No, it is not necessary to take action to ensure a better future for society. Society evolves and becomes more and more refined and efficient as time passes and technology improves. It would be illogical to state society was regressing, at least on a technological level. Taking action is a nice thing to talk about but it is a vague idea. What action? How? By whom? Just how would somebody go about taking action to ensure a better future for society?

Society ensures its own future will be better by constant evolution. Logic is the norm in a universe such as ours, and as such it is illogical to state that something is evolving backwards. Thus it is evolving forwards, and attaining greater refinement and efficiency of operation. Society is analogous to the development of machines within it. They start out as rough hewn instruments and gain greater refinement, and as new technologies such as steam traction and metal replacing wooden wheels become available, society also gains efficiency of operation.

For an individual within society, therefore, there is little they can personally do to make better the future of society as a whole. For themselves there are things they can do to make their own situation within society better, but not many people have the influence that would allow them to make a change for society as a whole. It is easy to come up with a counter argument along the lines of ‘Thomas Alva Edison changed society by inventing the light bulb’, but such a statement does not take into account the influences that caused Edison to do this, nor the fact that his invention was not entirely unique in its properties.

It was not Edison who made the change, anyway. It was those who followed him. The lightbulb manufacturers, the consumers, etc. Edison began a spark which lit a fire. But to suggest we all have the ability to light such a fire is preposterous. How many of us will likely invent something of such importance in our lifetime? Even if we devoted our lives to the process surely we would mostly end up as Homer Simpson did when he tried to emulate Edison’s achievements? Well actually if we were dedicated enough we would end up as a small time contributor to the wellbeing of a particular area of society like those contestants on The New Inventors.

Influence controlled by the individual is largely upon themselves and their immediate context. Although the Internet might be seen as expanding an individuals influence, if anything, the democratic nature of the resource limits individual effect, and causes if anything a shrinking of social influences to a particular demographic or sub demographic. To take action to ensure a better future for society, therefore, seems an impossibility, unless it is undertaken as a group enterprise.

This idea, that of united movements for change, is hardly new. In recent history we have had many such movements with varying success championing various causes. The Nazis, hippies, feminists, Communists, etc are all examples of mass social movements for change for what those people thought were good goals. Putting aside whether they were indeed good goals or not, the fact remains that if one wants to create a mass social influence, one needs to recruit a social mass. One must not look to Jesus-esque individual influences in an idealistic fashion, but to group influence as the answer.

Thus some people, of less social influence than others, will never have the chance to take action to ensure a better future for society. Those with influence will largely do what they have been doing, what works, and change is not to be expected any more than is logically necessary. Society will unlikely at any point in the near future begin to undergo a rapid and broad change for the better, or for the worse, as our universe is a balance of both worlds, and society exists within it and is largely influenced by its control.

Thus to take action to ensure a better future for society is not necessary, nor is it possible, for an individual. And for a group it would most likely be part of the logical sequence of evolutionary events that are not necessary to encourage as they happen of their own accord. For those in affluent conditions there is little to worry about. For those who are not there is more to. But society as a whole will very unlikely undergo any rapid shift in operational policy in near future.