What Makes for a Healthy Society?

In a 2014 preface for his 1978 book The Ohlone Way, a description of how the indigenous peoples of California’s Bay Area lived before Europeans arrived, Malcolm Margolin shared a list of what he thought constituted a healthy society:

• Sustainable relationship with the environment. In a healthy society, the present generation doesn’t strip-mine the soil, water, forest, minerals, etc., leaving the future impoverished and the beauty of the world degraded.
• Few outcasts. A healthy society will have relatively few outcasts — prisoners, homeless, unemployed, insane.
• Relative egalitarianism. The gap between those with the most wealth and power and those with the least should be moderate, and those with the least should feel protected, cared for, or rewarded in some other way.
• Widespread participation in the arts.
• Moderation or control of individual power.
• Economic security attained through networks of family, friendship, and social reciprocity rather than through the individual hoarding of goods.
• Love of place. The feeling that one lives with emotional attachment to an area that is uniquely beautiful, abundant in natural recourses, and rich in personal meaning.
• Knowing one’s place in the world. A sense, perhaps embodied in spiritual practice, that the individual is an insignificant part of a larger, more abiding universe.
• Work is done willingly, or at least with a minimum of resentment.
• Lots of laughter.

(thx, swati)

• books
• lists
• Malcolm Margolin
• The Ohlone Way