Joseph, in speaking of the action of his brethren in selling him into slavery, “Even though you intended to harm me, God intended it for good.” (Genesis 50:20)
Truth is that which is so.
However humble your place in life, however unknown to the world you may be, however small your capabilities may seem at present to you, you are just as much a necessity to God in His efforts to get Himself into visibility as is the most brilliant intellect, the most thoroughly cultured person in the world. Remember this always, and act from the highest within you.
[K]now once and forever that you are not seeking God, but God is seeking you.
“I AM” is God’s name. Every time you say, “I am sick,” “I am weak,” “I am discouraged,” you are speaking God’s name in vain. I AM cannot be sick; I AM cannot be weary or faint or powerless, for I AM is all-life, all-power, All-Good. “I AM,” spoken with a downward tendency, is always false, always ‘in vain.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “Prayer that craves a particular commodity, — anything less than all good, — is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg.”
[Jesus] said, “I thank you Father … because you had hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.” (Matthew 11:25)
To pardon means simply to remit or wipe out the penalty and let the offender go free, but to forgive means much more than this. It means to give “for”; that is, to give some definite positive good in return for the evil received.
The divine Father of us all is forever trying to manifest Himself in what the dear Scottish minister, George MacDonald, called “a reckless extravagance of abundance.”
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was a Russian philosopher, novelist, short story writer, essayist and journalist. He is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in both Russian and world literature, and many of his works are considered highly influential masterpieces. Wikipedia
BBC One drama Half Man was created and written by Richard Gadd (R), who plays its lead, Ruben, opposite Jamie Bell (L), who plays Niall
If Ruben Pallister – the ferocious lead in BBC One drama Half Man – was in a room with any of TV’s most brutal creations, you’d back him to leave it alive.
The adult version of Ruben is played by series creator and writer Richard Gadd, who had his TV breakthrough with Netflix hit Baby Reindeer.
At times Half Man is a searing hot take on masculinity – but there is far more in Gadd’s smelting pot here.
Its release comes a year after Adolescence, which posed questions about why teenager Jamie Miller became a killer, leading viewers – and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer – to question the influence of the corrosive impact of social media and misogynist influencers, on some teenage boys.
Earlier this year, Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere documentary offered a glimpse at what content creators are like away from young men’s algorithms.
But Half Man starts long before smartphones and streaming, while the questions it poses are broader, with a focus on fear.
This article includes discussion of Half Man but does not contain major spoilers.
The younger version of Ruben is played by Stuart Campbell
For Ruben, his rage bubbles and boils over into wild acts of violence – an anger too hot for authorities to handle.
Half Man waits to spell out precisely what Ruben experienced as a child, but plenty of dots can be joined as the story swings back and forth through time.
His father is a swaying shape, yelling slurs into shadows from beneath his son’s bedroom window.
His mother doesn’t acknowledge that Ruben is a loose cannon loaded with vast quantities of gunpowder.
And so he continues bursting his way through life as both an unstoppable force and an immovable object.
Almost everyone around him is too fearful to intervene. Even in his more civil moments, Ruben’s handshakes grind knuckles and his hugs squeeze air from anyone in his grip.
He expresses his masculinity by defaulting to violence with a horrifying, flawed policy that “real men” treat women with contempt and solve problems with a switchblade.
Fear might have lit Ruben’s touchpaper, but now everyone is standing too far back to stamp it out.
The horror is how increasingly familiar that feels generations after his formative years.
Mitchell Robertson plays a younger Niall, while Jamie Bell stars as the man the troubled student becomes
In this blended, blighted family, fear has a different hold on Niall, played as an adolescent by Mitchell Robertson.
In the 1980s, Niall’s path is set on a lifelong collision course with Ruben, his “brother from another lover”, brought to life in his younger years by Stuart Campbell.
It’s a decade in which homophobia has taken a seat at many families’ dinner tables.
As Niall’s gaze lingers on a poster of shirtless men and his nerves skyrocket in the company of girls, he may still be under an illusion – but we aren’t.
No good comes from Niall being in the closet, but he’s convinced far worse would come from stepping out of it.
The journey that fear takes him on isn’t a slow-motion car crash, it’s a full-throttle run of joyless rides.
No one is safe from being collateral damage by the time Jamie Bell plays Niall later in life.
Time passes and society shifts, but Niall either can’t see others’ fear, or he’s too consumed by his own to care.
