The gang were a collective and either did everything together or, at least, shared the profits.

Where do they get this idea of group rules, the sense of "we who do it this way"?

So at an emotional level there's a sense of feeling safe in a group, and part of a group, and feeling that people understand them.

All available facts should convince you that the billions of individual and collective actions that are taken every minute are improving life upon this planet.

But in our collective cultural consciousness, if there is a such thing, whether we like him or not we tend to think of John Milton as powerful.