Over thousands of years and billions of people, values enable the survival of a human society 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 adversity and uncertainty, especially for whole societies over the long term. Successful values, riding in their human carriers, can thus 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. Over millennia, the demands of survival in a hazardous reality have caused us to work out a set of values, morés, and behaviours that (mostly) guide us to handle both adversity and uncertainty. If we and our forebears had not learned and implemented our lessons 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.

         

                                   

                             American boys saluting American flag (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

                                           

   

        Chinese children (ROC) in Young Pioneers movement (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

                                      

    

              Russian children in Vladimir Lenin Pioneers (1983) (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

                                     

   

        Iranian boy soldier during Iran-Iraq War (1980 – 88) (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

But we don’t yet comprehend the biggest of these truths in a conscious and self-aware way. Most people of every nationality still see their values as being exempt from analysis because via early childhood imprinting we have been programmed to be deeply, unswervingly loyal to those values. This style of programming has made the vast majority 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 help thoughtful readers become consciously aware of values and turn them into concepts that are available for analysis and discussion.