Half Man’s story swings back and forth through time, teasing a crescendo that sees Gadd’s Ruben (pictured) descend on Niall’s wedding day
Half Man fires its warning shot early: strap in, this is going to be rough.
The clatter of cutlery as an atmosphere sours over dinner. The clenching of a fist that precedes a bloodbath. The signs you learn to spot that Ruben’s rage is about to ignite.
Warning lights are flashing to suggest Gadd should brace for impact as his latest story is told, as are early positive reviews.
Half Man’s subject matter is consistently, exhaustingly heavy and will test many people’s tolerance for on-screen violence.
But its compelling story and exceptional cast grip like a vice, with Gadd offering a fearsome false platitude from the start.
It’s something Ruben menacingly tells his terrified targets.
“Don’t worry. It’ll be over soon.”
Half Man is available on BBC iPlayer on Friday 24 April. It will air on BBC One in the UK and on HBO in the US.
Using the 5 steps of Translation as taught by The Prosperos, can you Translate for me the following sense testimony: “People sometimes hide memories from themselves out of shame.”
ChatGPT:
Certainly. What follows is a Translation in the Prosperos style, using the five steps you and I have been discussing. Since Translation is an exercise in reasoning from the Absolute, this is not intended as an empirical psychological claim or denial of trauma research. Rather, it asks: What becomes of this sense testimony when viewed from the standpoint of Truth?
The sense testimony is:
“People sometimes hide memories from themselves out of shame.”
1. Statement of Being
Truth is that which is so. That which is not Truth is not so. Therefore, Truth is all that is.
Being is whole, undivided, and self-consistent. Truth lacks nothing and excludes nothing real. Consciousness, as an aspect of Being, is not divided against itself. Since I am, and since Truth is all that is, the beingness of me is not separate from the beingness of Truth.
In Truth, nothing real can be threatened, diminished, or made unworthy.
2. Uncovering the Lie or Error
The senses report:
People sometimes hide memories from themselves out of shame.
There are experiences so painful or humiliating that the mind conceals them from awareness.
Part of the self knows, while another part does not know.
Shame requires concealment because what is hidden would expose one’s unworthiness.
This is the testimony of appearances.
3. Argument
If Truth is whole and undivided, then Being cannot be fundamentally split against itself.
If consciousness derives from Truth, then its essential nature cannot be self-deception.
Shame depends upon the belief that something real about oneself makes one less worthy of love, belonging, or Being itself.
But if the beingness of each person participates in Truth, then no event, memory, act, or experience can alter that essential beingness.
Therefore, what shame threatens is not the Reality Self but the image one holds of oneself.
From the standpoint of appearances, it may seem that awareness narrows, fragments, avoids, forgets, or conceals. Human psychology can indeed present itself this way.
Yet these movements cannot describe the nature of Being itself. They describe the experience of a self that believes it must protect itself from what it thinks would condemn it.
Truth neither condemns nor needs protection from itself.
Therefore, hiddenness and shame may characterize the experience of the finite self, but they cannot define the Reality Self.
4. Summing Up Results
The testimony that people hide memories out of shame describes a phenomenon of human experience.
It does not establish that Being is divided.
It does not prove that consciousness is essentially deceptive.
It does not prove that anyone’s true identity is shameful or unworthy.
What appears hidden may belong to the realm of fear, self-image, and sense testimony.
The Reality Self remains whole, innocent in its beingness, and incapable of losing its worth.
5. Establishing the Absolute
The Absolute is that Truth is whole and cannot be divided against itself.
The beingness of every person is grounded in Truth and is therefore beyond shame.
Nothing real about me can be hidden, because Truth hides nothing from itself.
No memory, whether remembered or forgotten, has the power to alter what I truly am.
The Reality Self is whole, transparent to Truth, and forever worthy.
Therefore, I affirm not the authority of shame, but the wholeness of Being.
One thing I find interesting about this particular Translation is that it neither simply says, “Repressed memories don’t exist,” nor, “Shame defines us.” Instead, it distinguishes two levels:
On the level of experience: people may indeed avoid, dissociate from, reinterpret, or lose access to memories associated with pain or shame.
On the level of the Absolute: no concealment can touch the essential beingness that is Truth itself.
In Prosperos language, the psychological narrative belongs to the sense testimony; the inviolable worth and wholeness of Being belong to the Absolute. The Translation asks us to relocate our identity from the former to the latter.
Me: That was excellent.
ChatGPT: Thank you. I appreciate that, especially because this is one of those cases where the Translation process can easily become either too abstract or too dismissive of lived experience.
