The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

The hyper-individualist operates by a straightforward logic: I make myself strong and I get what I want. The relationalist says, Life operates by an inverse logic. I possess only when I give. I lose myself to find myself. When I surrender to something great, that’s when I am strongest and most powerful.

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

Jonathan Haidt of NYU advises that if you want to create a thick institution, you should call attention to the traits people have in common, not the ones that set them apart. Second, exploit synchrony. Have people sing or play or move together. Third, create healthy competition among teams, not individuals. People fight and sacrifice more for their

A flock of birds has the astonishing ability to travel together and shift course without the individual birds bumping into one another. They do it, scientists have learned, because each bird follows three simple rules: maintain minimum distance between you and the neighboring bird; fly at the same speed as your neighbor; always fly toward the cente

“The secret of life,” the sculptor Henry Moore once said, “is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of every day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

She plants trees that will bear fruit she will never eat, and cast shade she will never enjoy.

Why should the building of this one structure—with specific instructions about the length of the beams and all the different woods and ornaments—require such minute attention? It’s because the Israelites are not yet a people. They are an oppressed and disparate group of tribes and individuals. As Sacks puts it, “To turn a group of individuals into

As Augustine put it, “Where there’s humility there is majesty; where there’s weakness, there’s might; where there is death, there’s life. If you want to get these things don’t disdain those.” T. S. Eliot once captured the ideal of religious life: “A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything).”

Hermann Hesse wrote a short story called “Journey to the East,” in which a group of men take a long journey. They are accompanied by a servant named Leo who does the menial chores and lifts the group’s spirits with his singing. He takes care of the little things. The trip is going well until Leo disappears. Everything falls into disarray, and the t