Notes on the individual and community.

 
(1) Man comes into the world with needs and wants, and must function in a world of other people with needs and wants.  We learn self-discipline and empathy, first with our past and future selves by way of experience and foresight; and then we extend and extrapolate this process to others, and in the process we learn negotiation, social skills, and empathy.  (See Peterson.)

(2) We can best help those people whose needs we know best, which is to say the people closest to us.  This is the deep meaning of "charity begins at home" and it is the rational basis for the idea of loyalty.  Your duty to those closest to you is greater, not because they are more precious in G-d's sight than the stranger, but because it is they whom you know best how to help, and it is to them that you will be held accountable for your failings.

(3) The negotiation of economic and social exchanges is a distributed process, conducted iteratively by the many parties involved.  (See Sowell.)  From this process emerge the relationships and networks that form society.  It is not a top-down process.

(4) There is an exact analogy between the economic market (the exchange of goods, services, currency, and credit) and the social market (wherein are exchanged intangibles such as love, friendship, honor, trust, and loyalty).  In our daily interactions with others, we constantly negotiate the boundaries of such things as greetings, courtesies, modes of dress, physical contact, compliments and insults, and so on.  This, too, is not, and cannot be, a top-down process.

(5) In the social world, trust (with its complementary trait, loyalty) is the analog of credit in the economic sphere:  it is built over time, as a function of an established beneficial relationship, and it makes possible things that would not be possible without it.  Specifically, trust, like credit, facilitates planning for the future.

(6) Most of what we know about the world, we learn from other people; it follows that our ability to understand the world depends on our ability to understand people.  Finding our way in the world of people is the hardest and most important mental work we do in life.  Whether we are born into a happy family or a broken home, a stable society or one teetering on the brink of collapse, our path to security and happiness lies in building and keeping the bonds that tie us to our families, tribes, bands, communities, and nations.