Anti-social and social courage

Where does courage come from since it seems to come from many different sources, protectiveness, revenge, creativity, rebellion, conservatism. Perhaps courage is amoral, and needs to be applied in a social and moral way rather than an anti-social or immoral way by any given society.

The strict communists might define free-enterprise as anti-social or criminal and the libertarians might define communism as criminal, so how one defines social and anti-social needs to be answered before one can understand courage within these systems.

In any case courage seems to relate to doing something irrespective of the obstacles in ones way, physically or mentally, which suggests a sacrifice of self, even if their may be a reward much later.

The fundamental question seems to be, does the courageous action enhance or weaken ones group or ones society, which is not always easy to detect in a plural society of several distinct groups. Why does it come down to the group?

Human nature, as seen since ancient hunter-gather times to the present, is defined both by tradition and by the empirical science of sociobiology as pair-bonding, group-selecting and group-centered, territorial, xenophobic, family-oriented, hierarchical...in a word, conservative or traditional.

Creations, inventions, new art and technology can this way be distinguished as social or antisocial by whether or not they enhance or weaken the group and its traditions. Culture can drift away from human nature, as it has in the West at the present time, but culture will eventually come back, or snap back, to what humans actually are.

Courage seems to exist or operate within these human traits and within the various cultural creations of human nature. For example, Orwell said that in a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act. But again, courage needs to be applied in a social not anti-social way related to enhancing or weakening the given group or society one is living in.

When our future human evolution enters the culture then long-term and short-term values will necessarily complicate the worldview and the courage that comes with affirming our evolution.  In this case Ordered Evolution seems to affirm the best of the past and the future.