The Philosophy of Everything 2e — Part IV, Ch 15: Organisation of Society

The most dangerous criminal in your country is not the one we chase down the alley. He wears a clean shirt, holds high office, and steals the school your child never got to sit in.

In brief: In this chapter I take on the question I put off the longest. It is how to make the line between people hold for millions of strangers who will never feel any warmth for one another. My answer is a shelter raised on four supports. I go through what each one needs, from a floor nobody may fall below to courts that hunt for the truth. Then I turn to the people living under the roof, because a society is only as safe as its worst-off person.

Two people who mean each other well can find that line on their own, the line where one person's freedom stops and the other's begins. They can find it in an afternoon, over a pot of tea. They feel their way to it. Neither of them needs a rule written down to know when he has leaned too far onto the other's side. The discomfort tells him, and he eases back.

I left the last chapter exactly there, and exactly at its limit. Because the moment you go from two people to two million, feeling your way to the line stops working. The two million are strangers, most of whom will never meet, almost none of whom will ever feel a flicker of warmth towards one another. There is no shared afternoon. There is no tea.

There is only the crowd. In any crowd large enough, some part of it will be wide awake and decent. Some part of it will be half-asleep and grabbing, reaching for the same seat on the same crowded train. You cannot ask a crowd that size to be good. Most of it will not be, on any given day. So you are left holding the hardest question in the whole book, and the one I put off the longest. It is a question about the decent and the grabbing together. How do you make the line hold for all of them at once, when you cannot count on a single one of them to hold it by feel?

You build something. That is the short answer, and it took me an absurdly long time to be willing to give it. You cannot grow goodwill in a crowd of millions on demand. So instead you build a thing that does the work goodwill would have done, and goes on doing it whether the crowd feels like cooperating or not. I have come to picture that thing as a shelter. It is a great roof raised over a whole people, to keep the weather off them, and to keep them off each other.

I should admit something here, because it shaped how badly I understood all of this for years. I used to think this whole subject was beneath philosophy. Committees and courts and tax rules, who pays for the roads and who empties the bins, the dreary machinery of running a place: I filed all of it under administration. It was somebody else's dull department, several rungs below the real inward work of getting a single mind clear. A philosopher thinks about truth and death and the self, I told myself. He does not think about drainage.

I had it exactly the wrong way round. The drainage is the thing that decides whether anyone gets to think about truth and death and the self at all. A person who is starving, or frightened, or robbed blind by whoever happens to be strongest that week, does no inward work. He has no room for it. The shelter is what makes the room.

Think of everything I had spent thirteen chapters on. It was how to tell what is true, how to look at the world and at myself, how to stop being pushed around by my own mind. All of it can only happen at all under a roof that somebody took the trouble to build. I had been admiring the furniture and ignoring the house.

A shelter of that size rests on supports, and there are four of them. Room to live your own way. Solid ground that holds. Protection from anyone who would hurt you. And a fair chance to climb. The plain old words for these are liberty, security, justice, and opportunity. A society is only ever as sound as the weakest of the four. Knock out any one of them and the roof sags. And it does not sag evenly. It comes down first and hardest on the people who had nowhere else to stand, which is the whole reason you raised it in the first place.

Think of every arrangement people build in order to live together: the family, the neighbourhood, the trade, the newspaper, the company, and the government over all of them. When it is working, each one exists to hold those four supports up for the people underneath. Most of all, it holds them up for the ones who cannot hold anything up for themselves.

Everywhere, and felt nowhere. And here is the strange part, the part that is easiest to get wrong. The better a shelter works, the less you should feel it. When a roof is doing its job you notice the warmth and forget the rafters. The things that hold a society up should be like that. They should be like the air, holding everything in place and noticed by nobody. This is truest of the government, which ought to be everywhere and felt nowhere, the way a breeze is.

The moment you feel it heavily, something has gone wrong. The moment it is in every room of your life, fussing at the temperature of things that are none of its concern, it has stopped being air and turned into weather. Too many rules is a storm that has somehow got inside the shelter it was supposed to keep the storm out of. We all like a breeze. Nobody likes a gale in the front room. The whole art of it is to build supports strong enough to hold the roof up, and light enough that the people beneath them forget they are there.

So let me walk through the four the way I had to think them through myself, spending longest on the one that turned out to need the most building.

