Chapter 13.               Part G                               

                                                           propaganda poster for the Cuban Revolution 

        Ultimately, all societies must exist in material reality, and if some of a society’s citizens are not experiencing adversity or uncertainty and so are feeling no need to practice courage, wisdom, love, and freedom, this fact only means that other citizens are handling more than their share, and buffering or insulating the lives of the spoiled and deluded few. In the past three centuries, complacency of a nation's elites has more and more frequently brought revolution and the overthrow of an old, corrupt order. (e.g. France, Russia, China, Cuba, etc.) Marx was right in this at least: as civilization grinds forward, literacy spreads, ideas spread, and more and more ordinary people, in larger and larger groups, become aware of their collective power. Arrogant, abusive aristocrats, bureaucrats, theocrats, and plutocrats are less and less likely to be tolerated, in societies all over this world, with each year that passes.  

But we also must not lose sight of the larger view: even revolutions are merely group behaviors that are contained within the cultural evolution model. They differ from social evolution in degree of chaos, but not in effect. Society's main mission is to find more and more dynamic balances among its values clusters and so to grow constantly more courageous, intelligent, venturesome, and loving. 

Some social changes contribute to the building of new values/morés clusters and others contribute to the destruction of old ones. Some do both at once. The important point to see for the purposes in this book is that this inclination towards unceasing positing and testing – an inclination which the evidence shows is programmed into us genetically, and which, thus, constantly puts some people in every society at odds with that society’s morés – is an unalterable part of our nature. And luckily so. It makes our cultures evolve. It gives us our statesmen, scientists, artists, and eccentrics, and they enable us to respond to this ever-changing physical reality and thus to evolve, economically and socially, in a timely way.

                    

                                    slums of Manila (evidence of a society not dealing well with change)

  Externally, of course, reality's uncertainty and adversity are always weathering, eroding, and jolting the body of any society, compelling it to deal with change. When a society no longer deals effectively with these jolts and pressures (e.g. drought, war, famine, plague, overpopulation, pollution, economic and technological advances, etc.), then by one process or another, it is sooner or later superseded by a society that does.

 

                      bee sipping nectar while pollinating a flower (mutualism in nature)   

                                                                    (note pollen-coated legs)