“What can we do now to create democratic nations and societies that are able to become socially self-sustaining into the centuries and millennia ahead?” In answer, the text provides a blue print for the transformation of democratic nations and societies for the times when it becomes obviously evident that in order for them to survive they will have to redesign the functions of their social institutions… or succumb the same descending arc of all historic nations, societies, empires, and dynasties big and small.
The title of this book reveals the macro-arc of social evolution that will bring about socially sustainable democratic societies, and peace. Necessarily this will require those nations to formulate a conscious intention for their existence — to sustain the social organization of human existence.
The holism of human social existence. What is expanded in the text is the discovery of the values that underlie the decision-making that has sustained our specie’s survival for over 200,000 years. These same values are the original cause of human motivation and underlie all human decision-making. What has not occurred is the conscious awareness of how they affect our decision-making individually and collectively. They provide a holism for social existence, yet they have never been consciously and intentionally embedded in organizations so that organizations are able to exist in a complemental relationship with people. As they exist now, organizations have at best a symbiotic relationship with people, as we see with most non-profit foundations; and at worst a parasitical relationship with the public, as we see with all profit-making organizations.
Something is missing! What is missing are the priorities of decision-making based on those values that would tie all human social activity together, and with a proactive morality and ethic that offer us the best options for those decisions.
What makes a social holism possible is the set of seven values and their characteristics that are innate to our DNA, universal to all people, self-evident, and irreducible. These values provide the hub from which all vectors of human social activity radiate, and give us an appreciation for the holism of all human social activities.1 When these values are consistently used by all people and organizations, the functions of a developed democratic society become inherently organized. They are the means we will use to transform our families, communities, and societies from dysfunctional instability to a productive and stable state of sustainable peace.
The title of the book relates to the greatness of the values of democratically founded nations as those given in the Declaration of Independence. The values expressed in that document are very clearly similar and congruent with the seven values that have sustained our species for so long. Those values make the principles of democracy attractive to all people. Liberty without license, freedom to make decisions of self-determination, the possibilities to develop the innate potential within us, these are all synonymous with the seven values.
What ties moral and ethical behavior to the behavior of organizational decision-making are the executives, the individual decision-makers of those organizations. What is critical to the survival of our societies is the moral and ethical decision-making by those individuals. What makes their decisions moral and ethical is their intent. In the context of the thoughts provided in these pages, organizations as corporations not only exist to make a profit and sustain their existence, but also exist to sustain themselves in order to sustain the social survival of society by making meaningful and effective contributions to the social sustainability of individuals, families, communities and societies.
Creating morally and ethically integrated societies has never been achieved because there has never existed an unchanging, timeless, irreducible, and universal set of values to guide the option-development, choice-making, decision-making, and action-implementation for their creation. Now that those values have been discovered, we can begin to envision societies that are holistically integrated so that decision-making within and among the major social institutions is inherently consistent and complemental.
1 “Social activities” means any human activity where there is a concert of effort, i.e., all organizations including all social institutions, all organizations, companies, corporations, and governmental organizations, for example, and many more.