Prosocial behavior begins with a simple idea: we are capable of acting for more than ourselves. Helping, sharing, cooperating, volunteering, and caring for another person's well-being are familiar human expressions of it. These behaviors can grow from empathy, reciprocity, fairness, social learning, or recognition that our own well-being is connected to the well-being of others.
We learn these behaviors through relationships. From childhood onward, interaction with other people teaches us how to share, cooperate, negotiate fairness, and accept responsibility for others. Over time, repeated behaviors can become expectations, and expectations can become culture.
But there is an important question hidden inside the idea of prosociality:
Who do we mean by “others”?
Our destiny does not have to be something predetermined or created by exceptional individuals. It can be something we make together — and that “we” can be understood more broadly than humanity alone.
When people create relationships based on cooperation, reciprocity, learning, care, and responsibility, they create conditions in which prosocial behavior can grow. Extending those values to our relationships with nonhuman life suggests an even larger form of reciprocity: recognizing that human flourishing depends upon the flourishing of the living systems around us.
In this sense, becoming a People is more than simply learning how to live together. It means learning how to live together within a community of life. A People can therefore create possibilities that no individual could create alone—and a living community can create possibilities that people could never create by itself.
What one generation learns about caring for people, land, water, plants, animals, and other living systems can become the starting point for the next generation.
That continuing process—people shaping culture, culture shaping people, humans influencing ecosystems, and the living world shaping us in return—makes a destiny.