What is a healthy society? I was recently asked this question in an interview; I’m unsatisfied with the answer I gave, and the question has stuck with me. Here’s another try.

By society I mean the system created by the agreements we abide by when we decide to live in community; particular ways of being and organizing our activities that inform our behaviors as they affect other people. These agreements may be explicit or implicit. A trivial example: different societies manifest different attitudes towards how people wait to be served; a society with strict attitudes will frown upon the practice of cutting in line, whereas a more permissive society won’t. People’s shared attitude towards waiting is part of their social compact; they agree on what is acceptable behavior and how they will enforce it. Societies have many such agreements; they define a sort of operating system for community.

What about healthy? My starting point is Bucky Fuller’s aspiration to make the world work for 100% of humanity. It’s an acknowledgment that current ways of organizing our activities are not working equally well for everybody. Although we’ve made much progress, there’s still much injustice and unnecessary suffering. (Suffering is inevitable, but we should strive to reduce it as much as possible.) In short, we can and must do better. Now, making the world work for 100% of humanity doesn’t mean trying to make everybody the same; that’s impossible and undesirable. Instead, it means ensuring everyone has the same opportunities to live a full, rich life.

But that’s not all there’s to it. Health implies longevity. (A healthy body is one that can last a long time; it’s the opposite of a sick, dying body.) We want societies that can maintain desirable conditions in the long term; for generations, with no end in sight. In other words, we want societies that are sustainable. A society that achieves equitable conditions on one or more levels but then destroys itself is (by definition) not healthy. (See tragedy of the commons.) Working towards sustainability calls for systemic thinking.

When contemplating the idea of a healthy society, I often think of James Carse’s book Finite and Infinite Games, which opens with this duality:

There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite.

A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

The members of a healthy society understand they’re engaged in an infinite game with each other, with people from other societies, and the environments that host them. Having evolved beyond zero-sum approaches, they strive to continue the play ad infinitum.