Quotes About Community

People with strong families who live in tight-knit and supportive communities are significantly happier than people whose families are dysfunctional and who have never found (or never sought) a community to be part of.

Sociological research has shown that the maximum 'natural' size of a group bonded by a gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings. ... But once the threshold of 150 individuals is crossed, things can go longer work that way.

People are egalitarian by nature, and unequal societies can never function well due to resentment and dissatisfaction.

Meaning is created when many people weave together a common network of stories.

Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture.

us. Christians and Muslims who could not agree on religious beliefs could nevertheless agree on a monetary belief, because whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something.

As robots and AI push humans out of the job market, the ultra-Orthodox Jews may come to be seen as the model for the future rather than as a fossil from the past. Not that everyone will become Orthodox Jews and go to yeshivas to study the Talmud. But in the lives of all people, the quest for meaning and community might eclipse the quest for a job.

Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any

good hunters, and apparently took care of their sick and infirm. (Archaeologists have discovered the bones of Neanderthals who lived for many years with severe physical handicaps, evidence that they were cared for by their relatives.)

Hardly anyone has just one identity. Nobody is just a Muslim, or just an Italian, or just a capitalist.

Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully when they believe in common myths

The average person lived many months without seeing or hearing a human from outside of her own band, and she encountered throughout her life no more than a few hundred humans.

Whales can hear one another from hundreds of kilometres away, and each whale has a repertoire of characteristic 'songs' that may last for hours and follow very intricate patterns. Every now and then a whale composes a new hit, which other whales throughout the ocean adopt.

How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation

Christians, Catholics, Armenians, Copts, Jews and even the occasional Hindu lived side by side in relative harmony. Though they had their share of disagreements and riots, and though

They can nevertheless play the game with complete strangers because they have all learned an identical set of ideas about basketball. These ideas are entirely imaginary, but if everyone shares them, we can all play the game. The same applies, on a larger scale, to kingdoms, churches, and trade networks,

Around 8500 BC the largest settlements in the world were villages such as Jericho, which contained a few hundred individuals.

Sociological research has shown that the maximum 'natural' size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals.

the alpha male wins his position by building a stable coalition with other males and females, not through mindless violence. In

Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings.

Family and community seem to have more impact on our happiness than money and health.

It's much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat.

They can nevertheless play the game with complete strangers because they have all learned an identical set of ideas about basketball. These ideas are entirely imaginary, but if everyone shares them, we can all play the game.

This raises the possibility that the immense improvement in material conditions over the last two centuries was offset by the collapse of the family and the community.