Rights & Freedoms
The social contract calls for the individual to give up some freedoms in exchange for participation in society. In other words, individuals have certain duties and responsibilities to society such as paying taxes. Rights are what society owes you in return such as a free education. Freedoms are limits to society's power over the individual such as freedom of speech.
Equality
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.Society can provide political equality whereby each person has equal political rights in a democracy. This includes the right to vote and run for office. Political rights also include freedoms, particularly freedom of speech and freedom of association. Without a society you'd pretty much have a survival of the fittest situation.
~ The Declaration of Independence, In Congress, July 4, 1776
Social Support
Society ties you in to a large social group that can offer support such as government services. Social support also includes things like culture, community and institutions that are features of a society. For example, neighbors who help each other in a community.
Education
Society will often provide a free education up to some level. Even where there is a cost for higher level education, this may be heavily subsidized in many nations. Education is a benefit for you as an individual or family. It could also be argued that it is a benefit for you that everyone around you is being educated as this can make society more wealthy, peaceful and productive.
Healthcare
Some societies provide an array of healthcare services for no cost or low cost. Even where healthcare is privatized, society provides the necessary stability for complex intuitions such as hospitals to thrive.
Cooperation & Collaboration
Society allows for cooperation and collaboration across large groups. This creates the conditions where complex companies, institutions and cultures can exist. For example, a thriving art scene in a cosmopolitan city where elements of the art world such as artists, museums and gallery owners can cooperate due to the peaceful and stable conditions provided by society.
Markets
Capitalist societies provide regulated competitive markets. This competition drives improvement whereby firms that best meet customer needs are more likely to survive into the future. These markets are the best known way to generate massive amounts of wealth that generally translate into a higher quality of life.
Technological Advancement
Markets and the high levels of cooperation are possible in a society lead to high rates of technological advancement. As an individual, you could labor for a million years and never produce something as advanced as a modern smart phone. Within a society, you can trade your labor to access technological advancements that you would never be able to achieve on your own.
Shared Infrastructure
Society allows for the sharing of large scale infrastructure. For example, if you drive from New York to California you are using billions of dollars worth of roads, bridges and overpasses for relatively little expense.
Law & Order
As part of the social contract, people within a society agree to give up some freedom to follow laws, rules and regulations. In exchange for this you hopefully get to live in a relatively stable, efficient, safe and secure place.
Justice
The goals of laws and regulations are supposed to be to make a society not just orderly but also fair. Likewise, political rights exist so that if you don't feel that things are fair you have a say in trying to change them.
Conflict Resolution
The pressures of life and of the human condition often drive people into interpersonal conflict. In a state of anarchy, there would be no rules or systems to help people resolve these situations. Within a society, there is much support for conflict resolution such as laws, courts and norms.
Peace & Civility
Perhaps more important than resolving conflicts when they occur is providing the structures to prevent conflict to sustain peace and civility. For example, a nation that uses diplomacy to sustain peace with neighbors and norms of politeness within a culture to sustain civility with others.
Collective Problem-Solving
Society can share resources and cooperate to solve large scale problems. For example, a nation that is prone to earthquakes that can use things like building codes, infrastructure and emergency shelters to mitigate earthquake related risks.
Mutual Defense
If you didn't have a powerful society in a place it would be likely that some other more powerful society would come in and try to take over. At least, this is the history of the world. In this context, one of the benefits of society is mutual defense whereby the people in a place create institutions that can prevent invasion.
Information Sharing
One of the benefits of a society is that people within a society share information. You could share information without a society but a society provides high levels of cooperation, stability and institutional support for information sharing. For example, a public university that publishes research that transforms the knowledge surrounding a topic.
Sense of Identity
For better or worse, humans tend to strongly identify with groups and tend to shape their sense of self around group identity. Societies provide identity such as a nationality that allow individuals to identify with very large diverse groups based on common symbols, stories, values, principles, shared experiences, languages and meaning.
Sense of Purpose
The duties and responsibilities that come with society are often portrayed as a disadvantage of society because these limit freedom. Certainly some duties such as taxes aren't particularly fun. However, there is some argument to be made that people thrive in responsibility as much as with freedom whereby contributing to society builds a sense of fulfillment, impact and connectedness.
Social Stability
Societies greatly stabilize life with their laws, rules, institutions, conventions, norms, infrastructure and mechanisms for peace and civility. Ironically, stability tends to encourage risk taking whereby when you have a stable life you can take risks, be creative and pursue dreams. This fuels economic expansion and rich cultural expressions that would be impossible in an unstable environment.
Wealth Creation
Social stability, education, shared infrastructure and markets allow for wealth creation at great scale. The creative risk taking associated with highly stable societies leads to innovation and constant improvement. The intensive competition of markets ensures that these improvements are aligned to needs.
Wealth Redistribution
Modern advanced societies all provide limited wealth redistribution to one degree or another. This occurs when taxation funds public services and social security. Wealth in a capitalist system tends to become incredibly concentrated whereby a few dominant firms may control large scale industries. Societies aren't particularly good at taxing the rich who may used sophisticated methods to avoid taxation. However, very limited wealth redistribution does occur and can help to address social problems such as poverty.
Culture
Culture are the meaningful and deeply human elements of life that are shared by groups. Thriving societies also tend to have thriving cultures whereby people have time and resources to invest in things like tradition, celebration, cuisine and arts.
Global Connectedness
Modern societies aren't isolated things and commonly cooperate at scale with other societies. Societies participate in things like global transportation and communication systems that allow you to connect with other societies on a global basis.
Disadvantages of Society
The disadvantages of society are mostly related to the realities of actual societies as they exist in the real world. In theory, a society can create justice. In practice, it may create more oppression than justice. Societies are quite powerful such that if they have flaws this can have a large scale negative impact. The following are possible disadvantages of a society.Despite the connectedness of a society people may still end up socially isolated. | Divisive politics and political polarization. |
Excesses of capitalism and consumerism. | Injustices such as discrimination. |
Invasive laws that limited freedom. | Lack of political equality. |
Lack of rights and freedoms. | Loss of individuality. |
Majority rule that oppresses a minority. | Oppressive laws or regulations. |
Poor quality of services such as education. | Social pressures on individuals to conform. |
Social stratification and class discrimination | Societies that are corrupt and influenced by power structures such as corporations. |
Societies that destroy the environment. | Societies that suffer from a social issues such as poverty. |
Surveillance and a lack of privacy. | Tax burden and inefficient spending by governments. |
