We Live in a Society

Five words.

That is all it takes. Five words, held as a live operating premise rather than a passing acknowledgment, and the entire texture of how a person moves through the world changes. Decisions that previously resolved instantly — what to say, how to act, what to demand, what to claim — now pass through a different filter. One that asks not just what do I want but what does this produce in the system I am embedded in.

We live in a society.

Most people would agree with this sentence if asked. Almost nobody runs it as active software. And the gap between those two groups accounts for an enormous amount of what separates individuals who navigate the world well from those who perpetually wonder why the world does not cooperate with them.

This is not about intelligence in the conventional sense. It is about a specific kind of examined awareness — the ability to hold your own desires and impulses at arm's length long enough to ask what they look like from the outside, what they cost others, and what they return to the system that makes your own life possible.

Education tends to cultivate this capacity, though it does not guarantee it. What it does, when it works, is introduce enough friction between impulse and action that the question gets asked at all.

The people who navigate this best are, on balance, the more educated ones. Not because education confers virtue but because it tends to expand the frame — to make visible the connections between individual behaviour and collective outcome that are invisible to people whose frame is narrow.

There is an uncomfortable universal truth underneath all of this, and it is worth stating plainly rather than dancing around it.

Value determines reception.

Not skin colour. Not tribe. Not the intensity of your conviction that you deserve better. The extent to which a person, a community, or a society is accepted, supported, and respected by others is determined, in the long run, by what they demonstrably bring to the people around them.

Negative value: extraction, disruption, imposition — produces hostility, exploitation, and exclusion.

Positive value: contribution, reliability, creativity, care — produces acceptance, collaboration, and respect.

This is how social systems function across cultures and across centuries. The societies that have achieved the most durable forms of internal cohesion are the ones that found ways to make individual contribution legible and valuable — and to extend the definition of who counts as someone worth contributing to.

The extension of moral consideration to animals, to strangers, to future generations are signs of material security. A society that is not fighting over basic resources can afford to care about things beyond the immediate in-group. That expansion of care is what development actually looks like from the inside.

Not only is it pointless to demand respect without first creating value, it is a sign that the person making the demand has not yet internalised the five words. They are still operating as if the social world owes them a response disconnected from what they have put into it.

Apply this to the Nigerian condition and something sharp comes into focus.

Ethnic loyalty and tribalism as political strategy is perhaps the most widespread example in Nigerian public life of people failing to run those five words as active software.

The logic of ethnic mobilisation feels coherent from the inside: your community is a unit, the centre holds resources, capturing the centre benefits your unit, loyalty to the project is rational. This logic has driven Nigerian politics for decades. It has also, slowly and then all at once, stopped working.

Because we live in a society. And the society the tribalist is operating in is not the one the strategy assumes.

The strategy assumes the spoils are real and distributable. They are increasingly not. The centre has been so thoroughly hollowed out by the capture itself that there is progressively less left to distribute to anyone.

The tribalist is fighting for a larger share of something that is actively shrinking, partly because of the fighting. The logic is self-defeating not in theory but in observable, measurable practice.

But the political failure is almost beside the point now.

The deeper failure is cultural.

When a river is diverted, the damage does not announce itself immediately.

The water still flows somewhere, redirected, serving whatever purpose the diversion was built for. But downstream, the change arrives quietly. The pools begin to shrink. The vegetation at the banks thins, then retreats.

Species that depended on the seasonal flooding find the flood no longer comes. The soil, deprived of the silt the river used to carry, stops replenishing itself. What was a living system begins to simplify — fewer species, fewer interactions, fewer of the redundancies that made the whole thing resilient.

Ecologists call this a trophic cascade. When you remove or redirect a keystone element, the consequences do not stay local. They propagate through every connected layer of the system, producing changes that look unrelated to the original intervention until you trace the water back to where the diversion happened.

A society is an ecosystem. The middle class is not its most numerous element or its most visible one.

