Quotes About Community

people are happy when they feel better off than their neighbors, unhappy when they feel worse off.

La gente es aceptada o rechazada en base a sus creencias, luego una función de la mente puede ser sostener creencias que procuren al que las sostiene el mayor número de aliados, protectores y discípulos, más que creencias que sean verdaderas.

Left-wing and right-wing political ideologies have themselves become secular religions, providing people with a community of like-minded brethren, a catechism of sacred beliefs, a well-populated demonology, and a beatific confidence in the righteousness of their cause. In

The explanations may help us understand the parts of the brain that made a behavior tempting, but they say nothing about the other parts of the brain (primarily in the prefrontal cortex) that could have inhibited the behavior by anticipating how the community would respond to it. [...] Why should we discard our lever on the system for inhibition just because we are coming to understand the system for temptation?

Religions have provided comfort, community, and moral guidance to countless people, and some biologists argue that a sophisticated deism, toward which many religions are evolving, can be made compatible with an evolutionary understanding of the mind and human nature.

A sense of solidarity among fifteen-to-thirty-year-olds would be a menace to civilized society even in the best of times.

If you want to see tribalism at its fiercest, check out a "Nikon vs. Canon" Internet discussion group.)

They use the franchise as a form of self-expression: they vote for candidates who they think are like them and stand for their kind of people.

The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion. It only means that people are capable of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty and to exercise it openly and fairly can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run.

A major theme of this book is that none of us, thinking alone, is rational enough to consistently come to sound conclusions: rationality emerges from a community of reasoners who spot each other's fallacies.

As an Auyana man living in New Guinea under the Pax Australiana put it, "Life was better since the government came" because "a man could now eat without looking over his shoulder and could leave his house in the morning to urinate without fear of being shot.

So not just vengeance, but also forgiveness and contrition, are necessary for social organisms

Stanley Goldfarb died and his relatives and the congregation gathered for an evening of prayers and mourning. When the time came for the mourners to come up and eulogize him, no one stirred. After several minutes, the rabbi was getting anxious. "Someone must have something nice to say about him," he implored. More silence. Finally a voice piped up from the back of the room: "His brother was worse.

When a "nation" is conceived as a tacit social contract among people sharing a territory, like a condominium association, it is an essential means for advancing its members' flourishing. And of course it is genuinely admirable for one individual to sacrifice his or her interests for those of many individuals.

It is about the relation of words to a community—how a new word, which arises in an act of creation by a single speaker, comes to evoke the same idea in the rest of a population, so people can understand one another when they use it.

emerge from the rough-and-tumble of argument, such as that you have to provide reasons for your beliefs, you're allowed to point out flaws in the beliefs of others, and you're not allowed to forcibly shut people up who disagree with you. Add in the rule that you should allow the world to show you whether your beliefs are true or false, and we can call the rules science. With the right rules, a community of less than fully rational thinkers can cultivate rational thoughts.31

Yet it would be mad to suppose that Sally is not better off, and positively depraved to conclude that one may as well not try to improve Seema's life because it might improve her neighbors' lives even more and leave her no happier.

Better still, improvements build on one another. A richer world can better afford to protect the environment, police its gangs, strengthen its social safety nets, and teach and heal its citizens. A better-educated and connected world cares more about the environment, indulges fewer autocrats, and starts fewer wars.

Sympathy, recall, tends to be expressed in communal relationships, the kind that are also accompanied by guilt and forgiveness. Anything that creates a communal relationship, then, should also create sympathy.

People in a connected world are exposed to the stories of strangers through many channels, including face-to-face encounters, interviews in the media, and memoirs and autobiographical accounts.

Locke recognized that people in power would be tempted to "exempt themselves from the obedience to the Laws they make, and suit the Law, both in its making and its execution, to their own private Wish, and thereby come to have a distinct Interest from the rest of the Community, contrary to the end of Society and Government."99

This new usage may fall deadborn from the innovator's lips or be welcomed into a segment of the community with open arms. The reception is partly capricious (as we shall see in chapter 6), but when a new combination does catch on, it could involve the later adopters' grasping the rationale with a stroke of insight recapitulating that of the original coiner, their dumbly memorizing the verb in that construction, or something in between.

En las pequeñas empresas -o, como se las suele llamar, las *empresas familiares* o *empresas de papá y mamá*- el nepotismo es muy habitual, por lo que puede entrar en conflicto con los principios de igualdad de oportunidad y granjearse el rencor de la comunidad en que se encuentra.

Communities can thereby come up with rules that allow true beliefs to emerge from the rough-and-tumble of argument, such as that you have to provide reasons for your beliefs, you're allowed to point out flaws in the beliefs of others, and you're not allowed to forcibly shut people up who disagree with you. Add in the rule that you should allow the world to show you whether your beliefs are true or false, and we can call the rules science.