Why Respect for Time Is at the Core of Creating Just Societies and Civilizations (and What Happens to Rights)

By Timothy B. Higginson — August 3, 2026

This chapter explores how respect for time is the means to create just societies and civilizations. The exploration starts at the highest level and works through a sequence to a concluding section regarding whether “rights” are still needed in the context of societies and civilizations structured around respect for time.

I. Time = In Existence

As the Buddha is quoted as asking: “What is the biggest mistake we make in life?” The Buddha’s answer is: “The biggest mistake is that you think you have time.”

A different way of saying this is that nothing is more valuable than time. Without time, nothing else matters. (It is the place of separate discussion to discuss more fully, but, for purposes of this chapter/essay, Kant’s phrase “I think therefore I am” becomes “I have time, therefore I am” where “I” is anything in existence. Thinking is not the root of existence. Thinking becomes relevant in the context of the spectrum of sentience. A rock exists because it has time. People and whales are sentient, along a spectrum of sentience. AI may become sentient.)

II. Time in Relation to Human Society.

Family, health, food, education, the arts, power, money, fame, houses and properties, cars, toys, etc are all of secondary and fleeting value in comparison to time. Anything with existence (whether human or otherwise) with impaired time (except due to natural aging) has been harmed in some way. Anything with no (nil) time is not alive.

When society restricts someone’s ability to exercise their time, society is violating the very core of that person.^[1]

Societal restrictions include, by way of examples, sending someone to prison, impairing their health whether directly or indirectly (thereby shortening the time they have naturally), and restricting their ability to choose what they do with their time.

In other words, as complete as possible an ability to have and exercise time is the core measure of whether a human is vested with being fully alive.

An individual’s exercise of their time applies to all aspects of that individual, such as gender, race, ethnicity, ability/disability, socio-economic status, DNA, IQ, height, weight, etc.

(For non-homo sapiens animate and inanimate creatures, the protections for their time also apply. Everything else in existence owes them inalienable obligations. However, the “intentionality” metric may not apply in determining the scope of the obligations due them, meaning the scope of what it means for them to be fully vested in their existence in the framework of harmonious biodiversity. This chapter will focus on humans, without intending to diminish the importance of the inalienable obligations due anything and everything that has time, because that importance is inextricable to the entire inalienable rights framework.)

III. How to Balance Interests in Time?

However, a just society cannot be structured around individuals who choose to harm others any more than it can be structured around institutions and laws that harm people. Some types of restrictions may be justified, even required. The determination for humans of what is a restriction justified by harmonious biodiversity will likely include an analysis aligned with the framework of “intentionality.” (For a more complete discussion of what is specifically intened by the term “intentionality,” please see Chapter 6.)

For instance, restricting the right to drive a car to individuals over a certain age who meet certain safety qualifications would seem to be well within the scope of justifiable restrictions because someone below a certain age would not meet the standard of having fully developed intentionality. Imprisoning someone fairly convicted of murder or other crimes that carry prison terms would also seem to be within the scope of a justifiable restriction, provided certain criteria are met, such as a fair and unbiased process with sufficient evidentiary controls.

The scope of justifiable restrictions involves a complex set of questions and criteria. To manage that, robust and actionable guidance is necessary.

That is where the metric of “harmonious biodiversity” provides the lever, the means, to give fullest freedom of use of time across all individuals in society while balancing the fullest use of time of others in the society, whether individuals or groups. Harmonious biodiversity, as explained in other chapters, fundamentally is based on an analysis of what creates the healthiest environment for biodiversity to thrive based on the latest testable scientific knowledge of the eons of evolution during which life has evolved to thrive on earth.

This “harmonious biodiversity” test/analysis can be applied to societal restrictions on the exercise of time by individuals and groups. For instance, if an environmental regulation is being considered regarding the emissions of an industrial facility, the environmental rulemaking body’s analysis framework would involve weighing the impact on the time of the individuals and groups living in the geographic area impacted by the emissions, as well as the impact on the time of each and every part of the biosphere in that area, individually and as an entirety to determine whether or not harmonious biodiversity is harmed and at what a scale across the entire biosphere of the area in question.

Harmonious biodiversity is, among other dead-ends, neither a human-centric analysis nor an economic analsyis, for all the reasons explained in other chapters. Instead, it is rooted in the science of 3.7 billion years of life evolving and thriving on earth.

