The View from Afar

The relationship between society and culture is often obscured because society often is confused with culture. Once people understand how society that underlies culture differs from culture, society’s simple elegance becomes clear. Recent multi-cultural confusion that creates a quagmire of moral relativism muddles society’s prospect for peaceful problem resolution.

Focused on foreground activities alone, they overlook the background represents framework for society. Understanding society generates the courage to defend it against those who, resigned by their actions to living the law of the jungle, would destroy it.

Society is simple. Society is the edge where any two individuals or cultures meet. Society requires no religion, no shared experience, and no natural law.

Individuals need society because each person is alone in one’s own consciousness. Even people together are alone. You can’t hug someone close enough not to be alone inside your mind, unsure of what to trust, aided only by pattern-recognition skills with which one was born and rationality developed over time.

People are like ships, alien, alone, and adrift on a sea of sense experience, buffeted by the waves.

A verbal “messenger line” is simple: Can you recall an instance in your personal past experience when you thought you were correct and later discovered to your regret that you were mistaken?

The question plumbs personal experience to deduce insight into one’s thinking. Personal experience is not religious dogma, not natural law springing from culture, and not related to the experience of the questioner. An answer invariably leads one to conclude that thinking can be fallible. While not universal, the understanding might as well be. Sometimes you think you are right, not because you are right, but only because you think you are right.

Decisions are not based on reality, but on an abbreviated and incomplete mental map of reality. Self-interest requires one assure one’s mental map is as accurate as possible. Self-interest encourages engagement with others who also have come to doubt their own perfection. Society with others can help detect instances where one’s thinking may have gone astray. Self-interest encourages community.

That decision-making uses an abbreviated mental map of reality is an idea accessible across all cultural and religious boundaries. It fosters a compelling framework for civilization, a path to honor able decision-making, and creation of virtues. It helps people deduce that long-term interests are served by a character-centered life. Respect is directed inward towards our selves and our treatment of others. Responsibility is directed outward towards friends, school, community, and world.

René Descartes ostensibly said, “I think therefore I am”, but he was really saying “I doubt, therefore I am.” Doubt and humility are complimentary. One who recognizes doubt becomes humble. Humility comes to those who recognize doubt. Doubt and humility provide compelling incentive to manufacture society with others.

Humility (Doubt) — an understanding that there may be a better way of doing things. Humility represents commitment to the continuous and repeating opportunity for improvement.

Respect (Reciprocity) — an understanding that others can be equally engaged.

Ingenious creative thinking improves our odds of survival. From simple threads fashioned from humility and a shared sense of need, a sturdy fabric can be fashioned between individuals, independent of their cultures, to encourage a peaceful process of problem resolution. Manufacturing society lifts us slightly above the rest of the animal kingdom and the law of the jungle, to manufacture a protective umbrella using a process of peaceful problem resolution that others learn to trust and embrace in their self-interest as their own.

Self-interest is why individuals create society. Self-interest motivates learning. Self-interest motivates society with others.