First, then, what are the values that enable humans to respond to the main consequence of entropy, the unceasing, uphill struggle of life, the quality of life we know as adversity?

A whole array of values should be taught to young people to enable them to deal with adversity. 

In order to deal well with adversity, a society needs large numbers of people willing, even eager, to face constant struggle, exertion, exhaustion, and pain. In fact, a society proves most effective and durable if its citizens take up the offensive against the relentless decay of the universe. Children taught to embrace challenge become adults who seek to bring new territories (perhaps even planets) under their tribe’s control, to devise new ways of growing and storing food and building shelters, to use technology to accomplish more work with less human exertion, and, in general, to perform the tasks of survival more efficiently.

When we generalize about what these entropy-driven behavior clusters have in common, we derive two giant values; these are courage and wisdom.

In different cultures all over the world, courage is instilled in the young, which is what we would expect if it really does work. Bergson spoke of élan, Nietzsche of the will to power.¹ Japanese samurai women and men lived by bushido, their code of total discipline, and European nations lived by a similar code, chivalry, right into modern times. But beyond the difficulties of translation from culture to culture and era to era, we see in all these values a common motif: they all direct their disciples to train themselves to persevere through challenges and obstacles of all kinds, even to seek challenge out. Achilles chose a brief, hard life of honor over a longer, easier one of obscurity. For centuries, the ancient Greeks considered him to be a model of a man, as do some people in nations that have absorbed ancient Greek culture to this day. Many other cultures have similar heroes.

 

  

                                             Brad Pitt as Achilles in the movie Troy, 2004

 

                                        

                                                                  Apache leader Crazy Horse, c. 1881

  

                                   Henry Cele as Shaka in the TV series Shaka Zulu, 1986

                    

                                                   Jet Li as Huo Yuanjia in Fearless

Confucius said that the superior man thinks always of virtue, while the common man thinks always of comfort. Nineteenth-century English writer K.H. Digby put it this way: “Chivalry is only a name for that general spirit or state of mind which disposes men to heroic actions, and keeps them conversant with all that is beautiful and sublime in the intellectual and moral world.”²

The exhortation to meet and even seek adversity and to defend one’s way of life echoes through all societies. Young people are encouraged to face hazards in defense and promotion of their nations. We can most conveniently sum up the gist of all of these values by stating that they are built around the principle that in English is called courage.

It is familiar and clichéd to push young people to aspire to courage. But clichés get to be clichés because they express something true. Amid the chaotic background of the physical universe, life strives to create stable, growing pockets of order. In the case of humans, it does so by programming into young people the entire constellation of values around the prime value called courage. From it, behaviors that meet and overcome adversity in all forms flow, and societies that believe in courage survive better because of that belief.