Mindfulness & society

Stoics talk a lot about society, and how important it is. We are social animals. I'm interested in differences between Stoics and other self-help methodologies, and the insistence on our inherent sociality, and the stress on being a good part of society is fairly unique to the Stoic school.

I was watching a great YouTube video on mindfulness from Dr. Siegel. He makes a very interesting case for the importance of the middle prefrontal cortex, a central, highly integrated region, in behaviors that we consider fairly essential for healthy human behavior. He lists the following functions of the middle prefrontal cortex:

1. Regulate body (heart / lungs, etc.)
2. Enable attuned communication
3. Balancing of emotions
4. Extinguishing fear
5. Enabling pausing before action
6. Insight (self-knowing awareness)
7. Empathy
8. Enabling morality
9. Intuition

What is interesting is that many of these functions are either explicitly social or enabling effective social behavior. Dr. Siegel notes that these sort of represent what we think of as a "soul". I think that's sort of correct, but I'd have to add that memories are also a really important part of that abstract concept. At any rate, the linkage of these concepts into a single unit is a fascinating concept, and I think it is a powerful support for the Stoics claim of the primacy of social behavior.

Even more interesting to the concept of society is Dr. Siegel's note that, in one case he describes, a single member of a family that does not have a healthy middle prefrontal cortex harms the harmony of the entire group, and causes the mental health problems to spread. Society is important; we need to be mentally healthy to contribute well to it, and by contagion, mental health problems can damage the network and damage all the participant's mental health.

Marcus Aurelius writes:

As you are a member of society yourself, so every action of yours should tend to the benefit and improvement of it. So that when you do anything which has neither immediate nor remote reference to general advanatage, you make a breach in your life, destroy its unity and are as really guilty of seditious behavior as a malcontent in an assembly, as far in him lies, disturbs the general harmony.