How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.

Compared to the ravages of social isolation, cholera, bubonic plague, tuberculosis, and venereal diseases are insignificant annoyances. The communal life of man has evolved a special technique of adjustment as varied and complex as the needs of human life itself. Nature, again with lavish hand, has bestowed on you the capacity for making a variety of bonds, with which you may effectively link yourself to your fellows. One of the most important of these bonds is speech. Common sense, whose very etymology connotes its social origin, is another of these fundamental bridges which serve to connect one human being to another. Love, sympathy, friendship, and pity are emotional links ; music, painting, sculpture, and writing in all its forms, drama, play, sport, religion, ethical codes, social responsibility, honesty, laws, science, politics, philosophy, hygiene, clothes, commerce, the whole world of technique, are but further devices which nature has placed at the disposal of man for effecting his social solidarity. That human being who most completely utilizes these bonds is most secure in his humanity ; and conversely, the more links any individual excludes from the practical conduct of his life, the less secure, the less effective, in a word, the less humanly happy he will be. The need for social life is the paramount truth in human existence. Evidence for this statement may be adduced from the fact that biological instincts far older than man have become subordinated and modified by this social need. Such primitive urges as hunger and sex, common to all living things, are dominated and socialized by this need. Marriage, which exists in some form in all human communities, is the socialization of the sex instinct ; the art of cooking, together with the various rituals of eating, is no more than the complex socialization of the instinct to keep alive by the ingestion of food. Other animals, better prepared for life, and therefore capable of living independent existences, have never developed plumbing, fashions, skyscrapers, newspapers, wireless, aeroplanes or the other appurtenances of civilized life.