Imagine a pie chart with four sectors which depicts how people of a nation allocate their collective time. The "Life Support Sector" shows the fraction of human effort needed to provide food, housing, clothing, health care, transportation, etc. The  "R&R Sector" shows time allocated to rest and recreation. The "progress sector" shows the fraction allocated to advance the arts, science, technology (as supported by infrastructure and education.) And the "Black Sector" shows allocations for creation of, or defense against, the dark side.

Social vectors are flows of human effort from one sector to another. A "good social vector" appears when fewer people are needed to provide food for the group and effort is released to other sectors.

A "bad social vector" appears when more human effort is needed to create or prevent dark side events. That is effort flows from the other three sectors into the Black sector.

Easier access to energy supplies and improvements in technology can cause a good social vector. Leaders of groups or institutions, who initiate aggression, cause effort to flow to the "Black" Sector. Other leaders who respond to these attacks or threats increase these flows. However, we make a terrible error when we assign the existence of these bad social vectors exclusively to these leadership behaviors.

Any two entities sharing a limited resource can create bad vectors. Consider what happens when market activities beggars one entity. That entity, in regaining its losses, beggars a third entity. Eventually, when market activities don't facilitate reclamation of lost well being, grassroots violence initiates a leaderless bad social vector. If this is true, 1) the leadership contribution to the social vector is a response to the initial social vector created elsewhere. 2) changing the heads of state or killing terrorist leadership will not stop these flows nor prevent new ones from starting, 3) markets have always had control over social vectors, and 4) six billion sets of personal behaviors, (specifically those creating and supporting a family) are the largest determinant of the globe's bad social vectors.

What if these personal behaviors result not from genetic predisposition but from culture's lack of development of six billion individual minds? What if each present mind does not realize that its behavior contributes to (collectively determines) the primary bad social vector? What does it mean if social destruction does not motivate a change in these personal behaviors.

I raise these questions to show how lame societies' are in shaping their future. How completely distracted they are by their daily problems and conflicts. And how current efforts to improve conditions fail to change the personal behaviors which initiate the social vectors that determine the future no one wants.