What Is Society For & What Makes A Society Good? (Laws of Heaven)

Before I give my answers, I’d appreciate if you, the reader, would consider these three questions yourself. In the West:

1. What is society for? What is it set up to do?
2. What should society be for?
3. What makes a society or group good?

Some years ago I considered the issue of who is let in to Heaven.

Good people, only.

That seemed pretty awful to me. No one wants to go to a hell and I don’t want even bad people to suffer.

But then I asked myself the question, “what makes a society or group good?” I thought back on my own experiences and I came to a simple conclusion: it’s always the people which make a group, of any size, good or bad.

Bad people. Bad group. It is really that simple. Leaders have an outsize influence, but leaders require buy-in from society, at least from the coercive elements and often from much more than that. (See my politics series for more on that.)

People who are cruel, power-hungry, greed, selfish or otherwise have nasty vices or personalities make a group hell. People who are kind, generous, humble and so on make a group good.

Again, it’s that simple.

So the conclusion I came to is that if heavens exist, they don’t let in bad people (or very few) because if they did, they soon wouldn’t be heavens. Bad people go to places with other bad people, and that’s what makes such places hell.

Now let’s move back to the first of our questions. What are our Western societies for. I think it’s close to inarguable that under neoliberal ideology, they exist to make sure that those with power and money retain their power and money and increase it. That premise predicts almost all the actions our societies have taken since around 1979 or so.

If you’re rich and powerful, you run the society and you run it for your own good.

This brings us to our second question. What should a society be for? This is a prescriptive question, there is no “correct” answer. The Pharoah, or Barack Obama or Elon Musk are going to give different questions than you or I, odds are (their true answer, not the one they tell suckers) and so is the Pope, let alone Torquemada. Mennonites have their answer, and so on.

My answer is a simple one. A society, or any group, should make its members happy, good, and if they are happy and good, it should make them strong. It should do that, as much as is possible, for as many of its members as possible and any society which doesn’t is a bad society.

Certainly it is impossible to create a lasting good society if the primary virtues of the society are greed and selfishness, as they generally are under capitalism and as they specifically are under neoliberalism. (New Deal capitalism did not exalt greed and selfishness.)

This is the start of a new series, “The Laws of Heaven”, where we’ll discuss the laws, principles and methods of creating good societies and groups. There is no current possibility of these principles being followed, but knowing what they are is important and opens up the possibility of a better future.

I hope you’ll join me in this exploration.

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