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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.

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.

Supreme traced a social and cultural topography of its brand’s global community, but that community formed exactly because you could only buy Supreme at its Lafayette Street shop in New York. Through its merch, Supreme held this community together across time and geography. It connected people, conversations, and symbols into one Supreme social network.