Chapter 13     Part D 

      As with courage and wisdom, a balanced pair of values guides the behavior of citizens in successful societies' attempts to handle the second trait of reality, quantum uncertainty. In order for a society to maximize its chances of handling the uncertainty of existence - the way that unexpected events keep coming up - that society must contain as wide a variety of potential responses to the demands of the physical world as the people in it, individually and jointly, can learn to perform. In a scary world, if you’re smart, you try to be ready for anything. Encouraging each individual young person to be versatile (the Renaissance man concept) helps here, but the really important value that a wise society should instill in each upcoming generation is freedom, a keenness to become one's best self, and to let others do the same.

        

       In order to be equipped to meet the widest range of futures possible, a society must contain the widest range of humans possible, with skills and talents literally of every sort imaginable. Then, in the society whose people love freedom, if an unforeseen crisis arises and threatens the society’s very continued existence, it has a higher likelihood of containing a small group of people, or sometimes one individual, who will be able to react effectively to the situation, and direct others to react effectively as well.

               

      In addition, in more ordinary times, when a society seems to be merely maintaining a steady state, the people in a vigorous and diverse society are pursuing a wide range of activities, doing research on a wide range of theories, and developing a wide range of skills, services, and products, any of which may reap benefits for all citizens in the near, middle, or distant future. Which "hobbies" will turn out to be a lot more than just hobbies in a decade or two we can't know because in a truly uncertain universe that can't be known. Some will fit into the society's economy and, in a decade or so, become simply parts of the division of labor. But in a truly free society, many of these hobby activities will seem, and will usually prove to be, silly wastes of time.

               

      However, a wise society loves its dreamers. Once in a while, an eccentric will invent something amazingly useful to all. In addition, the freedom that allows these folk to carry on being as eccentric as they are is vital. The presence of eccentrics in a society’s towns is proof that the value called “freedom” is part of the moral code of that society. Uniformity in a population is an enemy of survival in the long, long view.

      Individualism and cultural pluralism grow out of a society’s basing its values code on freedom. Teaching our young to value freedom is always good long-term strategy. In the long haul of centuries of time and generations of citizens, this educational practice enables a society to respond to the real world’s fundamental uncertainty because change that you can plan for isn’t real change. On the other hand, what life brings over and over is real change - events that, at least at first, baffle us and, if we’re caught in complacent smugness, dull and out of shape, deplete or even eradicate our way of life or even us. 

               

         To balance or focus this value called “freedom”, in the same manner as wisdom balances and focuses courage, society must teach love. Brotherhood. Agape.

               

        A society with a wide range of behaviors or lifestyles being practiced among its citizens must teach these same citizens to respect one another’s sensibilities and rights, or the society will be constantly torn by violence between its various factions. No matter which wins, some of the society’s versatility will be lost. Thus, some form of love for one’s fellow citizens is taught by the vast majority of successful societies and has been so taught for centuries. 

    Thomas Hobbes, English political philosopher

         At a minimum, citizens have to cooperate in large majority to create and use a process built into their society that will enable them to live, work, do business, and settle disputes without violence. For enlightened modern nations in this twenty-first century, that's the rule of law. The law is not perfect, but ours is not, in the terms of pure logic, a perfect world. However, people in the large majority sense that whatever the flaws in our legal system, it is infinitely preferable to anarchy. As Hobbs famously put the matter, life for humans with no system of social order in place is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".