But it is the keystone — the carrier of culture, the patron of art, the host of ceremony, the teacher of the next generation, the customer that makes the market function. When it is removed, the cascade begins.

Culture does not survive on sentiment alone. It survives on the middle class — the people with enough material stability to practise it, transmit it, fund the institutions that carry it, and maintain the social density that gives it meaning.

Shared language in its living form, ceremony, cuisine, music, the accumulated texture of a way of life — these require a network of people with enough margin to participate. Not luxury, margin. The difference between a family that attends a naming ceremony and one that cannot afford the transport to get there.

The Nigerian middle class is collapsing with the kind of acceleration that makes the direction unmistakable. The combination of currency devaluation, infrastructure failure, the withdrawal of subsidies without the construction of alternatives, and the systematic extraction of public resources by the people entrusted to manage them has compressed the middle into something unrecognisable in the space of a generation.

People who were middle class a decade ago are making decisions now that their parents would have associated with poverty. And the people entering the workforce today are doing so into an economy that has no structural use for most of what they were trained to offer.

This is the thing the tribalists are not seeing — or cannot afford to see, because seeing it would require asking uncomfortable questions about who built this condition and whether the political projects they have supported had anything to do with it.

The culture they invoke, wave, and weaponise as justification for their political loyalties is being quietly destroyed by those same loyalties.

The people placed in institutions because of ethnic proximity rather than competence are the people making the decisions that hollow out the middle class. The resources captured in the name of the community are the resources that never reached the schools, the healthcare systems, the infrastructure that would have allowed the community to actually thrive.

The pride is just as real as the destruction it leaves in its wake.

In a few decades, the ethnic sentiment will still exist because sentiment is durable — it costs nothing to maintain. But the living community that gives culture its substance will be unrecognisable.

The ceremonies will not be empty. If anything, they will be fuller — because for people whose daily life has been compressed into survival, a naming ceremony or a festival is one of the few remaining breaks from the grind, and people will come. But who comes will have changed.

The middle class that once set the standard — that demanded proper venues, that arrived in their own cars, that could afford to leave the country for a wedding and return for a burial, that brought resources and expectations and the quiet authority of people who have options — will be largely gone.

What remains is the ceremony populated by people who are themselves victims of the same hollowing, who cannot demand better, who do not know what better looked like, who have never seen the thing at its height.

And a few patrons. People who remember, or who were told, what it was supposed to be. Who keep showing up, keep contributing, keep trying to hold the standard more or less alone. Who feel the weight get heavier with each passing year and cannot fully articulate why, because the thing they are mourning is still technically happening around them.

That is not culture surviving. That is culture performing its own funeral while insisting it is a celebration.

But below them, the relationship to the culture changes in a way that is easy to miss because it still looks like participation. The poor attend. They are in the room. They dance, they eat, they are present for the ceremony.

What they cannot do is replicate it. They cannot host at that scale, cannot afford the venues, cannot give their children the version they are watching.

They experience the culture as spectacle — celebrating by proxy, at someone else's table, on someone else's terms.

This is the dishonesty at the heart of what gets called cultural survival. The form is present for everyone. But only some people are living it. The rest are audience to a life they are nominally part of but structurally excluded from inhabiting themselves. And over time, as the middle class thins further, the distance between the people who can host and the people who can only attend grows until the shared culture is no longer really shared — it is performed by some and consumed by others.

Underneath that, the production layer dries up. The artists, the craftspeople, the practitioners of traditional forms who would have carried the culture forward — not just repeated it but grown it — make the same calculation everyone else makes. The work cannot sustain a life. The audience that could pay for it is shrinking. The patronage that sustained it is concentrating in fewer hands, which means only the art that reaches the right networks survives. Everything at the base of the pipeline, where new voices and new forms would have emerged, goes quiet.

Until the traditional form becomes a niche maintained by the affluent for the affluent, occasionally displayed for outsiders as evidence that something is still alive. The form preserved. The function gone. And the people who were supposed to be living it watching from the edges of someone else's celebration, mistaking proximity for belonging.

