Introduction

Good intentions and idyllic wishes do not elevate the trajectory of people’s lives!

You have one life to live—and are incredibly lucky to reside in the land of freedom and opportunity. How will you make the most of these gifts? How can they help you attain health, prosperity, happiness, and a full life? How will you ensure freedom and opportunity are available to future generations?

Most people know their genes, parents, and choices affect their life. Few people recognize their culture is a refined reservoir of intergenerational practices and a type of human software that has enabled their ancestors, community, and country to persist through time. Few people realize that culture, more than anything else, affects the quality and trajectory of their life.

In 1978, at age 19, I embarked on a journey that would dramatically change my course. I participated in an economic development field study in Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Columbia, and a year later, in a similar program in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union. Experiencing varying qualities of life at an early age ignited a fire within me to understand the most advantageous cultures and practices. It caused me to study economic development at Purdue, public policy at Cornell, and business at Harvard; read over 2,000 books about history, religion, science, culture, government, economics, and leadership; and spend time in all fifty states, over fifty countries, and over two hundred U.S. and international cities. My early travels fueled my desire to identify the most advantageous perspectives and practices as I raised my family, operated several businesses, and was involved in the leadership of numerous nonprofit organizations for over four decades.

Experiencing all these cultures taught me that people only flourish as a collection of perspectives and practices—like the perspectives of causality, competition, meritocracy, comparative advantage, and fitness, and the practices of honesty, scholarship, work, free enterprise, and the rule of law—are prevalent in their populations. After our youngest child graduated from college in 2015, and my wife and I had financially secured our future, I began assembling a coherent, synergistic mix of the most advantageous perspectives and practices from the thousands that exist. Flourish: Practices that Elevate Everyone’s Life is the culmination of this work.

Cultural evolution is rare in nature and difficult to start. It only occurs in a few large-brained species, like humans, elephants, and orcas, which have adults that live beyond their reproductive years. Our ancestors’ descent from the trees and need to protect themselves from predators on the African savannas 2.4 million years ago was likely the cultural enabling circumstance for humans. The need for protection advantaged those who banded together, and the inclination to unite favored pair-bonding, kinship, and social interaction.1

Understanding how evolution shaped our ancestors provides many insights into human behavior. Before agriculture, between 2.4 million and 10 thousand years ago, or for about 99% of sapiens’ history, our ancestors lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers in racially and ethnically homogeneous groups of less than 150 people. After this time, most humans became rooted, enjoyed the benefits of agriculture, and began to live in multi-racial, multi-ethnic communities of hundreds, thousands, and millions of people.

Our instinctual operating system, which developed in Africa, is hierarchical and patriarchal. The strong dominate the weak, and the strongest males with the most formidable networks rule. Men and women form weak pair bonds, and the dominant, philandering males impregnate more of the females. The women of the extended families raise the children. This operating system inclines us to be emotional, reactive, and conforming. It causes us to become jealous of others, prefer egalitarian communities, want to defeat competitors, and eat as much as possible when food is available.2 This instinctual operating system develops in early childhood, acts on us 24/7, and enables us to subsist in the modern world. The most advantageous modern operating systems, on the other hand, are hierarchical, democratic, inclusive, meritocratic, constitutional, and lawful. They incline us to be monogamous, skeptical, rational, proactive, respectful of private property, tolerant of some inequality, win-win oriented, and caloric limiting. They vary by culture and yield different patterns and qualities of life.

It is our extraordinary brain which allows us to transform our instinctual operating system into a more advantageous modern one. The transformation is not easy, though. Human brains are an evolutionary synthesis of a reptilian core, a mammalian overlay, and a cerebral cortex. They have some eighty-six billion nerve cells. Each nerve cell has several thousand dendrites.3 The billions of cells and thousands of dendrites create trillions of neural connections, enabling our brains to store millions of bits of information and learn thousands of concepts, conventions, and behaviors. As spectacular as our brains are, however, they are still a product of thousands of small, advantageous adjustments to 250-million-year-old reptilian brains and hundreds of adjustments to 7-million-year-old primate brains.

Dogs, horses, chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins, and whales also have spectacular brains. What distinguishes our brains is their relative size to our body mass and the embedded prosocial tendencies. As the numbers of neurons and their connectivity relative to body mass affect individual intelligence, so the size of groups and their relative member connectivity affect collective intelligence. Collective intelligence and cultural potency increase exponentially as individuals’ brain mass increases relative to their body mass, individuals become more connected, and the group becomes larger. An example of the power of connectivity within groups occurred when the smaller-brained, prosocial sapiens overwhelmed the larger-brained, more independent Neanderthals 30-40 thousand years ago.4

The advent of language and concepts facilitates communication and problem-solving, but also enables people to lie, cheat, and exploit others. To enjoy the benefits of language, we needed the ability to infer others’ intentions and norms to reward truthfulness and punish dishonesty. Thus, we developed the ability to read others’ facial expressions and the emotions of pride and shame in response. Cultural evolution involved the community in rewarding norm conformity, sanctioning violations, and influencing our aspirations. Members of a community convey prestige to those who conform to their norms, develop needed skills, and perform essential services. They use gossip, public criticism, reputational damage, reduced marital prospects, and ostracism to sanction norm violators. Consequently, we feel pride when we conform and contribute to our groups, and shame when we disappoint them. The pride and shame that groups evoke affect human behavior more than most other forms of reward and punishment.5

The benefits of cultural evolution and individual, collective, and intergenerational intelligence are breathtaking. They include security, fresh water, a cornucopia of foods, housing, simple machines, colors, temporal partitions, base-10 math, algebra, geometry, calculus, language, a 600,000-word English lexicon, and thousands upon thousands of concepts. Thanks to cultural evolution, we have money, interest, capital, electricity, schools, the scientific method, universities, corporations, individual rights, due process, representative democracy, microprocessors, the Internet, and cellphones.

Some cultures, perspectives, and practices are superior to others. This is obvious in the extreme. Being born in South Korea is more advantageous than in North Korea. Typically, however, a culture’s comparative desirability is more nuanced, and we must examine the amount their underlying populations move along The Path of Fitness.