Modern society has us as individuals so it is increasingly easy to forget that we are really communal tribal animals. We survived, squabbled, and reproduced for generations in small groups, small tribes, small communities.
While we must honor both whether we like it or not people need people. It is a core human need, and the desire to connect is a fundamental drive. It is crucial to our development with potential for profound benefits on quality of life as we grow.
It is a mutual, interactive process along the lines of going from acquaintance to friend. It is the process of nurturing social connections through affection and trust. Shared understanding and respect for a brotherhood, one that transcends interpersonal politics or disagreements between individuals.
As a baby you were primed for and required damn near 24/7 connection. This 24/7 connection obviously requires something to connect to, a second party. Ideally a parent with some nervous system regulation, basic competence to keep baby alive and well, judgement, willingness to take action and responsibility, and mutual trust. But sole care, a second single human, while possible is largely untenable. So ideally at least two allowing diversity of connection and also so that each can have time and space to fully exist as their own self outside the connection, the relationship, the bond. Even more ideal is the multigenerational support, the close community support, the elders, the friends, the neighbors. All at a baseline of familial competence and roughly aligned for the good of the baby.
Bonds That Persist
There’s magnificent crazy idea that there is something great within every person that needs to be regarded with respect. And from that respect, trust can grow. And trust plays an analogous role in the creation of habitable order out of chaos. Trust simplifies relationships in your brain because it doesn’t have to account for how horribly complicated every person is. Trust flattens context because respect for ability and assumptions built on the body of the past allows you to make assumptions about the present situation and about the future. You’re on solid ground, secure, safe.
Without trust and respect that solid ground is thin ice. Chaos is lurking just below the surface, icy water, a shark. Betrayal, danger, risk, manipulation.
To counter this we assess everyone we meet. We create tribes of trusted people. A tribe of trusted people also known as family, friends, neighbors, mentors, allows you to better define your reality and relationship. The more trusted the more secure you are down to the most sensitive things like body image, sexual worthiness, confidence, ambition. We acquire the bonds of trusted people to allow the expression of our identity which Isaiah Berlin called as fundamental a need as food or water.
A family can offer unconditional love (even if it doesn’t always feel that way), but they are the people who installed your buttons and they often push them. Strong bonds mean that someone is looking out for us. Backup has arrived. We are safe now. Caring is healing scientifically.
One of the people’s main deathbed regrets is of connection. “Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives… Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes.”
In the army, soldiers live together, march together, dress together. They call themselves ‘brothers’ and are allocated into ‘fictive kin’ groups such as platoons, regiments, and divisions.
Help determine how to structure your waking hours, which is one of the eternal problems of human existence.
Empathy and solidarity are bred into us, like natural selection at a group level. Mutual aid, altruism, and trust are all cooperative traits that benefit the common good.
People Need People
The despair of freedom. The dislocation and emasculation experienced by the individual cut free from the familiar and comforting structures of the tribe and the clan, the village and the family.
Interpersonal Entanglement - Our sympathy with other minds makes our interpersonal relationships one of the most complex aspects of human existence. Romance, in particular, is more complicated than being nice to friends and kin, negotiating with allies, or outsmarting enemies - it contains aspects of all three.
Comradery
Some things can only grow in the light of others
Make Friends and Influence People
Trust is made of -Competence - are they capable? -Self-discipline - will they do it? -Honor - do they betray oaths for incentives? -Intellect - can they see the order effects? -Virtue - do they have good intentions? -Honesty - do they hide important information?
- reach out to the people in your life
- send them memes that remind you of them
- ask them what they’ve been up to since you last spoke
- ask them for their opinion on something you’re dealing with
- ask them about what’s on their minds
Mirror neurons are neurons that fire both when performing an action oneself, and watching someone else perform the same action - for example, a neuron that fires when you raise your hand or watch someone else raise theirs. We predictively model other minds by putting ourselves in their shoes, which is empathy. But some of our desire to help relatives and friends, or be concerned with the feelings of allies, is expressed as sympathy, feeling what (we believe) they feel.
Be deliberate about seeking out high-quality peers. talk to more individual people. there are billions of people on the planet and it’s extremely likely that there are all sorts of wonderful, amazing people that you’d love to have in your life.
In relation to bonds, when in group conversation you find that you’re not only in relation to others, but in relation to the ‘logo’ ‘geist’ that’s happening in the distributed cognition. First orient on each other then orient on the logos (find and intimacy with the logos) Us —> ‘We Space’ —> ‘Reality’ (meta?)
Looking at it from a negative starting point - how to look at fixing insecure, stressed, bad relationships/social patterns
Community as a Check on Individualism
Leo Strauss - individual freedom causes chaos because it undermined the shared moral framework which held society together, individuals pursue their own selfish interests and this inevitably leads to conflict.
Shared purpose / myth of America
In the 1660s, the Dutch philosopher Spinoza wrote, in his Ethics of Human Bondage or the Strength of the Emotions, that the term bondage relates to the human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions. That is, according to Spinoza, “when a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune.”
Humans historically enslaved other humans by destroying community and using estranged humans as machine cogs. We just use ideology to wishfully mark where we think we are on the spectrum. Leftists place us more towards the global collective end. Libertarians place us towards the individualist end. Conservatives focus on connection structures rather than degree. There is truth to all three ideological views of our species nature. Technology today allows each of these abstract ideologies to be concretely realized via actual connection modalities.
Why enslave each other when we can put partial digital copies of ourselves in each other’s second brains?
Individuals specialize. These bonds, units of social connection at the friend, family, and romantic level radiate out to form community. The community is a network
Most aspects of social life require an ability to catapult our minds forward in time; social emotions such as guilt and shame function by anticipating our own future feelings; making a promise to someone builds in a timeline of obligation and responsibility; and the simple act of gauging someone’s intentions is based on identifying different possible futures.