Lucky is a hunter's perfect dog. He displays patience and obedience in the face of game. He is a tracker dog and a pointer, not a killer at all. He loves searching for the truth, and is not troubled not to ever find it. We agree: searching can be more productive than finding.
I am trying to work out more fully an idea that I have discovered in the work of Douglass C. North: Man is an uncertainty remover. In this capacity humankind has invested enormously in the business of reducing uncertainties (threatening its survival and welfare) that arise in the physical world. The result of man's efforts are mind-boggling. However, in order to achieve the levels of advancement in improving his protection against an adverse environment, man had to chance upon as well as create appropriate tools not only in the physical world but in the social realm as well. A certain, more advanced level of command over the physical world presupposes commensurately higher degrees of specialisation, division of labour and concomitant social complexity.
In a way, and this is the key idea that I seem to find in North, during the course of human progress man replaces uncertainty emanating from the physical world by uncertainty generated by the social world. More complex social arrangements help conquer the physical environment more effectively, but expose the species to new risks of a social nature. Nowadays, we are not as much jeopardized, say, by the inclemency of weather than by defects in the social "technologies" that we have chanced upon and developed by and by to be able to gain more control over nature.
Storms are less of a problem than Stalin.
Incidentally, I am looking into these issues not least because I have never trusted simplistic worldviews that deify the state or make it the subject-matter of rash dismissal, which is just a different form of disrespecting the depth and seriousness of the issue.
Here is why I like supermarkets, and hope to be making modestly worthwhile contributions to the task of keeping our evolving social technologies on a path of further advancement:
