Absent notions of individual rights and basic fair play, the formal appearance of things simply reconstitutes itself in each generation, using some fraction of the population. It then becomes the meaning and justification of the shared life.
Given notions of individual rights and fair play, the appearance of things is falsified, but in a good way, by the material nature of the shared life; the nature of the shared life, shared by all, becomes the meaning and justification of the shared life.
An authentic society reveals the forms of things to be secondary; if the forms of society ever become the essence of society, it is virtually certain that a fraction of the population has simply been discarded.
Perhaps.