Evolution gave us our brains, our opposable thumbs, our capacity for language, and they’re wondrous.
But biology isn’t enough. We’re social creatures. We thrive together.
In community, by sharing even while striving, we’ve leveraged our biological inheritance to achieve ever more. It’s why our species has succeeded.
Call it biology plus community – a fusion that sustained the earliest humans on the savannahs and shores of Africa, that tamed fire and gave us chemotherapy, that girds much human flourishing today.
We need community.
Yet living in community is hard. Some among us inflict harm in hoarding the benefits of community for themselves. They seek advantages in deceit or subterfuge or power. They cause conflict, anguish, injury, fear and death.
It’s been so forever, I suppose, this tension between community and individual selfishness. Perhaps we need both in some measures.
But count me in for community, for caring for me and you. And for them, for the innumerable others we can’t know personally – and especially for those hounded and forgotten souls who suffer most when selfishness, persecution and cruelty trump thriving together.
How We Get Along
Can’t We Be Nice to each Other?
Great, metaphorical usage of a concluding verb.
Me, too, Jeff.