You cannot consume the material conditions of a culture while claiming to protect it. You cannot support systems that destroy the middle class and then mourn the culture the middle class was carrying. You cannot demand that others respect what you are actively dismantling.

Naming the problem is not the same as solving it, but it is the prerequisite.

The assumption that underlies most failed attempts at social change is that if enough people simply understood what was right, they would do it.

History has not been kind to this assumption. Entire populations do not spontaneously develop the right orientation. They never have, and never will.

Consider what it would actually cost to reach every Nigerian directly and orient them toward the kind of civic awareness this piece is asking for. Real engagement: door to door, household by household, the way the Jehovah's Witnesses do it — because that is the only model that actually changes individual behaviour at scale through direct contact.

Nigeria has approximately 238 million people — around 50 million households.

To reach each one meaningfully with the kind of repeated contact that actually shifts how people think and act, you need at minimum three visits per household. That is 150 million visits.

An urban campaigner in reasonable conditions can complete 15 household visits per day. A rural one, given Nigerian road conditions and distances, perhaps 8. Split the country roughly in half and you arrive at approximately 12 million person-days of work just for the first pass.

Deploy 100,000 dedicated campaigners — which itself is an enormous organisational achievement — and you are looking at 120 continuous days of operation before a single person has changed a single behaviour, before any follow-up, and before the next generation arrives and needs the same treatment.

Pay those 100,000 people ₦50,000 a month, which is below any reasonable standard of dignity but useful for conservative math. That is ₦5 billion a month in salaries. Add transport, materials, and logistics across a country with the infrastructure conditions we have described: call it ₦10 billion a month. Over a year: ₦120 billion. Roughly $75 million. Per cycle. Before maintenance. Before accounting for the 56 million Nigerian adults who are functionally illiterate and cannot read whatever you print. Before the 500-plus languages that turn a single national campaign into a translation project of staggering complexity. Before the security conditions in parts of the country that make door-to-door canvassing a physical risk.

And then the maintenance problem. Behaviour shaped by a campaign degrades without reinforcement.

The Jehovah's Witness model works partly because it never stops — weekly meetings, continuous community, ongoing contact across a lifetime. A one-time national orientation campaign would require permanent infrastructure to sustain its effects. You would be building a parallel civic institution with 238 million members, operating in perpetuity, funded by a government that currently cannot keep the lights on.

This is why the answer has never been campaigns. It is not that it is simply hard — campaigning is easy if you want to look busy without actually accomplishing anything at scale. At the level of real change, it is impossible. The answer has always been systems — the deliberate design of environments where the right behaviour is simply the easier one, and where ordinary self-interest, pointed in the right direction, does the work that no campaign ever could.

If moral instruction changed societies, no religious country would be third world.

What changes society is the deliberate construction of environments where the expected path and the correct path are the same path. Where doing the right thing is not an act of heroism but the obvious choice. Where the friction runs against extraction rather than against contribution.

This is what governance frameworks, accountability systems, and institutional design are actually for. Not to tell people what to value, but to make the incentives legible enough that ordinary self-interested behaviour produces good collective outcomes.

Over time, those outcomes become norms, and over time, the norms become invisible. People start to do the right thing not because they remember the incentive that was once attached to it, but because it is now simply what people do. That is how a society improves.

Not through a moment of collective enlightenment, but through decades of systems quietly doing their work until the behaviour they were designed to produce starts to feel like culture.

We live in a society.

Not a collection of tribes competing for a fixed resource, and not a zero-sum arrangement in which your community's gain requires another's loss.

A society whose capacity to produce value for anyone depends on its ability to produce conditions in which most people can participate, contribute, and build.

The people who understand this — who hold it as active software rather than Sunday morning agreement — tend to build things that last. The people who don't, who operate as if their actions exist in isolation from the system around them, as if extraction has no ceiling, as if the culture maintains itself regardless of what is done to the conditions it requires — tend to find, eventually, that the world they thought they were winning inside has quietly stopped existing.