Quotes About Community

The vital process of socialization prevents much harm and fosters much good. Children must be shaped and informed, or they cannot thrive. This fact is reflected starkly in their behavior: kids are utterly desperate for attention from both peers and adults because such attention, which renders them effective and sophisticated communal players, is vitally necessary.

Additionally, the fact that religious ideas are capable of uniting vast numbers of people under a single moral umbrella (although such ideas can divide across sects, as well) also indicates something universal calling from within.

Here's the fundamental problem: group identity can be fractionated right down to the level of the individual.

Asimismo, las creencias compartidas simplifican el mundo porque las personas que saben qué esperar de las demás pueden cooperar para domesticarlo.

Every society is already characterized by patterned behavior; otherwise it would be pure conflict and no "society" at all.

Social Institutions Are Necessary—but Insufficient

Freud and Jung, with their intense focus on the autonomous individual psyche, placed too little focus on the role of the community in the maintenance of personal mental health.

Naše je duševno zdravlje plod kvalitetna uranjanja u društvenu zajednicu, i to u puno ve?oj mjeri nego što smo obi?no svjesni. Netko nas neprestano mora podsje?ati na to da se trebamo ispravno ponašati i razmišljati. Kada skrenemo s toga puta, ljudi kojima je stalo do nas i koji nas vole na razne nas na?ine guraju natrag na stazu. Prema tome, jako je dobro imati takve ljude u blizini

To give is to do what you can to make things better. The good in people will respond to that, and support it, and imitate it, and multiply it, and return it, and foster it, so that everything improves and moves forward.

Se trata de un hecho lo suficientemente importante como para repetirlo: la gente organiza su cabeza conversando. Y si no tienen a nadie para contarle su historia, pierden la cabeza. Son como personas que van acumulando objetos de forma compulsiva y no pueden deshacerse de nada ellas solas. Se requiere el aporte de la comunidad para mantener la integridad de la psique individual o, dicho de otra forma, es necesario todo un pueblo para organizar una sola cabeza.

That's where we are simultaneously stable enough, exploring enough, transforming enough, repairing enough, and cooperating enough.

People exist among other people and not as purely individual minds. An individual does not have to be that well put together if he or she can remain at least minimally acceptable in behavior to others. Simply put: We outsource the problem of sanity. People remain mentally healthy not merely because of the integrity of their own minds, but because they are constantly being reminded how to think, act, and speak by those around them.

Necesitamos reglas, patrones y valores, tanto en soledad como en compañía.

In their poverty, they explore the city, and they discover some ratty, quasi-criminal area that has seen better days. They visit, look, and poke about, and they think, "You know, with a little work, this area could be cool." Then they move in, piece together some galleries, and put up some art.

people depend on constant communication with others to keep their minds organized.

Benjamin Franklin once suggested that a newcomer to a neighbourhood ask a new neighbour to do him or her a favour, citing an old maxim: He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.

Without the intermediation of the social world, it would be impossible for us to organize our minds, and we would simply be overwhelmed by the world.

people depend on constant communication with others to keep their minds organized. We all need to think to keep things straight, but we mostly think by talking.

A shared belief system, partly psychological, partly acted out, simplifies everyone—in their own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Shared beliefs simplify the world, as well, because people who know what to expect from one another can act together to tame the world.

You are not morally obliged to support someone who is making the world a worse place. Quite the opposite. You should choose people who want things to be better, not worse. It's a good thing, not a selfish thing, to choose people who are good for you. It's appropriate and praiseworthy to associate with people whose lives would be improved if they saw your life improve.

Have some humility. If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city?

The Dutch prepare their dikes for the worst storm in ten thousand years. Had New Orleans followed that example, no tragedy would have occurred. It's not that no one knew.

It takes a village to organize a mind.

These Westerners were different: self-made, unentitled, hands on, neighbourly and less precious than many of their big-city peers, who increasingly spend their lives indoors, manipulating symbols on computers.