ABSTRACT
Society seemed to be coming apart in simple ways, too – in how people refused to look one another in the face, in the coldness and brutality with which they spoke. The troubled young man by the name of Kong carried his frustrations into the civil service, where he had a middling career, and then into teaching, where he had perhaps the greatest career of anyone, ever. In early China, Puett explains, human beings were understood as a mass of contradictory elements – conflicting emotions, turbulent energies, chaotic spirits – all of which they worked to refine during their lives. The field of social innovation covers a vast range of challenges, from education and health to violence and discrimination to fighting pollution and climate change. The power dynamics at play may present a hierarchy – from the generational hierarchies of the Teme-Augama Anishnabai to the administrative hierarchies of the health systems in Sollefteå and Aarhus.