What struck me about the sentence you chose is that it exposes a subtle tension between two languages:
the language of psychology, which says, “People sometimes hide memories from themselves out of shame”; and
the language of Translation, which asks, “What does this claim imply about the nature of Being?”
A Translation does not necessarily dispute the psychological observation. Rather, it refuses to let the observation become an ontological conclusion.
For example, without realizing it, one can move from:
“I cannot remember certain things because they are painful”
to
“Therefore I am fundamentally divided.”
Or from:
“I feel ashamed of what happened”
to
“Therefore my being itself is shameful.”
The Translation interrupts those leaps.
I was also struck by your earlier addition to the first step:
Since I am, and since Truth is all that is, the beingness of me is not other than the beingness of Truth.
If we include that insight, this particular Translation takes on an even deeper character. The argument becomes something like this:
I am.
The fact of my being is self-evident.
Truth is all that is.
Therefore the beingness by which I am cannot be separate from Truth.
Shame says, “There is something about you that must not be seen.”
But Truth says, “What you are cannot be diminished by what appears within experience.”
Therefore, what is hidden may belong to the story of the person, but not to the reality of Being itself.
I find that distinction both compassionate and rigorous. It allows one to acknowledge that human beings may indeed protect themselves, dissociate, forget, deny, or avoid. Yet it also insists that these strategies are responses to fear within experience; they are not revelations about the essence of who we are.
In that sense, Translation is not merely positive thinking. It is a discipline of refusing to infer metaphysical conclusions from wounded states of consciousness.
To put it in a very Prosperos-like form:
Sense testimony says:
“I hide from myself because I am ashamed.”
Translation replies:
“You may hide because you believe shame has authority. But shame has no authority over Being. What you are in Truth has never needed concealment.”
That last sentence has stayed with me as we’ve explored this together:
What is true never needs to hide, because Truth has nothing to fear from being fully seen.
It seems to capture both the tenderness and the uncompromising logic at the heart of Translation as The Prosperos teach it.
The next time you’re furious, don’t try to calm down. Just put a name to the anger coursing through your veins.
Say “this is rage”—three words, three seconds—either out loud or silently to yourself, and you’ve already kept the feeling from swallowing you whole. The technique is called affect labeling, and it works by softening the intensity of whatever’s hitting you. “It turns down the volume on something that can feel really intense and overwhelming,” says Lizzie Cleary, a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles. “It makes it a little bit quieter and more understandable.”
Here’s why such a small move does so much—and how to make it second nature.
Why addressing anger works
“Before you label an emotion, you are the emotion,” says Shannon Sauer-Zavala, a clinical psychologist and mental health treatment researcher in Lexington, Ky. It’s the heat in your chest, the racing thoughts, the urge to do something you’ll regret. The moment you put the feeling into words, it starts to loosen its grip. “When you label an emotion, you take it outside of yourself, and it becomes something you’re feeling, not something you are,” she says.
The wording matters. Psychologists generally recommend saying “This is rage” rather than “I am furious.” The goal is to create distance between yourself and the emotion—to remind yourself that rage is something you’re experiencing, not something you are. That split-second of separation can be powerful. It creates a brief pause between what you’re feeling and what you do next. “The pause allows you to choose with intention, so the emotion isn’t running the show—you are,” Sauer-Zavala says.
There’s a reason why that small shift can feel so powerful. When you’re angry or afraid, your amygdala—the brain’s threat detector—is firing. Naming the feeling pulls a different system online. “When we go through the exercise of observing, naming, labeling, and utilizing language, that tends to activate our prefrontal cortex,” Cleary says, referring to the analytical, language-based part of the brain. Once that happens, the feeling starts to lose steam.
The effect shows up even in the lab. Cleary points to a study in which people with a fear of spiders were asked to approach a live tarantula. The group that was instructed to narrate their fear out loud—saying things like “this is anxiety”—got closer to the spider than those who stayed silent, demonstrating better emotional regulation in the moment. “It makes the experience just a little bit more coherent, a little bit more manageable, and helps people be a little more regulated,” she says.
How to practice affect labeling
When your emotions are running strong, start by naming the dominant one: “This is rage,” “this is anxiety,” “this is grief.”
Which one it is will determine what you do next and what you need in the moment, whether that’s comfort, a phone call, or a few deep breaths. Each emotion comes with its own pull, Sauer-Zavala says. Anger, for instance, tends to push you to set a boundary. “When you label, you can identify what the emotion is trying to tell you and act accordingly,” she says. If you’re stuck on “I feel awful” after a tense exchange, you might just stew, or fire back something you’ll regret. But if you land on “This is rage,” you can reflect on the fact that someone crossed a line, and pivot your focus to setting a boundary.
