Without social cohesion, the human race wouldn't be here: We're not formidable enough to survive without the tactics, rules and strategies that allow people to work together.
Life has always taken place in a tumult without apparent cohesion, but it only finds its grandeur and its reality in ecstasy and in ecstatic love.
Giving triggers social cohesion. It's also the basis for an economy not based on money.
Christmas can have a real melancholy aspect, 'cause it packages itself as this idea of perfect family cohesion and love, and you're always going to come up short when you measure your personal life against the idealized personal lives that are constantly thrust in our faces, primarily by TV commercials.
So when you tell a joke, you want to make someone laugh, or if you tell a story about someone who had a heart attack, it may be because you want the listener to exercise. Stories are tools to create social cohesion and to get humans to strategize together.
I think any new technology that helps connect and create social cohesion is great. But at the end of the day, you and I are analog creatures. We have to take 'oohs and aahs' and convert them to 0s and 1s and then convert them back to 'oohs and aahs.' Narratives that work in social networks are the exchange of stories that are told well.
I have a friend who lives in the South Side of Chicago. I helped out at a church charity there where they try to give a bit of cohesion to a desperate area. Everyone was very welcoming.
We were all flying around up and down the coast near Dunkirk looking for enemy aircraft which seemed also to be milling around with no particular cohesion.
Social cohesion was built into language long before Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter - we're tribal by nature. Tribes today aren't the same as tribes thousand of years ago: It isn't just religious tribes or ethnic tribes now: It's sports fans, it's communities, it's geography.
It is the responsibility of all the Sudanese, especially the political leaders and the media, to strengthen social cohesion through the proper understanding of the dynamics of unity, if they really want our country to remain united.