The frontier of our happiness
The emotional boundary of human progress
Societies may find their ultimate limits are in what they are able to make themselves feel good about.
I have for some time been toying with the idea of positive and negative entropy societies. What societies are able to take disparate elements and turn them into coherent ideologies/resources/institutions and identities? Are they able to raise the level of complexity of the elements (negative entropy), or must they consume some of the energy released by breaking complex elements down (positive entropy)?
Have no doubt, "radical" communities who use terrorism (for instance) are societies, but they are clearly positive entropy. They take the complex airplane and smash it into the complex skyscraper and feed on the release of energy that follows. They take complex social formations such as a highly tolerant and diverse society, and demand by violence deference to their less diverse social construction.
It is an interesting trait in terrorism that the terrorist has to carefully extort just the right level of fear. Too little and the subject may be able to mount an effective response, too much (or done for too long) and the subject may go into despair and stop being useful. The terrorist must keep the subject just at the threshold of terror; a golem for the terrorist's purposes.
The problem with societies built on negative emotions - the avoidance of terror, the avoidance of dishonor, punishment and diminution of deviants, etc, is that they create a constant emotional drain. Members of a society do just enough to avoid sparking off a negative event. There's little aspiration. Aspiration strives into the unknown, and the unknown may well hold more negativity.
To build, to overcome, to solve, to create, to discover...these are positive events. These are aspirational. Of course they can arise in response to crisis (necessity is the mother of invention) but a fundamentally inventive culture reveals a deeper drive. The culture has some aspects that allow invention, innovation, and problem solving to excite positive emotion. Particularly if they are cultivated and honored, these things are able to propel a society to achieve new configurations that solve new problems.
The limits of a society may depend upon where it creates a common frontier of positive emotional investment. The last two centuries have been so preoccupied with pragmatism and rationalism that we have lost a little of our pedestrian reverence for the utility of emotions (although folks like Danny Kahneman, Lee Atwater and the great marketing firms have made science of emotional manipulation).
Do you remember thinking of technology in awe - look what this last century has done and think what the next can do? Do you remember when "America" had an emotional appeal in the name alone? The America that incited that emotion did amazing things. We went to the moon, we revolutionized agriculture, we had a civil war to see if government "of the people, by the people and for the people" could succeed.
We've lost some of that. The predominate negativity of our political culture is forcing us into a contraction. We're retreating from our bold aspirations. Hard work and hard challenges involve negative potentials like failure, risk to resources and possibly loss of life; but they are done under the presumed gaze of a smiling fortune, a pleased lady liberty, a nodding vanguard. Even those who fail know the great exertion of striving boldly. Now there is a more broadly negative tone. Are emotional terrorists at work among us?
Where we set the common direction of our happiness, and how much we empower ourselves to move towards the same, may be the ultimate boundary of human progress.
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