################### The CRCRS Manifesto ################### ==================================================================================================================== for Connected, Resilient, Candid, Reciprocal Subsocieties (v2025-09-27. © 2025 John Pratt. Licence: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) ==================================================================================================================== Problem Framing *************** • Changes to our modern Western lifestyles and culture: • Provide us great opportunity and independence — with pluralism and individuality taken for granted; but • Draw us into ever-increasing division, isolation and loneliness: • Which have been linked with misery, health problems and even early death — though not everyone is aware, and it may be hard to admit due to social stigma; • Even compared to times and places where many other problems are worse; • By continuing to gate connection and resilience behind conformity. • Mainstream institutions and norms are adaptive for most people in many ways, but • Some challenging human dispositions — instinctive and/or socially normalised — can lead to too few, or too shallow, human relationships. Solution Framing **************** Those of us who are affected — and are willing to engage in good faith — must associate into local subsocieties: social contexts where we can: • Meet in person to form communal and personal bonds; and • Rely on a shared philosophy which: • Actually addresses the core principles that are really necessary to satisfy our unmet social needs, and • Helps us understand and manage the challenging dispositions that hamper our efforts to connect in mainstream society; • Ties our practices directly to our motivation of real connection and resilience; and • Gives us confidence in getting better-than-normal results for our efforts — through the self-selection of those of us who share a discerning and productive attitude, but • Neither withdraws us from broader humanity and society, nor places us in foolish opposition to them. Our Core Principles ******************* We must aspire — despite inevitable complications — to become: Connected --------- • Welcome all human beings who share our need — and follow our principles in good faith — to associate and belong with us. • Seek personal bonds with other individuals — drawing on whatever we happen to share. • Develop together our latent human social potential, including: • Customarily being around each other and involved in each-others lives — so we can effectively relate as human beings on instinctive and emotional levels, • Building friendships that can eventually grow to be as close as kinship, and • Showing up for the extremes of each others' lives: both joy & celebration and pain & hardship; • Practicing assertiveness — setting and respecting reasonable boundaries; • Building trust through more generous assumptions and interpretations of others' points of view, values and intentions, • Nurturing the ability to relate and interact with almost anyone who cares to do the same, and • Cultivating tolerance — or even forgiveness or respect — for those who make us uncomfortable or to whom we have a negative emotional attachment. Resilient --------- • Practice real emotional and practical support — as a sufficient basis for personal connection. • Practice mutual aid and protection — as a sufficient basis for group solidarity. • Value loyal and dependable relationships that: • Are stable and long-term enough to have effective cooperation and mutual accountability; • Give mutual benefit that is worth both parties making sacrifices for; and • Outlast predictable minor setbacks: • Especially: • Interpersonal conflicts, or • Changes in lifestyle; • That have no necessary bearing on the viability of the relationship (i.e. not including serious betrayal, abuse or neglect). • Value deep, well-maintained group interconnections and networking: • On the one hand, have a low barrier to entry and focus on individual relationships: • Give budding friendships the personal attention they deserve. • Prefer informal gatherings of like-minded individuals to limit organisational or regulatory burdens. • Reduce individual costs to involvement by keeping activities personal, flexible, local and free. (Unavoidable costs should be minimised and paid voluntarily.) • Don't introduce unnecessary attitudes or group dynamics that might inflame our challenging dispositions. • Be flexible in how we coordinate (e.g. online). • On the other hand, lean into group value and communal investment: • Have enough structure and custom within meetings to communicate and normalise: • Following the core principles, and • Managing our challenging dispositions. • Encourage a critical mass of members for group resilience, such that: • Each person's unique needs should align with someone else's available resources, and • We feel secure in our ability to adapt to life's challenges together. • Establish ways of coordinating that are known to meet our principles. Candid ------ • Share and respond to forthright admissions of need — giving connection and resilience problems the high priority they warrant. • Make it a group custom to disclose, raise, ask or offer whatever will serve us in following our principles: • To unify our rational and emotional natures, and • To grow group trust and solidarity; • With an attitude of respect and sincerity for the ritual (though the structure may be flexible and our interactions comfortable and good-humoured). • Nurture a gentle sense of irony about our judgements, opinions and stories about ourselves and others. • Prefer engaged, meaningful discourse — however imperfect: • To allow others to really know us — showing openly and honestly what we really want, value and believe, and • To nurture mutual understanding, respect and connection — putting our differences out in the open where they can't fester. • Admit vulnerability and expose ourselves