[In the following brief interview, Fukuyama comments on the human need for connection and cooperation and the causes of social fragmentation.]

[Rehak]: In your new book, you present the contentious view that on some fundamental, genetic level, human beings are built for consensus. Can you explain that?

[Fukuyama]: We're programmed to cooperate in groups, to be joiners, to feel accepted. This is one of these things that people believe common-sensically, and that social scientists tell us is wrong. Economists begin with this understanding that human beings are selfish and just want to make money. Even many religious conservatives view humans as essentially sinful. But people feel intensely uncomfortable if they live in a society that doesn't have moral rules.

Are you saying that every human being prefers law to lawlessness?

Not everyone will obey them, but over a large population, there is a tendency to spontaneously generate rules to control deviance and set limits on individual behavior.

Is there an example of how this tendency toward moral order manifests itself in daily life?

All the companies scrambling to dissociate themselves from the Salt Lake City Olympics because of a possible bribery scandal. Now, you can say that all of this is self-interested behavior, but from a social standpoint it doesn't make much difference. A market society promotes honest behavior because it is in people's self-interest to develop reputations for honesty. So even Wall Street sharks or whatever kind of predatory animal will generate order and rules, and therefore a certain kind of socially constructive behavior.

You also talk about some fundamental human need for ritual.

The more that modern economic life strips that stuff out of the workplace and the family, the more intensely people want it. In the United States, the only real secular ritual that we've managed to create that has a lot of meaning for people is Thanksgiving. We worship individualism, yet at Thanksgiving it's all about sharing and communal values.

So you're saying that that's not enough? Is the modern world diminished in some ways?

People's lives used to be full of Thanksgivings and now we're reduced to just this one. I think ritual will never disappear, but there's a kind of privatization, a tendency toward rituals that involve, in my language, a much smaller radius of trust—you and people like you.

Like what, for example?

Watching “Ally McBeal.” Well, you don't want to get too silly, but even something like that still draws together people and allows them to relate to a common set of experiences.

Is gossip also a kind of ritual?

I wouldn't call it a ritual, but it's one of the most important things that people do to establish communities and maintain informal moral norms. It involves this very basic human ability to make judgments about other people: who naughty, who's nice, who can be relied upon, who's a rat. They're essential to the functioning of any society.

Technology must have a big impact on that sort of functioning. Are people getting more isolated?

It's not that people associate with one another less, it's that they belong to a range of communities and want complete freedom to enter and exit each one. The Internet is a perfect example: you can go to a chat room anonymously, have what feels like a community experience and if you don't like it, you walk away. That's modern individualism. We seek to associate, but we want no restrictions on our behavior. Group membership becomes more superficial.

You trace a lot of these ills—the breakdown of the family unit, a rise in crime, a loss of community—to the social disruptions of the 1960s and 1970s. Have they affected your own life?

I lived in California in the 1980s and by the end of the decade there were hardly any of my colleagues who hadn't gone through a divorce or a family breakup, sometimes a couple of times. But my family has actually been kind of boringly stable. My parents stayed together their whole lives, and I've never been divorced, so I can't really talk about the instability part of the story from my own experience. It's more the stories of people I've seen around me.

How did you end up on such a stable course? What great epoch-making forces missed you?

I don't know the answer. Part of it is your family, what precedents or expectations they set, and part is your environment. But a lot of it has to be luck.