Derek Thompson

It's not that they're doomed to misery.

It's just that, man, there's a lot that you have to build on your own without the assistance of social institutions that are really, really good at keeping you connected to community.

If you don't have these things, you have to build it on your own, and that's just really damn hard to do.

So that was like much more of a sermon than it was a question, but I guess I wonder, you were a pastor for several decades, so perhaps you can appreciate.

Why don't you just sermon back to me?

How do you think about this idea

That ultimately, like the ultimate ingredient here, sure, maybe it's God, but also I think it's just other people.

It's a really beautiful thought.

And one thing I'm going to take from that is,

that the strength of the vertical leads to the strength of the horizontal.

It's strong beliefs in a higher purpose that lead to strong connections with other people.

And that's true way outside of religion.

Like why does everyone make their best friends from school or work or their children's school?

Because they are obligated by the law to send their children to school or to attend school.

That's a very thick connection.

The strength of the vertical, which is the letter of the law, predicts the strength of the horizontal.

It is the law of mandatory education that leads to many people making their best friends from school.

This also, I think, might explain the difficulty of forming Church Without God.

If the vertical's going to be weak, the horizontal's going to be weak.

If you have a book club of lots of people who don't really like the same novels, you're gonna find that book club doesn't last for very long because the strength of the vertical isn't strong enough to prove the strength of the horizontal.