Quotes About Cooperation

What is moral is everything that is a source of solidarity, everything that forces man to Ã¢â'¬Â¦ regulate his actions by something other than Ã¢â'¬Â¦ his own egoism.

If there is any one secret of success it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from their angle as well as your own."50 It's such an obvious point, yet few of us apply it in moral and political arguments because our righteous minds so readily shift into combat mode.

As Darwin said long ago, the most cohesive and cooperative groups generally beat the groups of selfish individualists. Darwin's ideas about group selection fell out of favor in the 1960s, but recent discoveries are putting his ideas back into play

Anything that binds people together into dense networks of trust makes people less selfish. In

Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.

Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their own.

Group selection may or may not be common among other animals, but it happens whenever individuals find ways to suppress selfishness and work as a team, in competition with other teams.

When I say that human nature is selfish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our own interests, in competition with our peers. When I say that human nature is also groupish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our group's interests, in competition with other groups.4 We are not saints, but we are sometimes good team players. Stated

It's the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That's what brings out the best in people.

found a way to forge a sense of "we" that extended beyond kinship. We trust and cooperate more readily with people who look and sound like us.69 We expect them to share our values and norms.

Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we're all stuck here for a while. Let's try to work it out.

you don't usually help the bees by destroying the hive. Finally

It seems to take more than just a high level of social intelligence to get reciprocal altruism going. It takes the sort of gossiping, punitive, moralistic community that emerged only when language and weaponry made it possible for early humans to take down bullies and then keep them down with a shared moral matrix.43

the very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship. Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally, particularly when those beliefs rest upon the Sanctity foundation.33 Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.

Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their own."43

Yet punish we do, and our propensity to punish turns out to be one of the keys to large-scale cooperation.

When a few members of a group contributed far more than the others—or, even more powerfully, when a few contributed nothing—most adults do not want to see the benefits distributed equally.51 We can therefore refine the description of the Fairness foundation that I gave in the last chapter.

But as a psychologist studying morality, I can say that multilevel selection would go a long way toward explaining why people are simultaneously so selfish and so groupish.91

human nature is 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.

We have the ability (under special conditions) to transcend self-interest and lose ourselves (temporarily and ecstatically) in something larger than ourselves. That ability is what I'm calling the hive switch.

Vengeful and grateful feelings appear to have evolved precisely because they are such useful tools for helping individuals create cooperative relationships, thereby reaping the gains from non-zero-sum games.

Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship.

Durkheim, who said: "What is moral is everything that is a source of solidarity, everything that forces man to Ã¢â'¬Â¦ regulate his actions by something other than Ã¢â'¬Â¦ his own egoism."65

Humanity comes first. Always. Politics and religion, valuable as they are, are always of second importance. If we do not work together to preserve life, to treasure it and keep it safe, then nothing we fight for is worth having.