THE BEST SOCIETY

That society is best which best fosters the fulfillment of true human needs.  True human needs are to be distinguished from mere wants and desires not essential to human flourishing.  Abraham Maslow’s famous “hierarchy of human needs” offers a good model ranked from food and water to higher consciousness and peak experiences.

That society which promotes such a hierarchy of values and provides for its people to ascend toward the higher reaches of individual and collective development is a sane and humane society, more mature than societies that foster simply the liberty to pursue a nebulous and undefined happiness.

The better we come to understand our own nature as a species and our vital relationships with other species and our planetary and cosmic environments, the more precisely shall we comprehend the needs we need to fulfill.

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