This fundamental lack of connectedness allows people to act in trivial but incredibly selfish ways. Rachel Yehuda pointed to littering as the perfect example of an everyday symbol of disunity in society. “It’s a horrible thing to see because it sort of encapsulates this idea that you’re in it alone, that there isn’t a shared ethos of trying to protect something shared,” she told me. “It’s the embodiment of every man for himself. It’s the opposite of the military.” In.
A deep and enduring economic crisis like the Great Depression of the 1930s, or a natural disaster that kills tens of thousands of people, might change America’s fundamental calculus about economic justice. Until then, the American public will probably continue to refrain from broadly challenging both male and female corporate leaders who compensate themselves far in excess of their value to society. That.
The findings are in keeping with something called self-determination theory, which holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered “intrinsic” to human happiness and far outweigh “extrinsic” values such as beauty, money, and status. Bluntly.
Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker.
The problem is that it’s hard to aim a rifle when your heart is pounding, which points to an irony of modern combat: it does extraordinarily violent things to the human body but requires almost dead calm to execute well.
Industrial production actually rose in Germany during the war. And the cities with the highest morale were the ones – like Dresden – that were bombed the hardest. According to German psychologists who compared notes with their American counterparts after the war, it was the untouched cities where civilian morale suffered the most.
The one thing that might be said for societal collapse is that – for a while at least – everyone is equal.
It makes absolutely no sense to make sacrifices for a group that, itself, isn’t willing to make sacrifices for you.
Civilians understand soldiers to have a kind of baseline duty, and that everything above that is considered “bravery.” Soldiers see it the other way around: either you’re doing your duty or you’re a coward.
If there’s an image of the apocalypse, I thought, it might be a man in a business suit building a fire in the courtyard of an abandoned high rise.
To make matters worse, politicians occasionally accuse rivals of deliberately trying to harm their own country – a charge so destructive to group unity that most past societies would probably have just punished it as a form of treason.
Contempt is one of four behaviors that, statistically, can predict divorce in married couples.
Why are you focusing on how different you are from one another, and not on the things that unite us?” The.
Adversity often leads people to depend more on one another, and that closeness can produce a kind of nostalgia for the hard times that even civilians are susceptible to.
When a person does something for another person – a prosocial act, as it’s called – they are rewarded not only by group approval but also by an increase of dopamine and other pleasurable hormones in their blood. Group cooperation triggers higher levels of oxytocin, for example, which promotes everything from breast-feeding in women to higher levels of trust and group bonding in men.
Western society is so unappealing. On a material level, it is clearly more comfortable and protected from the hardships of the natural world. But, as societies become more affluent they tend to require more, rather than less, time and commitment by the individual, and it’s possible that many people feel that affluence and safety simply aren’t a good trade for freedom.
It’s hard to know how to live for a country that regularly tears itself apart along every possible ethnic and demographic boundary.
People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long. The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it’s a dangerous waste of time because they’re both right.
If you want to make a society work, then you don’t keep underscoring the places where you’re different – you underscore your shared humanity,” she told me. “I’m appalled by how much people focus on differences. Why are you focusing on how different you are from one another, and not on the things that unite us?” The.
According to the Times notice, Mr. Bauman called his employees into a meeting and asked them to accept a 10 percent reduction in salary so that he wouldn’t have to fire anyone. They all agreed. Then he quietly decided to give up his personal salary until his company was back on safe ground. The only reason his staff found out was because the company bookkeeper told them. Bauman.