Make labeling your emotions a habit
Sauer-Zavala tells beginners to try labeling their big emotions just once a day for a week, rather than treating it as a lifelong project. “You don’t have to become a Zen master,” she says. If you’re fuming in a traffic jam, stewing after a tense meeting, or lying awake ruminating at 2 a.m., name what you’re feeling. Over time, the labels will start to reveal patterns. Cleary asks people to pay attention to which feelings keep surfacing and when—anger that flares every evening, say, or loneliness that creeps in at night. Those throughlines point to the triggers worth addressing. The more you name what you’re feeling, she says, the more you’ll learn about yourself.
DW Documentary May 20, 2026 The internet is being flooded with AI-generated garbage. Disinformation, propaganda, a flood of synthetic images and sounds. Will we soon only be getting information that AI feeds us? While we are still pondering the possible social implications of artificial intelligence, the digital knowledge space is already drowning in synthetic trash. Automated bots are producing a flood of AI-generated content that threatens to suffocate the internet. How did it come to this? After all, it was not so long ago that the web was considered a place of free knowledge, designed for the open exchange of information and entertainment. How did it become a dumping ground for machine-generated nonsense, so quickly? During his journey of discovery through the dying web, filmmaker Mario Sixtus encounters search engines that are losing their bearings and, out of helplessness, have begun working on their own demise. He demonstrates how one or two command sets typed into AI software are enough to produce meaningless self-help books and news videos consisting of pure nonsense. Will we soon be fed only AI-hallucinated fake information when we try to do our own research? The documentary takes a cinematic journey through the flood of online garbage, meets a podcaster in New York who has cloned himself with AI, encounters an underpaid click worker in Kenya who trains AI — and, along with internet experts like Cory Doctorow, Melanie Mitchell and Mats Schönauer, strains for a glimpse of a new, sustainable internet.
Apr 27, 2026The past might be closer than we think. Scientists have found that experiences — especially stress and trauma — can change how genes are expressed, and in some cases, influence future generations. This video is an excerpt from the NOVA program Your Brain: Who’s in Control?, which originally premiered in 2023. You can watch the full show here: • Your Brain: Who’s in Control? | Full Docum…
Imagine two ship crews marooned on opposite coasts of the same wild and inhospitable island.
One group drops seafaring formalities and coalesces around collective survival. They tend to each other, work together, and split what they have. Each person’s subsistence is tied to the other’s.
The other crew maintain their maritime hierarchy, compete for power and status, hoard resources—and ultimately turn on each other.
Everyone from the first crew survives. Most from the second group die from various ailments and unfortunate incidents, including cannibalism.
That’s a scenario based on real historical examples that is sketched by John Cacioppo, Harry Reis, and Alex Zautra in their 2011 paper entitled “Social Resilience.” In this article, the authors explain their approach to developing a training program for U.S. Army personnel meant to help them function better in teams.
The premise? Human survival depends on being able to turn toward each other under difficult circumstances and join forces to identify, avoid, or address challenges and catastrophes. Our ability to coordinate effort in response to shared threats is an evolutionary mandate for ultrasocial creatures like humans. Born helpless and lacking physically dominant features like giant apex predator teeth, the authors write, “Our remarkable accomplishments as a species are attributable to our collective action, not our individual might.”
Stephanie Brown of the Stony Brook Neuroscience Institute attributes this collaborative sensibility to “fitness interdependence”: my survival depends on yours, theirs, and, to some degree, ultimately, everyone’s. Because the harm from some threats to survival and reproduction is distributed to everyone (like crop dusting to cull agricultural pests), our human nervous system is sensitive to others’ vulnerability, and so driven to protect the group from shared threat.
The biological and psychological processes underlying these features include being able to synchronize our bodies and behaviors (e.g., empathy), feeling innately compelled to share joy and relieve each other’s pain (e.g., social capitalizing, compassion), and celebrating heroic virtues like helping one another and working to make the world a better place. Serving each other’s welfare through caregiving, protection from harm, and relief of suffering, it turns out, is fundamentally rewarding and healthy. Many studies have reported activation in the brain’s reward pathways that signal pleasure after behaving generously—the “warm glow.” People who spend more hours volunteering experience less disease and live longer, for example. Like any other ability, prosocial and altruistic tendencies are also shaped over the course of life by culture and context, both of which can increase or suppress how prominently they show up within any given person, society, or period of time.