Liberty. Start with the room to live your own way, because it is the support that all the others are finally in service of. A society is three things laid one over another: a way of living, a way of being governed, and a way of getting by. Call them the cultural, the political and the economic, if you like the longer words. People move through all three doing whatever they each, rightly or wrongly, take to be good for them. They are wrong about it a fair amount of the time. That is because people are imperfect, and a good deal less reasonable than they believe themselves to be.

The temptation, when you are arranging a society, is to fix all that wrongness from above. It is to decide for everybody what the good life is, and to press it down onto them from the top. Resist it. The job is not to herd people towards the correct way of living. The job is to leave them room, fenced only by the one rule the last chapter spent itself on: harm no one, and you may live however you please.

The way you leave that room is to push the decisions downwards, as far down as they will go. Push them towards the province, the town, the street, the household. Let the shape of a society grow up out of the ground, rather than be stamped onto it from on high. A thing that grows from the ground fits the ground. The customs and small economies that people work out for themselves, in their own places, settle a hundred quarrels before those quarrels ever reach some distant hall. And they rarely produce the kind of explosion that a single pattern, pressed down onto everyone, produces every time.

Because that is the thing the top-down design always forgets: one size has never once fit all. Press a rigid shape onto people who do not share it and you have not organised them. You have bound them. And the ones who were doubtful to begin with are now doubtful and resentful both. Keep the structure loose. Let it bend. A society that can change its own shape as its people change is a living thing. One that cannot is already, somewhere inside itself, starting to die.

It cost me something to come round to this, because I am by temperament a tidier, a person who likes things neat. I like a clean single rule, applied the same everywhere. A society that comes up crooked and varied from the ground offends the part of me that wants the world squared off. But the squared-off society is the one that snaps.

Security. Then the solid ground underfoot. It is the one support without which all the talk of freedom is only a cruelty. You can hand a starving man every liberty in the world, and you have handed him nothing. A person whose survival is in question every day is not free. He is merely frightened. And a frightened person cannot live well, and cannot let anyone near him live well either. So underneath everyone, with no exceptions, there has to be a footing that will not give way beneath them. There has to be a level below which no one is allowed to drop.

Poverty is a black hole. I do not mean that as a phrase to be admired and walked past. I mean it close to the letter. It bends everything around it towards itself. It takes a tremendous amount of strength to climb out of its pull, more than most people caught in it will ever be able to spend. That is because the trap is precisely the thing that has already taken their strength.

The decent society does not stand at the edge of that hole and lecture the people down in it about effort. It lowers a rope. The rope, at its plainest, is food, clothing and a roof of one's own. And, I would add, it is a way into the rest of the world through the internet, the net that everyone now lives half a life inside. Cut off from that, in this century, the poor are not only poor. They are sealed off.

Beneath all of this sits a claim I want to set down plainly, because it overturns something we are taught to treat as a law of nature. We are told that the weak are simply culled (weeded out, the way a farmer thins a herd), and that this is how living things have always gone. We are told that to prop up the people who would otherwise fall is to fight nature herself, and lose. We are now rich enough, and clever enough, that this is no longer true. And we are allowed to say so out loud. The old culling does not have to win.

A society can choose to guarantee every one of its members a life of basic dignity. In doing so it overrides the cull on purpose. And it should, for a reason colder than mere kindness. Nobody can ever tell which single life, kept alive when it would otherwise have been thrown away, turns out to be the one that changes everything for the rest of us. Every life is worth keeping partly because no one can see far enough ahead to know which one matters most.

I have felt, in my own life, the particular arithmetic of a tight month. I mean the way one serious worry about money will crowd out every larger thought a person was trying to have. Multiply that by a whole life lived inside the worry, with no footing under it, and you understand why that footing is not charity. It is the precondition of everything else.

And securing one life must never come at the cost of another, or of the ground we all stand on. Foul the air and the water and the soil, and you have only manufactured the next round of fear. That is because a stripped and emptied world is a world that ends up at war over what little is left.

Justice. This support needs the most room of the four, because it takes the most machinery. Justice is the support that says no one may improve his own life by tearing into someone else's. Take that away and every other support rots. The reason is the mutualism this book keeps returning to, the whole business of dealing with each other so that both sides come away ahead. It cannot survive in a place where the strong can simply take. A land whose people cannot get justice is a land already walking towards its own ruin. It just does not know the date yet.

The ground rule is the same three-line measure I carried out of the cosmos a few chapters back, and into the street. It runs: harm no one, harm nothing, harm not yourself. And where harm has been done, match the answer to its size. No softer, or the weak go unprotected. No harder, or the one doing the punishing becomes the next offender in the line.

