Last word: Bowling alone?

People are at their best when they're working together for the common good, believes Carrie Quinlan

Sometimes I quite like people. There, I said it. People are friendly and helpful, given half a chance, and I wouldn’t want to live next door to anyone else. We’re programmed to like and trust people, and form groups to help one another out. The trouble is, we’re also programmed to be selfish and stupid, and to grab as many resources as we can. One giant human coin, two largely different tendencies. How we behave in the world is down to which we think is the stronger.

I’m at the Edinburgh Fringe as I write this, doing a show that involves reading the papers in the morning. In a lot of respects, it’s a lovely way to start the day; on the other hand, it can give you an awful view of human nature. I’ve discovered that the only real difference between the major daily newspapers is which people they think are worse: people who leave the telly on standby or people from abroad.

I had thought that, as a liberal paper, The Independent was somehow nobler than The Daily Express. Now I’m not so sure. The Express appears to want a world where people who aren’t like us don’t exist. The Independent could, I think, happily do without us as well. All of which leaves me feeling grumpy and depressed by lunchtime. It’s like opening a Pandora’s Box in which they forgot to put the hope.

So I have determined to provide the hope myself. I say we all band together behind the assumption that folks, on the whole, are a good thing, and work together for the common good.

Who’s with me? Barring a few survivalists living in the forest with guns and waiting for the end of the world, I think it would be pretty much everyone. Because our ancestors managed to work out that life’s more fun in groups thousands of years ago, around about the time they discovered that hunting a woolly mammoth on your own is destined for failure.

I know people in groups can be dreadful. They fight wars, form mobs and wreak havoc at football matches. But groups can also be magnificent things. They can build hospitals, form orchestras, win the Ashes. Often it takes one person to start something off, and it’s individuals within the group who do great things, like taking three for 54 or playing first violin – but without the rest of the gang, who cares?

Community is the fabric in which the individual is able to thrive. I have a family that helps me out, friends who give me a hand when I need it, and then there’s the complete stranger who helped me to the bus stop when I broke my toe. Not to mention the NHS and libraries and street lamps, all of which are brilliant things provided by society.

The trouble is that the Thatcherite idea of community as a gravy train for the weak and the lazy still has currency and is still a disgrace. Yes, there are people who abuse the system and who see the banding together of individuals for the common good as an opportunity to sponge. But there aren’t many of them, and I’m prepared to put up with that if the alternative is every man for himself.

Our lives together are far from perfect, but they’re better than they would be apart, so instead of going our separate ways, how about we start helping one another? Get rid of this ‘us and them’ mentality and replace it with one that says ‘us’ and ‘more us’. The revolution starts here, and it’s not going to smash anything up.

Carrie Quinlan is an actress, comedian and columnist for The Guardian.