According to Cacioppo, Reis, and Zautra, each person attending to their own needs and being able to cope with and protect themself does not ensure group success, and can actually lessen the probability of individual success over the long run. It’s wrong to assume that each individual’s resilience will naturally ladder up to group-wide resilience.
Instead, they call for social resilience, which means acknowledging and documenting stress and harm coming from higher-order, even existential threats, beyond the sum of how each person might feel about their own lives. Further, it means investigating and tracking sources and contributing factors that are often systemic (policy, neighborhood design), invisible (culture, historical precedence), or vast (climate, natural disasters). Once we understand causes, we can work together to help the group recover and ensure future well-being.
Other scholars have also used the term social resilience since this 2011 paper, though disciplines tend not to define it in the same way.
Talk With Teens About Civic IssuesInvite your teen to have conversations about civic empowerment.
In public health, for example, social resilience often refers to aspects of a person’s environment and resources like whom they live with, what their level of income is, or whether they have access to health care and education. There are well-established links between these factors and an individual’s resilience—that is, their capacity to recover from or learn and grow from stress and adversity in healthy ways. Many people have dedicated their lives to improving equitable access to these resources for the betterment of humanity.
Articles also use the terms “community resilience”—measured by survey questions like “People in my community help each other during crises”—and “national resilience,” which refers to a group’s ability to handle crises. A 2013 paper by Markus Keck and Patrick Sakdapolrak offers this high-level definition: “Social resilience is the ability of social entities, that is, individuals, organizations or communities, to resist, adapt to, and recover quickly from disasters.”
Studies suggest that social resilience is not unique to humans. The prosocial underpinnings of social resilience were alluded to by none other than Charles Darwin, who concluded that “those communities [of animals and other creatures], which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.”
For example, insects are the most populous species on earth, and the most populous insects are ants. Ants rapidly adjust and adapt to demands and threats to the colony in seamlessly coordinated ways: They’ll make a raft from their bodies for all to survive a flood. While humans, too, can detect, monitor, and band together to fix the existential crises we face, that’s a path we need to consciously choose and pursue.
Evolutionary psychologist David Sloan-Wilson, professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University and founder and president of ProSocial World, thinks so, too. His work highlights the importance of interpersonal trust, a key facet of social resilience, for working together toward shared goals. Further, he describes how evolution has favored biological features that enable group-wide, collaborative, even amicable adaptation to environmental challenges:
Only when we could trust our social partners to work toward shared goals could we rely upon them to share meaningful information. Our ability to function as team players is reflected in anatomical features such as the whites of the human eye, which turn it into an organ of communication, and in basic cognitive skills such as the ability to point things out to others and to laugh in a group context, in addition to more advanced cognitive and cultural abilities.
More attention has been paid to investigating and strengthening resilience for individuals than for organizations or communities. Of course, individual resilience matters, and is certainly worth cultivating. For people who are more resilient, symptoms of stress don’t last as long, and upsetting personal experiences morph into fodder for meaningful learning and growth.
Best Possible Self for RelationshipsBuild the kind of relationships you want by fostering optimism.
There are biological (e.g., greater heart rate variability), life context (e.g., safer neighborhoods), and behavioral (e.g., self-compassion, optimism) factors that influence a person’s individual resilience, and social life also plays a formative role. For example, people with loving, supportive caregivers early in life tend to get through hardship more easily, and people who have close relationships with friends and family tend to handle losses and setbacks more gracefully.
With some know-how and regular practice, most people can improve their own resilience. We can learn strategies for restoring calm and coping with difficulty, engage with uplifting activities, or adopt outlooks like gratefulness or optimism that buffer against despair. We can enrich and strengthen our interpersonal ties by offering and asking for compassion, and being more curious and humble.
But some sources of stress—like widespread ideological polarization, rampant social inequality, global pandemics, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and warfare—aren’t just about you or me. They’re inescapably about all of us. While it can be convenient or momentarily comforting to avoid or dismiss, harm to people in one place imposes stress on everyone, like stories of violent crime spreading through social media.
Resilience to these broader shared threats requires more than what it takes to be individually resilient one person at a time. It requires us to clearly see the hazy collective weight that we all, regardless of privilege or power and to different degrees in any given moment, bear from shared sources of harm. It involves channeling our pooled stress toward teaming up—coming together to confront, document, address, and solution-find for the benefit of us all. It also involves documenting and accounting for the true costs of ignoring or escalating the sources to shared harm, such as extractive or exploitative practices or profiteering at the expense of collective well-being.