The wrong criminals. We reserve our fear, though, for the wrong criminals. A thief breaks into your house and takes what you own. It is a violation, and it frightens us, and we lock him up for it. But what he took can mostly be replaced: the cash, the jewellery, the things. There is another kind of thief we barely punish at all, because we have never understood what he steals.

The corrupt man in high office does not take your jewellery. He takes the road that was never built, and the school your child never got to sit in. He takes the hospital that turned out to be a line in a budget that someone pocketed. He takes the future of a whole generation, skimmed quietly off the top. And none of that comes back. You cannot recover a childhood spent in a country its own leaders looted.

So the most dangerous criminal in any society is not the one we chase down the alley. It is the thieving, scheming man in the clean shirt and the high office. And he walks free precisely because we have never learned to feel the true size of what he does. I will be honest that I find this second thief harder to forgive than the first, and I have had to ask myself whether that is fair. I have decided it is, because the thing he takes is so much larger, and so much of it can never be given back.

Two kinds of court. The first stone of a just society is the plainest one, and I set it down in the last chapter. A court must weigh every person the same, whatever he happens to be made of. It must weigh the powerful exactly as it weighs the poor. But equality on paper is not equality in the room. Here is the piece almost nobody thinks about, the piece that decides whether justice ever actually reaches the people who need it.

Picture two ways a court can work. In the first, the judge sits back like a referee and simply listens. This side argues, that side argues, and whoever argues better wins. It sounds fair. It is not, because arguing better is a thing you can buy. The man with money hires the cleverest tongues. The truth of the matter loses to the polish of the advocate. And the poor man, who cannot afford the clever tongue, loses with the truth on his side.

In the second way, the judge does not sit back. He leans in. He is not there to be persuaded by whoever performs best. He is there to dig for what actually happened, and to ask his own questions. He goes hunting for the truth himself, rather than wait to be sold one of two versions of it. Lawyers have names for these two: the first is called the adversarial way, and the second the inquisitorial way. A society that wants justice to reach the people who cannot defend themselves builds the second kind of court. In it, the judge is a hunter of the truth and not a scorer of a debate.

And it spreads such courts everywhere, from the smallest village up to the highest bench in the land. Three judges hear the lowest cases, and more are added at each step up. That way no one has to travel a hundred miles or wait ten years to be heard.

The many hands. A justice system is more than its courts, though. It is a whole set of hands doing different parts of the work. I will not march you past every one of them, because most need only a sentence. There are people who watch for trouble before it happens, and people who look into it after. There are people who rush in the moment a crisis breaks, whether the crisis wants doctors or wants guards. There are people who clear up and rebuild after a flood or a fire, and set the survivors back on their feet.

There are cameras kept on the public squares, so that officers need not roam the streets stopping and harassing ordinary people. The officers step in only when the cameras show that something is genuinely wrong. There are guards on the doors of the places that need guarding. None of it is glamorous. All of it is the quiet plumbing of a society that holds together.

But a few of these hands matter enough to stop on. The first is the one that catches people before they fall. Most people who break a law are not hardened criminals, or hardened anything. They are first-timers, often people who never quite meant to. They took a single wrong turn under pressure, and could have been turned back by a word at the right moment.

A society serious about justice spends real effort on catching those people on the way down. It does this not with cells but with counsel, that is, with people who guide: social workers, people who understand the mind, a few officers. Together they make a quiet net. It takes hold of a person as he is slipping and walks him back up, rather than waiting to cage him at the bottom. Every person turned back that way is a citizen kept, a life kept, a freedom kept.

This kind of catching is cheaper and kinder and wiser than a prison, every single time. And it sits naturally alongside the thing I said about prisons in the last chapter. Prisons should be places a person is rebuilt in, not warehouses he is stored in.

The second is the hand that fights the man in the clean shirt. It is the hardest, because the people whose job it would normally be to catch him are the very people he controls. You cannot ask a bureaucracy to police corruption while the corrupt hold its promotions and its postings in their hands. The fear runs the wrong way. So you do two things.

First, you turn the whole population into the watchmen. Reward, openly and well, anyone who exposes a corrupt official. Keep doing it until exposing them stops being dangerous and becomes a thing ordinary people simply do, a movement rather than a department. It works because nothing on earth frightens a corrupt man like a public that is watching, and is paid to watch.

