The Relationalist Manifesto

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The uncommitted person is the unremembered person. A person who does not commit to some loyalty outside of self leaves no deep mark on the world.

David Brooks • The Relationalist Manifesto

When a summons has been felt and a promise has been made, a commitment has been sealed. The life of a relationalist is defined by its commitments. The quality and fulfillment of her life will be defined by what she commits to and how she fulfills those commitments.

David Brooks • The Relationalist Manifesto

The relationalist doesn’t walk away from the capitalist meritocracy, the systems of mainstream life. But she balances that worldview with a countervailing ethos that supplements, corrects, and ennobles. She walks in that world, with all its pleasures and achievements, but with a different spirit, a different approach, and different goals. She is co

David Brooks • The Relationalist Manifesto

The person makes his commitments maximal commitments. He doesn’t just have a career; he has a vocation. He doesn’t just have a contract marriage (What’s in it for me?). He has a covenantal marriage (I live and die for you). He doesn’t just have opinions. He submits to a creed. He doesn’t just live in a place. He helps build a community. Furthermore

David Brooks • The Relationalist Manifesto

Most of us get better at living as we go. There comes a moment, which may come early or later in life, when you realize what your life is actually about. You look across your life and review the moments when you felt more fully alive, at most your best self. They were usually moments when you were working with others in service of some ideal. That

David Brooks • The Relationalist Manifesto

Personal transformation and social transformation happen simultaneously. When you reach out and build community, you nourish yourself.

David Brooks • The Relationalist Manifesto

The state has an important but incomplete role to play in this process. The state can provide services, but it cannot easily provide care. That is to say, the state can redistribute money to the poor, can build homeless shelters and day care centers. It can create the material platforms on which relationships can be built. But the state can’t creat

David Brooks • The Relationalist Manifesto

Some Weaving is in the family—to practice the unconditional love that is proper family love. This sometimes requires daily acts of putting your convenience before mine, setting aside time for family dinner, making the most of any chance to have a celebration, overwhelming the bad things with good things and of course the regular habits of forgivene

David Brooks • The Relationalist Manifesto

A good society is like a dense jungle. There are vines and intertwining branches. There are enmeshed root systems and connections across the canopy. There are monkeys playing at the treetops, the butterflies darting below. Every creature has a place in the great ecosystem. There is a gorgeous diversity and beauty and vitality.

A good person leading

David Brooks • The Relationalist Manifesto

When things are going well, there’s a process weaving from the bottom to the top. When relationships are forming well, microscopic neural networks weave together in the brain, individual personalities weave together and are made stronger, families weave tight bonds and are made more resilient, neighborhoods become more coherent, towns more vibrant,