I recently wrote the title in an email to a discussion list I participate in. I'm not sure where it came from - whether I read it somewhere or heard someone say it - but I am fairly certain that it is true. Even as I read my own words echoed on the discussion list, I wondered at the truth of them. I could not find a weakness, but I did find abstraction inherently assumed in the statement. It is fair to note what is assumed, in fairness to myself and others.

Expectations are derived from many things. Part of expectations are heuristic - learned things. A child might think that an orange tree can produce bananas - in time, we can hope, that the child will learn the difference. Society does that - though, in all fairness, society is also seemingly committed to the same level of thinking that creates things people perceive as problems. As Albert Einstein once wrote:

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Despite itself, society has managed to progress - but as Ayn Rand notes:

The course of mankind's progress is not a straight, automatic line, but a tortuous struggle, with long detours or relapses into the stagnant night of the irrational. Mankind moves forward by the grace of those human bridges who are able to grasp and transmit, across years or centuries, the achievements that men had reached - and to carry them further.

The bridges of which Ayn Rand writes would seem to coincide with the ratchet mechanism through which society has seen progress - sometimes, the ratchet slides back, but somehow society manages to move beyond any slips. The trouble isn't progress, the trouble is stagnation.

Quantitatively - if quantitative analysis of progress can be had in any meaningful sense - if expectations are low, how does this impact society? I would believe that it would lead toward stagnation; the less expectation the less likely there is to be progress. When society has great expectations, it seems as though there are great achievements and that society somehow manages to move forward.

And what of the expectations themselves? A society - any society - seems to be built upon expectations. Law, as a rule, is built on the foundations of the expectations of a society. Governments are the same, one could say, but this is not always the case - especially when the type of governance was not selected by those governed. In choosing what it deserves, society makes known expectations. Markets are built on this. That society expects 'new' or 'improved' brought the silly conundrum of 'new and improved'.

Is it fair to say, then, that any individual is the sum of the individual's expectations? Maybe that could be true. What is it that you expect of your life, and how does that guide your life? With high expectations come greater challenges. With lower expectations come lesser challenges. Yet an individual can become stressed with higher expectations... is it not true that this would be seen at a societal level as well? Is society more forgiving of stress than an individual?

Is society really the sum of it's expectations? I believe so, but I have no evidence to prove it. Maybe it doesn't need evidence. Maybe the truth is in the expectation of it being true.