Why do humans need other people?
Human beings are not meant to develop in complete isolation. We need relationships because intelligence, responsibility, empathy, and moral awareness grow through contact with lives different from our own.
Other people do not merely accompany our journey. They challenge our self-interest, reveal our limitations, and give us opportunities to cooperate, serve, repair, forgive, and learn how to live beyond ourselves.
Marie’s Answer
You can survive for a time without closeness. But you cannot fully develop alone.
According to Spiritism, human beings need society because our abilities grow through exchange. One person discovers what another does not know. One creates what another needs. Through language, work, education, family, friendship, and cooperation, knowledge passes from one life to another.
But our need for others is not only practical.
Relationships expose parts of us that isolation can hide. Patience becomes real when someone tests it. Generosity begins when another person needs something from us. Justice matters when our freedom meets someone else’s rights. Forgiveness, responsibility, loyalty, and compassion can only be practiced in relationship.
This does not mean that every relationship is healthy or that loneliness should be avoided at any cost. Solitude can offer rest, reflection, and clarity. Distance may also be necessary when a relationship depends on control, humiliation, or harm.
The problem is not solitude itself. It is permanent withdrawal from shared human responsibility.
Spiritism teaches that complete isolation limits progress because it leaves fewer opportunities to exchange, cooperate, and confront our own self-interest. We often discover who we are through the effects our choices have on other people.
We also depend on one another at every stage of life. We are born needing care, live through systems built by countless others, and eventually may need support again.
Needing people is not a spiritual weakness. It is part of the structure of human life.
The purpose of society is not simply to place individuals beside one another. It is to help separate lives gradually learn solidarity—to receive without entitlement, contribute without domination, and recognize that no one develops entirely alone.
Doctrinal Source | Grounded in The Spirits’ Book by Allan Kardec, Questions 766–775, concerning the necessity of social life, isolation, family bonds, cooperation, and human progress.
Continue Exploring
-
Explore how Spiritism understands purpose without reducing life to a fixed script. Meaning is shaped through the choices we make, the relationships we build, and the person we gradually become.
-
Explore how moral awareness, freedom, and responsibility distinguish human beings within nature. Spiritism does not place humanity outside creation, but gives us a deeper obligation toward it.
-
Discover why moral growth begins with honest self-awareness, daily choices, and the effort to repair what we can. Spiritism sees becoming better as gradual work, not instant perfection.