Ideals "include the standards we maintain -- consciously or otherwise -- for how we ought to think about ordinary matters." Ideals emerge, or are required, in conflict resolution among agencies. "In childhood, our agencies acquire various types of goals. Then we grow in overlapping vwaves, in which our older agencies affect the making of the new. This way, the older agencies can influence how our later ones will behave." In this sense, then initial agencies are viewed as placing constraints on the form of agencies that will develop later.
"A working society must evolve mechanisms that stabilize ideals -- and many of the social principles that each of us regards as personal are really `long-term memories' in which our cultures store what they have learned across the centuries." In other words, ideals, as emerging properties of a stabilized society, can be viewed as a sort of long-term memory.
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