped early humans survive by enabling them to draw on social resources more effectively.

Over time the mutation spread.  Rather than being limited to living in small bands of kin-based groups as our genus had for millions of years, Homo sapiens could live in increasingly larger and more complex societies because they could intuit others' intentions.  The most basic social information is the intention to help or harm.  As culture flourished, societies developed norms in which helpers were embraced and the selfish and violent were ostracized. . . .

We truly became social creatures when the brain network that oxytocin activates allowed us to determine who to trust.  Knowing when to trust strangers led to large-scale societies.  In these communities, an individual's survival depended on many others.  Cooperation among nonkin provided social insurance against a bad crop or an unsuccessful hunt.  Communities began to function like superorganisms in which each segment nourished the other parts.

Paul J. Zak,  Immersion:  The Science of The Extraordinary and the Source of Happiness

Cooperation.......................

. . . cooperation begins with conversation:  asking intelligent and open-ended questions;  listening;  respecting others' opinions;  and understanding people's real concerns, as well as what opportunities they're most excited about and what strengths they have to contribute.

-Dan Sullivan/Catherine Nomura:  The Laws of Lifetime Growth:  Always Make Your Future Bigger Than Your Past

You mean it's not "opposable thumbs".....?

The ability to engage in large-scale cooperative activity is what makes humans as a species unique. It is the secret of our success as a species. It is certainly the secret of the productivity of modern developed economies.

-John Kay, as culled from his recent review of Joseph Henrich's The Secret of Our Success

The power of myths..................

Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions.  Rather, it's the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all.  As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched, or smelled.
     Legends, myths, gods, and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution.  Many animals and human species could previously say, "Careful!  A lion!"  Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo Sapiens acquired the ability to say, "The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe."  This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language. ...
     But fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively.  We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states.  Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.  Ants and bees can also work together in large numbers, but they do so in a very rigid manner and only with close relatives.  Wolves and chimpanzees cooperate far more flexibly than ants, but they can do so only with small numbers of other individuals that they know intimately.  Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers.  That's why Sapiens rule the world whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.

-Yuval Noah Harari,  Sapiens:  A Brief History of Humankind

Still surfing.........................

... surfing a wave has a distinctive kind of value.  Being adaptively attuned to a changing natural phenomenon, in part, by not needing to control it, is at once a kind of freedom, self-transcendence, and happiness.  Or so I will argue in later chapters.   To a surprising degree, I submit, what is valuable in human life is a matter of being adaptively attuned - a way of "surfing," in an extended sense.
    To surf, in general, is to be adaptively attuned to a changing pheomenon beyond oneself, for its own sake.  In a social form of adaptive attunement, you could "surf" through a conversation, a meeting at work, or a crowded street, going along with the flow of conversational or meeting dynamics, by staying attuned to other people and responding fluently in each new moment of cooperation.  Whatever else you might hope to achieve, you'd do that purposefully, with a certain awareness of its intrinsic value, partly for its own sake.  You'd give up seeking control, perhaps in order to keep cooperative relations sweet, for the feelings of harmonious social connection and the consequent sense of peace.

-Aaron James, Surfing With Sartre:  An Aquatic Inquiry Into A Life Of Meaning

On graciousness.........................

     The key to painless growth is humility, which amounts to merely dropping pridefulness and pretense and accepting fallibility as a normal human characteristic of self and others.  Lower mind sees relationships as competitive; higher mind sees them as cooperative.  Lower mind gets involved with others; higher mind becomes aligned with others.  The simple words "I'm sorry" put out most fires painlessly.  To win in life means to give up the obsession of "who's at fault."  Graciousness is far more powerful than belligerence.

-David Hawkins

About that self-sufficiency...............

     In a modern economy, no one is self-sufficient.  Instead, people are specialized.  The work you do probably does not produce something you could consume.  Even more striking is the fact that almost everything you consume is something you could not possibly produce.  Your daily life depends on the cooperation of hundreds of millions of other people...

We carry on our lives not really conscious of the complexity of that specialization.  In fact, when it enters our minds, we often resent it.  We praise ourselves for our urban gardens and our do-it-yourself home projects.  We urge on another to "buy local," and we berate business executives for moving jobs overseas.  Of course, if we took such sentiments to their logical conclusion and tried to eliminate commerce with strangers entirely, we would have to return to primitive hunting and gathering.

-Arnold Kling,  Specialization and Trade:  A Re-Introduction to Economics

About commerce.......................

Politics endures, but human action evolves.  We learn.
      And what are we learning?  How to take care of one another, which is the point of what we sometimes call capitalism.  (Don't tell Ayn Rand.)
      It is remarkable that we speak and think about commerce as though competitiveness were its most important feature.  There is, as noted, a certain Darwinian aspect to economic competition - and of course we humans do in fact compete over scarce resources.  But what is remarkable about human action is not its competitiveness but its almost limitless cooperativeness.  Competition is only one of the ways that we learn how best to cooperate with one another - competition is a means to the higher end of social cooperation.

-Kevin D. Williamson,  The End Is Near And It's Going To Be Awesome:  How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier, and More Secure