A healthy social structure, like a language, has to be massively redundant in its representations of meaning. Otherwise the loss of a single element in the social fabric would be disastrous. This redundancy is maintained by mentoring, which uses quite a lot of our energy.
Redundancy is expensive but indispensable. Perhaps this is merely to point out that life is expensive. Just to keep itself going, life makes demands on energy, supplied from inside and outside a living being, that are voracious compared with the undemanding thriftiness of death and decay. A culture, just to keep itself going, makes voracious demands on the energies of many people for hands-on mentoring.
— Jane Jacobs (2004, 159)