to emotional risk — which is the courage necessary to: • Deeply connect, • Be open to other people and ideas, and • Trust that we will still belong despite interpersonal conflict. • Give confidence that demonstrations of friendliness and goodwill are sincere and can be trusted: • Be frank about how close we do or don't want to be to people if our intentions or attitudes don't match. • Prefer neutrality, or even tolerance with stiff politeness, over fake friendliness or insincere goodwill. Reciprocal ---------- • Give mutual support and protection the high priority they warrant — by looking for opportunities to help each other. • Seek a proportionate degree of care and assistance from others: • To ensure our own involvement is sustainable; • Including: • Reciprocation of effort in personal relationships (not to be confused with superficial transactional relationships), and • Reciprocity of effort within the larger group: gratefully receiving the help we need to compensate for the help we have given. • Have a sense of fairness and even-handedness: • Treat others as we would be treated. • Only expect those rights and privileges we grant others. • Include and accept others in the way we ourselves deeply desire to be included and accepted. • See others' flaws in ourselves and tolerate them accordingly. • Vindicate others' trust in their security and belonging. • Honour a truce with anyone we just can't connect with, rather than acting or manoeuvering against each other. Challenging Human Dispositions ****************************** Dispositions Framing -------------------- The challenging human social dispositions that we must understand when forming subsocieties: • Are present in all of us to some extent, • Can be seen as common ground — part of our shared humanity, and • Can sometimes be channeled into pro-social behavior; but • Often regress into counterproductive behaviours for our purposes, • Can undermine the will and effort necessary for us to create real connection and resilience, and • Can form vicious, mutually-reinforcing cycles when any of them are left unmanaged; so • Unless we: • Are aware of them, • Accept their influence on us — instead of normatively denying them, • Evaluate our groups' progress by how well we're managing them, and • Channel them in more adaptive directions; • We will inevitably act upon them: • Without proper restraint — if we knowingly and uncritically condone them; or • Without the necessary self-awareness — if we are deeply oblivious or in denial of them, or too hastily overcompensate for them or assume we can erase them completely; • Which — if uncorrected — will leave our group in a downward spiral of following our dispositions instead of our core principles, until the group has become denatured and worthless. Dispositions List ----------------- Conditionality ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ • To measure stake in potential relationships using extraneous criteria that are disconnected from the fundamental motivations of connection and resilience: • Especially: • Shared beliefs or opinions — usually religious or political; • Activities — usually hobbies, causes or vices; • Social gatherings where we must compete for social status and continued inclusion; and • Proficiency at social protocols and customs: • Regardless of their moral and practical limitations, • Possibly including denial of our lack of real connection and resilience; • As the only socially endorsed ways of forming relationships without attracting shame and stigma, • To the point where we are effectively excluded or rejected — by others or ourselves — because we don't share them; • Even when they have not satisfied our fundamental motivations for pursuing them in the first place; • Instead of investing directly in each-other's lives and wellbeing out of more principled social obligation. Tribalism ~~~~~~~~~ • To only connect with people based on superficial demographic similarity. • To filter people into in-group vs out-group: • Us; our tribe; people like us who want and do good things; individual human beings worthy of empathy, understanding and good treatment; vs • Them; the Other; people who want and do bad things; the inferior and contemptible; our designated scapegoats, fit to be remorselessly dehumanised, de-individualised, diminished, accused, judged harshly and/or warred against. • To live in siege mindset, where a sense of being under attack by the out-group leads to prejudiced opinions and responses to anyone associated with them. • To have cliquey group identity and labels (as opposed to "human beings", "members of this group", or "friends"). • To judge, ostracise or exclude others based solely on the grievances or opinions of others in the group. • To normalise blind support for each other's claims or actions: • To signal solidarity, or • To purport high social or moral standing; • Uncritically echoing and championing group claims about what is right — rather than independently valuing truth, empathy or substance; • Especially when there is a norm of protecting each others' egos from the possibility of being in the wrong; and • Especially to curry favour with higher-status people — including cronyism or cultishness based on power rather than earned respect. Hypocrisy ~~~~~~~~~ • To hide — often from ourselves — what lies behind our socially and morally unassailable personas: • The many flaws that we judge in others but don't want to admit we have (often due to social taboo), even though they are part of our shared humanity. • The desire to have ourselves and our beliefs be dominant: • Especially wanting: • Resolution in favour of our own beliefs or preferences — which are often the only ones we think should be tolerated, and • To feel in control and raise our status by having others defer to us and follow rules that suit us; • Often framed as though noble using excuses like "fighting for what we believe". • Deep self-absorption or selfish motivation — often hidden behind