When I start to try to think of some, though, I quickly begin to wonder whether there are solutions of scale, or whether scale is in fact one of the components of the problem. If this is the case, then moving to Manitoba and taking up sprout farming might be my best alternative, after all. Most of human progress has been toward bringing us closer to each other, and although this constriction has its attendant perils, I insist on feeling that it's basically positive. The reason splitting up into villages doesn't work is that it builds one community at the expense of all the others. We need the two least-connected people on the planet to be one degree less than that apart.
Music can help.
It can help a lot, actually. Powerful songs, carefully placed, can alter worldviews. Obscure brilliance can spin a web from one detached person who chances upon it to the next. It doesn't matter if you know the words or sing it phonetically, but the story, if you follow it, does a credible job of confronting jealousy and disassembling it, properly, into admiration and self-assessment, and even if it didn't, falling in love with your best friend's girlfriend is, like the tendency of cellos to drift out of tune, a maintenance problem for a noble enterprise, not a sign of moral decay. I don't want to give up on mass entertainment, any more than I want to give up on cities, and on the possibility that the person next to me on a London subway train will be reading the same book I am.