Sublime

Rather, gifting carries with it a collective intelligence that knows our participation in the gift is what sustains us. We don’t just benefit via increased social bonds and that warm fuzzy feeling of “doing good” – when we’re kind to each other and the world round us, we are literally increasing our chances of survival.

Kevin Kwok has a schtick about how friend groups underinvest in themselves. A group of people with high mutual trust, shared interests, and low coordination costs have already solved for many of the issues that otherwise prevent humans from accomplishing great things.

Behavioral economics is demonstrating that humans don’t always act in self-interested ways, and that transactions themselves have an emotional component.

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?  

Empathy is a “capricious and irrational emotion that appeals to our narrow prejudices”. It encourages us to take shortcuts towards familiar and accessible feelings, values, and beliefs. Of course, all of this makes sense when we take an evolutionary perspective. As Bloom observes, “we are constituted to favour our friends and family over strangers,... See more