Chapter 13                                 Part B 

         Over millions of people and thousands of years, values enable survival of a human society if and only if they complement the forces underlying physical reality, or, to be more precise, successful values must cause humans to behave in ways that complement and accommodate the physical forces that underlie reality, usually for the individual in the short term, but especially for the whole society over the long term. Then, the successful values, riding in their carriers (us), go on.  

            Our values in modern democracies have been fairly effective at guiding us to survive and spread, though admittedly not always in humane ways. But the demands of survival in a hazardous reality have caused us, over millennia, to work out a set of values, morés, and behavior patterns that is (mostly) consistent with the forces of reality. If we and our forebears had not learned our lessons at least moderately well, and then implemented them at least moderately well, we would not be here. Having children is hereditary: if your parents didn't have any, you won't have any. Or, to be more sensible for a moment, if we don't have kids, then we don't have kids to pass our way of life on to. 

       

                                          American children reciting pledge of allegiance

       

                                                           Chinese children saluting flag

 

                                                            children saluting flag in Belarus 

 

                                            Boy scouts in Iran at celebration of 1979 revolution

            But we don't yet comprehend the biggest of these truths in a conscious and self-aware way. Most people in all countries still see their values as being exempt from analysis because in a deep way - via early childhood imprinting - we have been programmed to be unswervingly loyal to those values. This style of programming has made the vast majorities of people in most societies, both historical and modern, into unwitting pawns of their society's "way of life". A major purpose of this book is to try to make values conscious and turn them into concepts that are available for analysis and discussion by circles of thoughtful people in this twenty-first century.