Put Yourself in Context — “Social Fabrics” are Group Brains
Self awareness is not complete if we think of ourselves only as individuals. It also requires awareness of how we interact with the people we share our lives with. (Beyond other people, we can benefit from greater awareness of how we interact with the other animals, plants, and things we share our lives with, but that’s a larger story than this essay.)
I know that other people have explored these ideas in greater detail than this already. With this essay I’m just trying to raise them as briefly as possible in ordinary language, to get you thinking about them, and maybe provide some new insights for you.
It helps to think of ourselves as nodes in a “social fabric” of communication links to other people — most simply, like threads and sticks on which we can pull or push. Of course they are much more than just slack threads or rigid sticks, and they don’t form a regular “fabric”. A more accurate description is that they form an intricate, irregular network, roughly analogous to the network of nerve cells in our brains. We individual humans are like individual nerve cells with communication links to and from others near and far.
A single link can vary in strength from weak to strong, and it can also vary in rigidity from flexible, like a thread or rope, to stiff, like a stick or pole. A link can…
