It’s easy for those of us living in so-called developed states to survey the turmoil across much of the developing or under-developed world and take a certain amount of comfort in our uneventful lives. We might not consciously harbor conceits about the superiority of Western Civilization but nevertheless, the absence of social strife, relatively low crime rates, the abundance of material goods and services, well-funded university systems, access to advanced health care, relatively stable systems of government — all of these factors taken together evoke a sense that relative to much of the rest of the world, we live in reasonably healthy societies. To the extent that we hold this perspective, we do so however while viewing society in a strangely skewed way. We treat the individual as the fundamental component out of which society is constructed and view the common good as the ability for the greatest number of individuals to fulfill their desires. But this isn’t what makes a society and it never will.