And second, you cut the cord between an official's honesty and a politician's favour. Let postings and promotions run by a fixed, automatic rule of merit. Then no honest official has to please a powerful man to keep his career, and the powerful man loses the lever he used to bend him with. Take away the lever and most of the corruption goes with it.

The police. And one of these hands, in most places, is past mending, and I am not going to be polite about it. The police, as they have actually become, are too often a corrupt and bullying force. They have been turned against the very people they were set up to protect. It is no answer to say the people should keep order for themselves. A crowd cannot police a crowd.

The answer is to stop trying to repair a thing this far gone, and to build its replacement up from the ground. I mean the counsellors, the truth-hunting courts, the watched squares, the emergency teams, the public turned watchman. Together they make a whole better-shaped set of hands, doing the work the police were meant to do and stopped doing. Replacing it outright is not too wild a thing to want. It is overdue.

Some of these hands carry weapons, and they should. A country is at peace inside its borders partly because there are soldiers standing on them. Take the soldiers away and the looters come. And a looted country falls into exactly the chaos that justice exists to prevent. The defending of the country, and the heavier work of enforcement, belongs to the nation as a whole and not to its provinces. That is because a province will always be tempted to bend the nation's safety to its own small quarrels.

And one rule runs under all of it. A society should reward, openly, the people who raise their grievances without raising their fists. And it should come down hard on the ones who reach for violence to be heard. It should, because the day violence is seen to work is the day a society begins teaching everybody to use it.

Soldiers and rulers. A word here on the soldiers, because it carries over from the last chapter and matters more than its length. I said there that a country run by too many men out of the army slowly turns into a country that mistakes every problem for a war. It spends on weapons what it owes to its own poor. Here is why. We train a soldier, rightly, to sort the world fast into friend and foe. We do it because his life, and his comrades' lives, depend on his seeing a threat before it is on him. That is the correct shaping for a soldier. It is poison in a ruler.

Carry the friend-or-foe habit into high office and you get a man who magnifies small troubles into enemies. He reaches to crush what could have been let alone. He escalates a quarrel with a neighbouring country until both sides are taking turns avenging the last blow, and the whole thing finally catches fire. Such states tend to wreck themselves, putting the swagger of their armies above the welfare of their own people. And behind a good many of them, quietly, stand the makers of the weapons. They fund the men who start the wars, because the wars are their trade.

The patriotism such men preach is, to be plain, a social evil whenever it is built on shutting other people out or pulling them down. The only cure for it is to keep widening the circle of who counts as one of us, until there is no one left outside it. So keep the old soldiers to a small share of the lawmakers, well under a tenth. Let no soldier walk straight from the barracks into the parliament. Make him put the friend-or-foe habit down first, over years. Let him learn to be a civilian in his bones before he is handed the power to rule over them.

Get justice right and the rest of the shelter can stand. Get it wrong (let the powerful take whatever they please and the weak go unheard) and you do not merely have an unfair country. You have a country winding slowly towards war, because people who cannot get justice eventually go looking for it with whatever is to hand. Deny it long enough and there will be blood.

Opportunity. Then the last support, the fair chance to climb. The footing keeps you from falling. Opportunity is the ladder up from it. And a decent society owes its people the ladder every bit as much as the footing.

Think of where everyone stands as a hill. The people at the top, the ones who already have wealth, can see for miles. Every step they take upwards is easier than the one before it, because money makes more money very nearly on its own. From up there the whole country of chances lies spread out below them, and they need only reach down and pick. The people at the bottom can barely see past the next day. They are not lazier, and not less able. They are lower on the hill, and the view from the bottom is short.

So when we talk about a fair chance, we are not talking about hauling everyone up to the same height. That is neither possible nor even something to want. We are talking about cutting a real path up the slope for the person at the bottom. It is the same slope the person at the top has been strolling up with the wind behind him. Equality of the chance to climb, never equality of where everyone ends up. The second of those is a fantasy and a tyranny both. The first is only justice, finally stretched to cover the future as well as the present.

I will admit that I spent years on the upper slope of that hill without once noticing it was a slope. I took the long view I happened to have as simply the view. And I assumed that anyone who lacked it lacked something in himself. It is a comfortable little error, and a wicked one, and shaking it off was not pleasant.

A floor and a prize. So how do you cut that path? You begin, again, with that same footing. But now you can see it does double work. A guaranteed minimum under everyone is not only mercy. It is the firm place a person has to be standing before he can reach for anything higher. Almost all the evil in a society, traced back far enough, grows out of the plain terror of not surviving. And you cannot ask a terrified man to take the risks that any climb requires.