other motivations we prefer to admit to — including: • The desire to benefit from other people's efforts (whether they like it or not); • Internal motivations for altruism that may be misaligned with our surface altruistic goals; and • The tendency to twist things to suit our own preferences at others expense. • Vulnerability, as though it would: • Indicate weakness (due to social stigma, or emotional unawareness or immaturity), or • Be too dangerous (due to conditioned mistrust or anxiety). • Negativity that we prefer not to feel or admit to: • Especially: • Loneliness and isolation, • Defensiveness, fear and insecurity (which often prompt us to defend our personas), • Pain, shame, sadness, helplessness, envy, resentment, superiority, suspicion and mean-spiritedness; • Hidden by a veneer of positivity — which we resent anyone uncovering or refusing to share; • With the perverse exception of righteous anger, which is often normalised to everyone's detriment. • Impaired rationality and ethics in the presence of instinctive and emotional reactions: • Especially: • Minds which routinely rationalise and/or moralise to justify irrational, short-sighted decisions, • Difficulty discerning reasons (actual criteria or ulterior motives) from excuses, and • Diminished empathy; • Especially when incentivised by: • Perceived threats to our security, • Unmet needs, or • The potential to gain: • Power and status, • Mating or sexual opportunities, or • Money or other resources. Superficiality ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ • To uncritically conflate social normality with goodness, through: • Judging each other's worth, trustworthiness or respectability based on normative appearance, presentation and signalling — rather than how we actually treat each other; • Failing to discern harmless, eccentric weirdness from shady or predatory weirdness; and • Overturning our default suspicion of others only — and then too easily — when they present a nice, conforming, agreeable face. • To present — and expect from others — an image or persona that: • Must remain pleasing or even perfectionistic by purported social or moral standards to gain any social acceptance; • Is beyond what is required for healthy social adaptation; and • Creates a persistent restriction on authenticity. Pretentiousness ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ • To believe in our own relative sophistication. • To think we can't be wrong about ourselves — even when our self-belief is made of poorly-examined identifications and labels that are received from our cultural or ideological groups. • To have an impenetrable sense of righteousness about our desires, actions and causes. • To divert our desire to help others away from humbly and personally assisting people we know, towards grandiose and impersonal efforts to help people in the abstract. Superiority ~~~~~~~~~~~ • To always compare ourselves hierarchically to others — socially and morally. • To try to elevate ourselves (or groups we identify with) — socially or in our own heads — by lowering others: • Especially to judge, shame, disparage or scapegoat others — through either overt haughtiness or manipulative maneuvering; • Even regarding failures or attitudes we actually share — especially where there is a social expectation of pretence; • Implicitly assuming that we are some of the best people to have ever lived when setting standards for others. • To neglect, reject, or be embarrassed by connections due only to perceived low social status: • Basing status judgements on trivial social proof — including admission of lack of close connections, vulnerability or the need for support that we all share; • Even when their status says nothing about whether they would meet better criteria for connection (like those espoused in our principles). Complacency ~~~~~~~~~~~ • To value comfort and familiarity over growth and fulfilment. • To ignore the emotional, health and opportunity costs of the lack of deep personal relationships. • To treat only the symptoms of disconnection and vulnerability, through means such as: • Shallow social connections that avoid the risk and exposure necessary to form deeper relationships; • Replacing meaningful social obligations with financial ones, for example: • Relying on social interaction with people who are just colleagues as though they were personal friends, or • Paying professionals to service minor care or practical needs, in lieu of relationships where others naturally want to look after us; • Media, especially: • Social media and online connections that require little investment, • Parasocial relationships, or emotional opinions about far-removed, higher-status people, or • Excessive escapism; • Pets that are personified and doted on to make up for lacking human connections; or • An endless parade of excuses for why we can't, needn't or shouldn't invest more in close connections, including: • Hiding behind cynicism about other people's likely reactions, • Tactical overestimation of our desire for solitude, • Assuming that we will get what we need via existing approaches — even when we consistently have not, • Tactical focus on our other privileges or good fortune when it comes time to admit to what we lack, or • Always being tactically too busy with things less challenging — but also less rewarding — than good relationships. Call to Action ************** For those of us disconnected and vulnerable despite our best efforts at solving the problem in normative ways: • A group based on these principles may be the best opportunity we'll ever have to transform our lives; and • We cannot sit passively by and expect: • Others to take responsibility and action for us, nor • Our lot to improve without each of us exercising courage and effort, nor • To find a thriving group that we can just join and benefit from without investment; so • We must each make the most of this opportunity to help form Connected, Resilient, Candid, Reciprocal Subsocieties.