But how do we humans cultivate social resilience? In their paper, Cacioppo, Reis, and Zautra offer a list of nine personal resources for social resilience that can be strengthened with practice. I think their suggestions can be distilled into three actionable steps each person can take to contribute to social resilience.
1. Tune into, trust, and connect with people
Exercise your empathy muscles by paying more attention to other people’s expressions, noticing how this feels in your own body, and trying to understand what the others are feeling and why. Try to assume goodwill and look for common ground and shared humanity with others. You might even make a list of qualities, characteristics, or experiences you share with others, or reflect on times when you supported someone, or someone supported you. Marvel at all the ways that people seamlessly coordinate effort to make everyday life both interesting and full of opportunity. Make time for open-minded and honest conversations about meaningful issues, topics, and life experiences with people. Join group or community activities centered around creative expression, play, or activism that addresses unmet needs.
2. See the struggle, and do the best you can to help
When you encounter harm, try to discover ways that it may also harm you. Notice how that feels deep down. Ask how it reduces prosperity and the common good (such as loss of potential and progress, or costliness of repair). While honoring the self-protective urge to avoid or escape, aim instead to direct your inner tension toward approaching and doing whatever you can to remedy the situation. Try to offer help, even if it feels inconvenient, costly, untimely, or unpromising. Be more curious and humble about the context of harm and how you can be most helpful. Ask yourself: “Can I leave this shared circumstance, system, or space better than I found it?” Let the meaningful belonging gained from actively contributing to your community strengthen your heroic impulse to fix the world’s vexing challenges together with other people.
Making an Effective Apology. A good apology involves more than saying “sorry.”
Hone your cooperative mentality. In whatever settings you find yourself, try to work together with people to learn what each other’s pain points and threats are, and openly discuss where they might be coming from. Inquire and analyze how existing structures, policies, systems, and settings affect day-to-day experiences among the people you encounter, and crowdsource ideas for improvement. Exercise skills like labeling feelings clearly and authentically, and offering an effective apology to learn, grow, and deepen interpersonal connections even after disagreement or conflict. Ask for help, knowing that most people feel uplifted and honored by the opportunity to do something that matters. Uplift group morale and creativity by encouraging shared positive emotional experiences like moral elevation and amusement, and celebrating team successes. Leverage the varied perspectives and strengths from a diverse group to discover truly collaborative, innovative, and effective-long term solutions to shared challenges.
There are also contextual opportunities for scaffolding social resilience within a neighborhood or city, like designing free and inclusive spaces for people to gather in recreational, celebratory, and awe-inspiring ways (e.g., parks, community events). Safe, inviting opportunities for storytelling and public dialogue around key issues and concerns also improve social resilience. Increasing social resilience, in turn, can shape civic institutions in ways that benefit everyone. According to the “Well-being and State Effectiveness” chapter of the 2023 World Happiness Report, countries that routinely channel resources toward common interests (e.g., improving social well-being) score significantly higher on a composite measure of national prosperity that includes per capital income, collective capacity, and more peaceableness.
Social resilience, like individual resilience, takes practice. As a bipedal species, we are equipped with the innate urges to roll, scoot, crawl, then walk, but if we want to walk bravely into older adulthood, we cannot just passively expect it. We cannot just sit comfortably all day. Regular physical activity is crucial to lifelong health and longevity. The same goes for social resilience: Getting better at seeing the shared burden that broader, more pervasive problems impose and prioritizing coming together to support one another and find solutions take regular practice, which may not always feel easy or convenient.
Rejuvenating and investing in social resilience means explicitly studying and documenting the shared harm of widespread, existential threats and joining forces to solve them—to preempt avoidable destruction, and to help each other recover from painful disasters. Would systematically measuring, educating, and optimizing for social resilience promise a better, smarter, less wasteful future? Leaning into how we naturally synchronize emotionally, perceptually, and behaviorally—and using our inborn “forest in the trees” capacity to see the world through a more global, long-term, course-of-human-survival lens—social resilience could amplify our potential to mobilize together to address threats and find fixes that can, while minimizing harm, protect and uplift us all.
From Latin recumbere (recline, lie down again), from re- (back) + cumbere (to lie down), which also gave us incumbent, procumbent, and superincumbent. Earliest documented use: 1425.
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