Sublime

We believe in social progress, and we believe the most powerful tool to advance the cause of progress is the peer network.

innovation in our species depends more on our sociality than on our intellect, and the challenge has always been how to prevent communities from fragmenting and social networks from dissolving.

Every society requires that members, or wannabe members, signal they’re serious about giving as much as they get and not just eating the kugel and running.

All these theories attempt to counter the crude dichotomy that suggests we can either have relatively small-scale and simple social organisation, with high levels of freedom, or complex, large-scale societies that trap us in an iron cage of restraints. Instead, they suggest that progress can mean more complexity and scale as well as more autonomy.

It suggested that individuals are not powerless in the face of the impersonal. We can create families, communities, even societies, around the ideals of love, faithfulness and trust.

the guiding values of these free agent small groups—trust, reciprocity, and horizontal loyalty—are essential nutrients of free agency itself. The story isn’t simple.

We [also] build our sense of civic identity and opinions about government through social interactions. […] Our social capital — which Putnam defines as the overarching belief about society that facilitates co-operation — diminishes when we lose opportunities to engage with people outside of our regular social networks.

The whole thrust of modern thought has been toward reducing the sphere of individual moral responsibility.