was. He had been alone and working for weeks now. Food that his family had
left for him sat uneaten by the door, rotting.
He took out a blank piece of paper and drew a large circle on it. He then
marked points along the edges of the circle and, with dotted lines, indicated
the pull of each dot toward the center. Beneath this, he wrote, “There is an
emotional gravity to our values: we attract those into our orbit who value the
same things we do, and instinctively repel, as if by reverse magnetism, those
whose values are contrary to our own.^41 These attractions form large orbits of
like-minded people around the same principle. Each falls along the same path,
circling and revolving around the same cherished thing.”
He then drew another circle, adjacent to the first. The two circles’ edges
nearly touched. From there, he drew lines of tension between the edges of
each circle, the places where the gravity pulled in both directions, disrupting
the perfect symmetry of each orbit. He then wrote:
“Large swaths of people coalesce together, forming tribes and
communities based on the similar evaluations of their emotional histories.
You, sir, may value science. I, too, value science. Therefore, there is an
emotional magnetism between us. Our values attract one another and cause us
to fall perpetually into each other’s orbit, in a metaphysical dance of
friendship. Our values align, and our cause becomes one!
“But! Let’s say that one gentleman sees value in Puritanism and another in
Anglicanism. They are inhabitants of two closely related yet different
gravities. This causes each to disrupt the other’s orbit, cause tension within
the value hierarchies, challenge the other’s identity, and thus generate
negative emotions that will push them apart and put their causes at odds.
“This emotional gravity, I declare, is the fundamental organization of all
human conflict and endeavor.”
At this, Isaac took out another page and drew a series of circles of
differing sizes. “The stronger we hold a value,” he wrote, “that is, the stronger
we determine something as superior or inferior than all else, the stronger its
gravity, the tighter its orbit, and the more difficult it is for outside forces to
disrupt its path and purpose.^42
“Our strongest values therefore demand either the affinity or the antipathy
of others—the more people there are who share some value, the more those
people begin to congeal and organize themselves into a single, coherent body
around that value: scientists with scientists, clergy with clergy. People who
love the same thing love each other. People who hate the same thing also love
each other. And people who love or hate different things hate each other. All
human systems eventually reach equilibrium by clustering and conforming