20.4. Cutting Ourselves Off from Change

There's a powerful urge, within both academia and corporate offices, to believe that "in the long run" everything socially unhealthy will disappear (at least as far as is practically possible) through some sort of inherent, numerical logic of the marketplace. Of course, as Keynes once remarked, in the long run we're all dead.

But in the shorter run the decisive fact is not that we've arrived at some optimized equilibrium, but that, as growing human beings, we are on a path. And along that path our task is not the maximization of some pre-established, purely numerical "value," but rather the discovery of our values, the struggle to become worthy of them, and the exercise of creative imagination and disciplined work in socially incarnating them.