1.1. Environments consist of beings as well as inanimate entities. On being heard, conversations between them begin, gathering together societies of mutual interest and dependency. 1.2. In society, individuals find they obtain greater benefit from their actions than they do alone. 1.3. Soon after life on Earth began, three or four billion years ago surplus social capital gave birth to the biosphere of social beings, of which we evolved as a part.

2.1. Only about half our cells are human, the rest are bacteria. Without these we struggle to survive. 2.2. Inside and around us, the sociality of virus, microbe, and animal, blended together and evolving, gives rise to what we come to know of as 'us'. 2.3. Our body is the environment for microscopic beings. And they live in it dismissive of its needs —as we appear to be of the needs of ours.

3.1. Every being exists as an element of a social environment. From this elemental sociality, individual, multi-cellular life-forms evolved. 3.2. Before we developed as groups of individuals, from extended families into tribes, nations, and empires, our own life-form evolved colonially. 3.3. Although our technology sets us apart we are not essentially so different to other species. 3.4. Hunting, warring, reproducing and protecting young, are fundamentally social acts. Sport, music, and art, express and develop social cohesion. All are resourced from social capital and variously serve to produce it.

4.1. Born expecting to be understood, we have learned to see, to hear, and to feel, within the cultural environment that has surrounded us; consciously and unconsciously developing our behaviours to be interpreted by those around us. 4.2. Before we could stand we fought to be free —now something we line up and die for— yet deprived of connection we soon become frustrated, anxious or bored. 4.3. our culture nurtures us as we grow, finding our sense of security and home inside the groups that it defines. Enfolding us in its constructions, customs, and stories, it manifests who we are, both to others and to ourselves. 4.4. So as our society and species can evolve and survive, as individuals we have evolved to die.

5.1. The environment of a being is the series of spaces it knows through experience; constructed by perception as much as by physics and biology. 5.2. Individual perception develops through adaptation to the culture surrounding us during ontogeny. This frames our experience and informs the perception we have of others and ourselves. 5.3. Darwin noticed that finches have adapted to their environments. And yet it is the environments, of inanimate and animate things, that 'select' those beings that survive. 5.4. We shape our environment but we survive, and are shaped, as an integral element of it.

6.1. As we develop, the cultures of our family, tribe, and community grow nested within us like Russian dolls, informing our feelings, thoughts, and behaviours. 6.2. Adapting as we grow we absorb the narratives of our familial cultures, integrating them even when they contradict one another. 6.3. The differences between our singular personal cultures individuate us; while the commonalities between them facilitate communication, aggregating us into ever larger groups. 6.4. Reproduction involves the transmission of biological codes, but also of cultural codes that reproduce on being believed. These grow and evolve, whether within their native societies or alien ones, engaging and competing with others as individuals do.

7.1. Individuals depend upon society. In a social crowd their boundaries soften and they merge, as differences between them are unconsciously reconciled. 7.2. In a shared virtuality of symbols and signs, cultures hold societies together. 7.3. Shepherding societies to wage war, or revolt, or labour and repress, a culture's narratives of belief and justice comfort, excite, and terrify. 7.4. Responding to threats and opportunities they perceive, cultures develop and grow. With lifespans of hundreds or thousands of years they behave as individuals, changing their 'minds' and replacing their leaders.

8.1. As cultures evolve and develop increasingly complex strategies to exploit social capital, individuals take on increasingly specialized roles. 8.2. limited companies evolved in our cultures to release social capital from the risks and responsibilities that constrain individuals. 8.3. limited companies have rights as individuals do, to own property, enter into contracts, employ others, and sue for damages, but only limited responsibility. 8.4. Conceived to drive our industry, limited companies were the first virtual beings, their artificial intelligence a simple algorithm of cupidity. Serviced by people they have grown; now they direct economies and nations. 8.5. From handprints on cave walls to printing presses and HTML, for over 65,000 years virtuality has grown, while human brains have shrunk.

9.1. cultures secure their future by means of their historical narratives. Their unity, and their practices of justice, freedom, and charity, are founded upon an acceptance of the context of meaning this provides. 9.2. Many narratives hold that recent human migrations were 'natural', but peoples were and continue to be dispossessed of their common land, variously evicted from their homes and stripped of their livelihoods, through ordered Acts of inclosure. 9.3. Peoples have been forced to migrate to towns. There, religious charities, industrialists, and a new breed of landlord, rehoused extended families of the old world in ideal, nuclear-family homes. 9.4. Societies infantilized after industrialization when families were rendered down further by the extermination of a generation of males in two world wars. 9.5. scientism has replaced old religions; education now trains citizens for industry, and knowledge is translated into procedures. Social capital has been digitized and, in ever more finely segregated demographics, virtuality has bloomed.