weekly Go Flip Yourself

To embed meaning and stories in everything. We extract the purest essence of an idea, value or lesson and then tell it through as many means as possible so it lives on with possibility of endless continuation, in collaboration with the past and future.

But Haidt also spends a fair amount of the book exploring a comprehensive moral matrix (fascinating) along with the need for the divine—or specifically, a need to belong to something bigger than ourselves, balanced by a hunger for awe. He spends a fair number of pages exploring (and gently denouncing) the New Atheist movement for (willfully) misunderstanding the role of religion in peoples’ lives—he points out that people are motivated to show up for each other not because of shared beliefs but because of belonging. Absent something to belong to, we are adrift.

Every writer who chooses to write in English as opposed to their mother tongue, every filmmaker who leaves their country for Hollywood, every founder who creates a business in the US instead of their own country, may be making an excellent decision from an individual point of view. They are likely to gain more personal influence that way. But they’re also increasing the influence of globalized American culture more than they are helping their own home culture.

If the culture in a school is at odds with its pedagogical goals, energy will be wasted trying to deal with the friction between these value systems: You get disruptive students and motivation issues. An educator might have an easier time if they found a way to align the peer culture with the pedagogy. But crafting aligned cultures is not how mainstream education works.

Culture is a catalyst. It multiplies the effectiveness of all other interventions and tools. A kid that grows up in an academically oriented family might use the internet to accelerate their rate of learning. The same kid in a different context might use the same tool to distract herself. Knowing how to scale up cultures that support us would be immensely useful, but it is a difficult problem.

“Children are biologically programmed to imitate the behavior of our older peers. There are no actions that an adult can take to rival the effectiveness of older children modeling desired behaviors for younger children.”

If we want to revitalize our neighborhood communities, we should ask: which factors explain why so many have declined in the face of technological change? I see four: changes in the physical landscape, decline in local institutions, individualization of religion, and shifts in our education and aspirations. Where these four factors have changed the least, community remains the strongest.

When the corporate executive and the college student struck up a conversation in the 1980s, they weren’t just sharing space. They were engaging in a moment engineered by circumstance. The stakes were low; the expected return on breaking social norms was just high enough. With nowhere else to be, curiosity got its chance.