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The negotiated social hierarchy is never perfect because of those changes and internal corruption: willful blindness, manipulation, the exercise of arbitrary power, parasitism, selfishness, and general criminality. Thus, the ideal person not only has to be properly socialized but has to serve as someone willing to attend to, resist and repair the always-outdated and somewhat corrupt social structure.
That ideal person is represented in the stories we tell one another about the heroic individuals who serve as our role models. However, there is a danger attendant in the fact that the social order is insufficient: that fact opens the door to careless, self-interested and irresponsible social rebellion, as an imitation of genuine creativity. On the creative side, this is equivalent to the misuse of power, manipulation, and voluntary blindness that corrupts social institutions.
The ideal person (or the ideal balance of persons) is, therefore, someone who is properly socialized, appropriately grateful for and appreciative of the wisdom of the past, but still capable of creative and reparative action—and willing to accept the responsibility for that action—when the social situation has become too rigid.
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