That’s an interesting comment, proreason, that my suggested economic framework is ‘heartless’. Emotional bonds have no place in an infrastructure. The bones, the skeleton, of an organism, operate by function. Not by emotion.
Does emotion have a role to play within a society? Of course. It’s vital. But it’s on another level of society – and society can be understood as made up of multiple levels, from the most basic common structure (that economic triad) to the psychological nature of being human to the trivial (whims and follies of individuals).
Emotions are not whims; they are necessary components of ‘being human’; without them we are robots. But emotions, such as compassion, care and anger, shame, greed, are basic components of our human (not societal) nature. They should not but do, interfere with the economic triad. We can emotionally support our dependents (children and elderly) but we can emotionally stand up for ourselves and refuse to be sponged off and used by the greed of others, and the unions and those who sponge off others are just two examples.
As for innovation, that’s yet another area of a society. It’s the peripheral adaptive capacity of the population. Some societies inhibit and repress dissent, questions, explorations. We can all remember the intellectual winter of the early medieval period in Europe – and the same in the Islamic world – where dogma and a rejection of reason and human observation has prevented adaptive progress. A society must never repress this capacity-to-reason, and that’s why freedom of expression is vital. This also means that we must have inequality of thought; i.e., we must not all ‘think alike’ but must be open to questions.