So guarantee that minimum outright. Let no person's income fall below what it actually costs to live: the rent, the food, the children's schooling, a doctor when he is ill. The usual objection turns up at once. Give people a guaranteed minimum, it says, and they will lie down on it. There is something to that. Nobody, left wholly to himself, chooses hard labour for its own sake. We all need a reason to push.

So you do not stop at the minimum. You secure the bottom, and then you make climbing up from it pay. Guarantee that no one drops below the line, and reward, visibly and well, everyone who rises above it. Safety at the bottom, and a real prize for effort above it. A man no longer kept awake by the fear of falling is, perhaps for the first time in his life, free to spend his strength on rising.

Above that secured bottom, the path up the hill is paved with three things: a roof of one's own, a schooling, and a doctor. No family anywhere feels safe without a place of its own to stand. So the society stands behind them. It does not hand them a house. It guarantees the loan that lets them buy one, and the loan that lets them be educated. And it lightens the weight of that loan most for the poorest and least for the comfortable, the help shrinking as the income grows.

And now medicine. Here I will be exactly as blunt as I know how to be. Medicine has, in too many places, stopped being a way of healing and turned into a business. In that business the diagnosis follows the profit instead of the patient, and a single illness can drown a poor family in a debt it never climbs out of. That is a betrayal of the whole point of the thing.

Care that a sick person can actually afford is not a luxury of wealthy countries. It belongs in the minimum, alongside the food and the roof. And the healer has his own share of the repair to make. He must wean himself off the profit, and remember that he is looking at a person and not at an invoice.

And then there is the one who does not want a job but wants to make something: to start the small enterprise that may one day give work to others. For him, the last paving stone is easy credit. It is a fair chance to borrow the seed of a business, without having to be rich enough already not to need it.

The people under the roof. A shelter, in the end, is only ever as good as the people living under it. So the last thing to say about building a society is something about the people the building is full of.

Each person carries, in some mixture, four qualities, and a society runs on all four at once. There is ingenuity: the making and inventing and figuring-out that moves a civilisation forward. There is mutualism, that same thread I have followed through the whole book. Here it means the knack for the dealing that leaves nobody drained, the kind that feeds both sides at once. There is protectiveness: the standing-up to defend, against injustice, against whoever would harm what is weaker than himself. And there is diligence: the plain capacity to keep at a thing until it is finished. Without it, none of the other three ever amounts to anything.

Not one of the four is higher than the rest. A society needs all of them, and so does a single life, and a person moves among them across a single ordinary day. They shift in us the way the colour of a room shifts: with the mood, and the hour, and the slow change of the years.

The one a person is strongest in tends to become his work. It helps me to give each a name, as if they were people you have met. The one full of ingenuity grows into a researcher or a teacher or a maker of new things, an Ashok advancing what we all know. The one who burns for justice joins the forces that defend the rest, or takes up the law: a Rita.

The natural mutualist solves a problem for other people and builds a living out of the solving, a Naseem with his small enterprise. And the diligent one, a Jennifer, does the steady work the whole thing quietly rests on. It is the work without which nothing a society dreams up ever actually gets made. Each is playing a part the others cannot, and the society has need of every part.

Nor are the four only for the grand public roles. They turn up in the most private corners of a life. A couple keeping their bed alive uses every one of them. They use the ingenuity to think up something new to try, and the protectiveness to defend the idea when the other is unsure of it. They use the mutualism to work towards the version that suits them both. And they use the diligence to make it a real part of their life together, and not a single night's experiment.

How we meet difference. There is one more way the people under the roof divide. It decides, more than anything else does, which way the whole society tilts. Set anyone you please along a line by how he meets the people who are unlike him. At one end stands the liberal, who welcomes the difference, takes people as they are, and is glad of the variety. Beside him is the moderate, who does not exactly welcome the difference but tolerates it and lets it be. Then comes the conservative, uneasy with variety, digging in against change, wanting things to keep the shape they have always had.

And at the far end stands the extremist. He is not content to dislike what is different, but sets out to force his own pattern onto everybody else. When the liberal pushes a civilisation forward, the extremist hauls it back. No society is all of one kind, and none should be. But the healthy one keeps its weight towards the first two: towards the people who can trade ideas with one another without anyone getting hurt. And the sicker a society grows, the more it fills up with the last two, the diggers-in and the forcers.

