Social Organization Progressively Expands and Integrates

Social Organization initiated distinctly with the consolidation of the institution of family life, moved in stages successively through simple structures of clan-based and tribal existence to the eventual emergence of a diversity of forms of urban society, coming to rest only recently in the solidification of the nation-state schema of planetary division. Relative to the one before it, each stage opened up a wealth of new opportunities and realities for the exercise of human capacity in food, health, agriculture, technology, culture and prosperity. The advancement of our species in terms of the historical progression of social organization has not occurred at the expense of our individuality. Indeed all great vistas of what we consider human achievement have been made possible by the increasing integration and complexity of human social organization. Power for good and evil has increased both for it and because of it. As social organization has increased, the scope for the expression of the capacities latent in each human being has correspondingly expanded.