Maybe the most important question in the world right now is, “How does society work best?”

Because the wrong answer is winning.

It’s a simple question. Multiple-choice, really with only two choices. And we know that only one of the two choices is the right answer.

We know that because scientists have asked the question in their research. The results were surprisingly revealing. For example, how you answer that question determines whether you are politically on the left or on the right. And how you answer the question, “How does society work best?” is mostly determined by your genes. In other words, whether you are left or right is mostly inherited, as we will see.

But before looking into genopolitics, let’s answer the question. How does society work best?

We can think of a society, such as America, as a system. Some of the parts of the system are people, and other parts are institutions — subsystems, such as businesses, churches, clubs, and so on. A nation, such as the United States of America, is a system. Are America and the United States of America the same thing? It’s better to think of a society and a nation as two different systems. Because a society and a nation are really two different kinds of systems. So, how our society (America) works best might be different than how our nation (the United States) works best. And it is.

The United States of America is a governed system. Without the U.S. government governing it, the U.S. as a nation would not exist. America as a society could still exist without a government, though. That’s not hypothetical; it really happened, and it could happen again. A society can exist without a government, and America has. Here’s how Thomas Paine put it,

For upwards of two years from the commencement of the American War, and to a longer period in several of the American States, there were no established forms of government. The old governments had been abolished, and the country was too much occupied in defence to employ its attention in establishing new governments; yet during this interval order and harmony were preserved as inviolate as in any country in Europe.

Thomas Paine, "Chapter I. Of Society and Civilisation", The Rights of Man (1791)

We might think that’s impossible, but Thomas Paine was right there in the middle of it and we weren’t. Maybe he was right? America didn’t have a real government?

If you want to think of it this way, a society can be any group of people — a tribe, a commune, a church, a club — who interact according to the rules of the society. A nation is one kind of society. A nation is a society that is governed as a hierarchy, with the government on top of the hierarchy and the citizens below. But a society of people doesn’t have to be organized as a hierarchy; the people in the society can interact with each other voluntarily, as equals, voluntarily following rules, perhaps informal or even unspoken rules, with no central governing body controlling them. (In fact, if Paine was telling the truth, then America was such a society for a while.)

A governed nation though is structured, not as a group of people voluntarily following informal rules, but as a hierarchy of control. People are governed by other people, and those doing the governing are the people who are on top of the hierarchy, who issue and enforce rules.

If you do think of it that way, then the answer to the question, “How does society work best?” could be different than the answer to the question, “How does a nation work best?” A nation has to work as a governed hierarchy of control. But a society can work in a different, even an opposite way: It can be a group of people voluntarily interacting by rules that they agree to. And those rules may come not from the top-down — from the government regulators — but can originate spontaneously, as the people interact voluntarily. That in fact is how a free market works.  

So the true answer to the question “How would our society work best?” is either:

 • As a hierarchy of control, ruled by the people in a government at the top of that hierarchy.

 • As a spontaneously organizing system; people freely interacting voluntarily according to agreed upon rules.

“Complete This Sentence: ‘Society Works Best When...’”

That is the title of a section of the 2013 book Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences. In it, John Hibbing discussed the scientific discovery of the real difference between the political left and right. The difference is in how people answer the question: ‘How will our systems of human interaction work best?’

“The first time we employed this scale (in 2007 on a sample of 200 U.S. adults) we did not quite believe the results,” Hibbing wrote. “The Society Works Best Index predicted issue attitudes, ideological self-placement, and party identification with astonishing accuracy.”

These pieces of the ‘Society Works Best Index’ questionnaire will give you an idea of what it is about. How would you answer?

Society works best when... 

1-Our leaders are obeyed 

2-Our leaders are questioned 

Society works best when... 

1-People are rewarded according to merit 

2-People are rewarded according to need

Society works best when... 

1-People are proud they belong to the best society there is 

2-People realize that no society is better than any other 

Society works best when... 

1-Our leaders call the shots 

2-Our leaders are forced to listen to others

Society works best when... 

1-Behavioral expectations are based on an external code 

2-Behavioral expectations are allowed to evolve over the decades

Can you see how these questions relate to the leftists, who believe in more and bigger government as a hierarchy of control, and rightists who believe in voluntary interaction of equals according to voluntarily agreed upon rules? Leftists are people who believe that the Control system is best. Rightists are people who believe the Freedom System is best.

The media and academia didn’t like the discoveries reported in Hibbing’s book. It wasn’t well received. Leftists like us to believe that there is really only one answer to the question of how our systems will work best: Hierarchy of Control. Their solution to all societal problems is: More Government regulation and control. Not more freedom and voluntary interaction.

Hibbing et al also showed that the difference in how people believe society works best is the result of genetic differences. Other scientists found the same thing.

…over the past decade, an unprecedented amount of scholarship utilizing genetic models to expand the understanding of political traits has emerged. Here, we review the ‘genetics of politics’, focusing on the topics that have received the most attention: attitudes, ideologies, and pro-social political traits, including voting behavior and participation.

Peter K. Hatemi and Rose McDermott “The Genetics of Politics: Discovery, Challenges, and Progress” Human Genetics (2012)

Leftists don’t like the idea that freedom is better than control, or that humans can inherit intelligence and behavioral predilections. Leftists need to claim that all human behavior, including intelligence, is the result only of society and environment. Because those things can be controlled by government. Leftist media and academia denounced and suppressed the discoveries of “genopolitics”, and that is why few Americans have even heard of these ideas.

Leftists are people who are born inclined to believe that our society should be a hierarchy of control, with rulers at the top controlling the rest of us.

Rightists are people inclined to believe that our society works best as a group of people voluntarily interacting by rules that spontaneously emerge from the ground up, as a result of our interactions with each other.

Inside Rightful Freedom, we explore the idea that spontaneous order is the secret ingredient of freedom, in Control versus Freedom. That belief was once widely held to be true by most Americans. It’s a “secret” now because leftists are in the process of successfully erasing it from public discourse and the public mind.

Yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.

Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1849)

The more perfect civilisation is, the less occasion has it for government, because the more does it regulate its own affairs, and govern itself...

Thomas Paine, "Chapter I. Of Society and Civilisation", The Rights of Man (1791)