Three kinds of society. Which is why a society is never one fixed thing, but always somewhere on a moving scale. And the old way of talking, the one that counts by the long account of our choices, sorts that scale into three. There is the bad society, where the footing is gone and the supports are knocked away. In it, evil has grown so good at looking like goodness that people can no longer tell them apart. The ignorant and the grasping set the tone, and a person trying to be decent has to fight for every inch of it.

Even that one does not hold forever. A waking mind cannot live inside it indefinitely. Sooner or later the people in it push back towards cooperation, though the pushing-back, when it has been put off too long, tends to be bloody. There is the in-between society, the one most of us actually live in. Here good and evil trade the day back and forth. A person can see the right thing clearly enough and still, often, take the other road, and the whole question of how to live stays genuinely hard.

And there is the good society, the nearly peaceful one. Here the footing holds and the supports stand, and most people, most of the time, are trying to become a little better than they were a year ago. Evil still turns up, but seldom, and is easily enough put down. Which of the three you live in is not luck. It is the sum of countless small choices. It is what the old word calls karma: the same reckoning I traced through a single life earlier in this book, here falling on a whole people at once.

But do not sit waiting for the perfect one, and do not let anyone sell you the blueprint for it. I said early in this book that the people most certain they had worked out the perfect society went on to kill millions in the building of it. I said too that no such society is ever coming. The people who would have to live inside it are each at a different stage of waking. Some are barely stirred, some long awake, and all of them are alive at the same time. I gave you that as a truth about a single mind. It is exactly as true of a whole people.

No roof on earth will bring every last one of them to the same height. So put away the dream of the finished society, and put your trust in the building of it instead. Trust the slow getting-better. Trust a thing always under construction and never done, worth honouring for the work and not for some completion it will never reach.

Built for everyone. And it has to be built for everyone, not for the deserving few. The reason is the plainest thing I told you at the very start of all this, and again when I first turned to how we are to live beside one another. A person can only ever be about as good as the worst people they are left to live among. I handed you that as a fact about one life. Here it is with a whole country standing inside it.

A people kept frightened, cornered, and without hope does not stay quietly in its corner and leave the rest of us in peace. In the end it reaches up and pulls everyone down into its trouble. There is no saving yourself alone, as I said at the beginning, while the building you are standing in is on fire. Which is the whole case for the four supports, made one last time. The ground under the worst-off person in a country turns out, when you follow it all the way through, to be the ground under you.

What the safety is for. That is how you raise the shelter, and how you keep it standing. The four supports are held up for everyone, and most of all for the ones who cannot hold anything up alone. But a shelter, even a flawless one, only ever does the single thing. It keeps you safe. And being kept safe, I had already begun to suspect, is not at all the same as being alive in any way worth the name. A person can be perfectly protected and perfectly bored. He can be fed and housed and defended, and quietly dying of having nothing to live for.

So once the roof was up and holding in my mind, one question was still standing there in the middle of the room. It was the largest one left, and the one the whole book had been walking towards. What is all the safety actually for? What turns a life that is merely safe into a life that is worth the trouble of living? That was the question I had saved for last.

Words to Keep

• shelter: the whole set of arrangements a people builds to keep the weather off them, and to keep them off each other.

• liberty: room to live your own way, fenced only by the one rule that you harm no one.

• security: solid ground underfoot; a level below which no one in a society is allowed to drop.

• justice: the support that says no one may improve his own life by tearing into someone else's.

• opportunity: a fair chance to climb; a real path up the hill for the person standing at the bottom.

• mutualism: dealing with each other so that both sides come away ahead; the thread that runs through this whole book.

• man in the clean shirt: the corrupt official, the most dangerous criminal, who steals roads, schools and a whole generation's future.

• truth-hunting court: a court where the judge digs for what actually happened, instead of scoring a debate between hired advocates.

• guaranteed minimum: an income no person may fall below, covering rent, food, schooling and a doctor; the floor under every climb.

• the four qualities: ingenuity, mutualism, protectiveness and diligence; every person carries a mix, and a society needs all four.

• liberal and extremist: the two ends of the line of how people meet difference, one welcoming it, the other forcing one pattern on all.

• karma: the long reckoning of countless small choices, which falls on a whole people as surely as on one life.

Sources and Further Reading

• This chapter comes from my own observation and thinking about how a society holds together, not from any one book.

• The Indian tradition of karma: the old word this chapter uses for the sum of a whole people's countless small choices.

• The adversarial and inquisitorial traditions of court procedure: the two ways a court can work that this chapter compares.