Propaganda poster for the Cuban Revolution (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Ultimately, all cultures exist in physical reality. If some citizens are not experiencing adversity and thus feeling no need to practice courage, wisdom, love, and freedom, this only means other citizens are handling more than their share and insulating the lives of the spoiled few. In the past three centuries, complacency of a nation’s elites has brought more and more revolutions and the overthrow of old, corrupt orders. (e.g. France, Russia, China, Cuba, etc.). 

Marx was right in this at least: as civilization grinds forward, literacy spreads, ideas spread, and ordinary people in growing numbers become aware of their collective power. Arrogant, exploitative aristocrats, bureaucrats, theocrats, and plutocrats are less and less likely to be tolerated, in societies all over this world, with each year that passes.

Some social changes contribute to the building of new values and morés and others contribute to the dismantling of old ones. Some do both at once. The important point for the purposes of my argument is that this inclination toward unceasing positing and testing—an inclination that is programmed into us genetically and that constantly places some people at odds with their society’s morés—is an unalterable part of our nature. And luckily so. It makes cultures evolve, socially and economically.

It is also worth noting that the numbers of cultures possible that would all still qualify as brave, smart, free, and kind is close to infinite. Pooling all the cultures that have actually been tried by all societies ever still gives us only a small fraction of the total possible. We can't test every way of adapting to a catastrophe or an opportunity. We have to move with the changing times so we find a way that works and get on with living. The accumulation of all the knowledge that really does work has been long, hard, and slow. 

Some people in every era resist change; some even resist the idea that change is constant. They want to stay with what they were raised to because it feels secure. But if we don’t go at the universe assertively, don't grow, change, and adapt, then in a while, the universe comes for us. Change is the one constant in this universe. Very scary for many of us. So many paths, so many hazards. We don’t want to be this free.

An implicit assumption of this book and my whole argument is that we cannot hide from change. We go at it, hard, or we go under. If you don’t like being this free, what I am saying is: “Get in the game. There is only one way to get off this playing field and you will get to it soon enough. In the meantime, here and now, your team needs you.”