The primary function of society

Why is freedom associated with the morphogenetic character of social processes? Because it is the shape-creating, organization-generating, aspect of the process which ultimately allows people to do what they want, what they desire, what they need, and what is deeply adapted to life as it is lived and to experience as it is felt.
The humanity of the environment comes about only when the processes are morphogenetic, are whole-seeking, are placed in a context that gradually allows people to work towards a living whole in which each person plays a part.

I believe we may take on this task, collectively, and can gain effective, instrumental knowledge of our generative system, and thus some measure of awareness and control over the system of processes that generates the world.
I choose to define society as that system which creates the human world, and say that its primary ongoing function, and the criterion we should use to judge it by, is its capacity to create and recreate a living world for us.

In this vein, I wish to propose the concept that society — the huge system of process-rules and principles we know as society — should be viewed as having as one of its major functions the continuous creation and perpetuation of a living physical world.
The processes which are created and maintained by society, by our culture, provide the world with its genetic material. If we want to understand how the formation of the world works, we need to study this system of processes and their action of the form of the built world.
If we want to judge the extent to which society is able to form living structure, we need to compare its system of processes with the action of living processes.
If we want to influence and modify the world, to make it more living as a structure or more adequate to human need, we need to influence the action of this system of processes.

It may even be said that we could approach a new point of view in which the primary function of society would be understood as the function of generating a healed structure in the world through morphogenetic processes — and that this primary function is to allow us, the members of society, to adjust progressively all the small processes in such a way that individually, and together, they will more and more effectively create a living world.

As things stand in society today, there are forces at work making the transition to a morphogenetic regime very, very, difficult. Although it is possible to imagine minor improvements in some of our processes […], and we may be able to imagine small-scale improvement in the degree of life our processes create, changes on the larger order that is required are — for the moment — prevented.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/18 Encouraging freedom#