If someone dismisses your ideas out of hand, ask them to explain. If they have an answer, you might learn something. If they don’t, they might learn something.
I once knew a triumvirate of professors who ditzed the idea of “Community”, a concept my mother could explain having spent the war years in a small village where the people had complex mulitple relationships stretching back generations. I was too polite to demand an accounting for why they reviled something familiar that they dismissed as a fabrication. In my mind 2 thoughts ran in parallel: that this was their area of research so they knew something I did not, and that their feelings seemed overly high. I kept quiet. I should have asked them what they meant.
Here’s a related thread of thought: Does a market economy based on self-interest (Adam Smith: 1776) conflict with moral sentiment (Adam Smith: 1759)? Apparently even Adam Smith believed that people co-operated, through an organized division of labour built with reference to a sense of propriety.
All people are disposed to collaborate co-operatively. Added incentives and artificial discipline exist to standardize our treatment of people:
- They shape how we deal with others, but not that we will deal with them.
- They may induce us to co-operate with those members of our community that we would otherwise keep at arm’s length and ensure that each person has a place, even if that place is outcast and dreadful.
- They establish means and methods for dealing with people outside our community.
But every individual must collaborate with others if they are to survive childhood or find the resources to live as adults. And it is their community that sets the context and defines the (initial) social network.
