Expectation and Reciprocation... in the Social Imagination!

People think that they can make everyone in society equal and make everything fair but who is the judge of that? Expectation and reciprocation are relative... we expect certain behavior from some people and not from others and the same for reciprocation. Whether we are talking about our friends, siblings, parents, spouses, neighbors, politicians or bankers, we expect things (abstract and real) and we expect things to be mutually reciprocated. We expect that and its not always the case to get back in the same way or amount that you think you gave.

Time is always a difficult subject or thing to expect from someone and to reciprocate. Money follows, and then love, friendship, duty, and death. Yes, we even include death; an eye for an eye... And, these days, people don't expect to die but they will and some will have to and some people are expected to die but they don't... not when they are expected to or even want to. Sound crazy? Its all in the social imagination which is good, bad and ugly.

I saw a 'post-apocalyptic'  television series; it very well written as it looked carefully at expectations and reciprocation. In the later part of the series as it appeared that maybe the situation was getting better since the military took over and a new government was forming, we realize that the only way to organize a society that is equal and fair for everyone is to codify all behavior, codify all goods and services, transactions involving ownership, marriage, births and deaths. If there wasn't a bar code for something, then a chain reaction was eminent and it had to be remedy quickly.

There was no need for self determination, self motivation, self sufficiency, or selfishness... because, it was all coded in to make it all fair. No one had to expect anything and no one had to reciprocate to anyone. Is that where we are headed? You can't make all things equal and fair without striping bare humanity with its good, bad and ugly social imagination. Its the giving and taking, the push and pull that keeps us human, that brings out the good, bad and ugly.

Expectation and reciprocation keeps us from the pit of entropy. And, yet its that pit of entropy as an expression of disorder, or the seeming randomness of a system, or of our lack of information about it that keeps us going somewhere... or at least reaching out in our social imagination to interact and expect results and for those results to be reciprocated back into something we can all make use of or sense of in our social imagination even in the smallest way.