Another example would be rules, laws or codes impacting the time of transgender people. Again, harmonious biodiversity provides the analysis framework. Because these individuals and groups increase the biodiversity of the population, the default under the harmonious biodiversity framework is to protect their exercise of their time as they see fit to the fullest expression of their life.

A further example would be rules, laws or codes impacting a woman’s time in terms of their bodies and minds. Reproductive restrictions or restrictions on education or otherwise impacting this exercise of their time would be measured on the impact of those restrictions on harmonious biodiversity, and would be suspect at best given that evolution is based on the fullest exercise of each creature’s full natural capabilities by each creature. Again, the default under this analysis would be to protect the exercise of an individual’s time as they see fit to the fullest expression of their life.

IV. Expanding from Society to Civilization

On the basis that societies are subsets of civilizations, they share the same framework for a just organizational structure. As civilizations have grown (or are progressively growing) into a single, global integrated civilization, respect for time applies equally at the global level as to more local societies.

V. Expanding from Human-centric to Biosphere-centric

Harmonious biodiversity is, at its very core, holistic in terms of the thriving of the whole. The health of the whole and each part under the rubric of harmonious biodiversity is the key to all parts thriving, within the scientific community’s understanding of the mechanism of evolution. Evolution is frequently entirely misrepresented as “survival of the fittest” when evolution is much more accurately described as based on the interplay of harmony and biodiversity, as described in other chapters/essays. Western philosophy, such as Hobbes, is rooted in either entire fictions or, being kind, a total lack of accurate science and scientific knowledge by either or both the authors or the society of the time.

VI. How Harmonious Biodiversity Derives from Inalienable Obligations

As discussed above, everything in existence has time. Everything that has time has inalienable obligations to time itself. Flowing from that, everything has inalienable obligations to everything else. Inalienable obligations are those obligations that are inherent in everything that has time, whether animate or inanimate, and at whatever place on the spectrum of non-sentient to sentient.

The core reason for this inclusiveness is that this is required for life itself. Life, whether on earth or elsewhere, depends on the biodiversity of its entire environment, animate and inanimate. Life on earth would not exist without our magnetosphere, without oxygen, without sunlight, etc.

In other words, inalienable obligations are obligations due to time to act in accordance with harmonious biodiversity. Harmonious biodiversity is the actionable component of this larger framework of inalienable obligations.

Societies and civilizations are subject to these inalienable obligations on a number of grounds, including, in particular, that the societies and civilizations also only exist in time, and further only exist because of the people (who have time) in the absence of whom the societies and civilizations themselves would not exist, and all the dependencies the societies and civilizations have to everything that enables them to exist, animate and inanimate.

VII. Are Rights Still Needed for a Just Society/Civilization

In an ideal application of harmonious biodiversity, rights would not be necessary, as harmonious biodiversity, as described in this chapter creates just societies with no reliance on rights. Just as non-human animal societies do not rely on any concept of rights, neither should human societies, whether viewed as independent and isolated from all other parts of the earth’s biosphere (which, of course, is a fallacy of staggering proportions), or correctly understood scientifically as integrally a part of the earth’s biosphere.

However, rights and human systems based on rights predominate around the world, despite their terrible flaws. As described in Chapter 1 (and other chapters), the concept of “rights” is foundational to the thinking and the structure of almost all countries’ legal systems as a well as international and multinational institutions, and the thinking, analysis and legal and other structures underlying them.

For instance, Chapter 1 includes an in-depth discussion of the utter failure of rights-based polities to achieve their stated goals, whether the failure is analyzed in the framework of humans alone, or, even more concerning, analyzed in the framework of whether rights have or have not failed to create and protect a livable earth.

Therefore, because of and while systems and polities based on rights are in place around the world, despite their terrible flaws, and while rights do provide critical protections in some places and to some extent, rights cannot realistically be replaced wholesale with the harmonious biodiversity framework in an instant.

Any switch-over will happen on a scaled approach, removing and replacing rights from the ways societies are structured as and when harmonious biodiversity is implemented sufficiently to provide the protections that render the rights unnecessary. During any switch-over period, the current rights-based frameworks should not be used to restrict the adoption of inalienable obligations; instead, they should be used to accelerate the widest possible adoption, including with the goal of replacing rights-based regimes as quickly as possible in order to achieve both the broadest set of benefits from inalienable obligations, and to avoid the imminent collapse of human civilizations due to short-fuse ravages of human-created climate change.

[1] A metric for the scope of the ability to exercise their time by person (or any creature with at a certain level of sentience) could, subject to more analysis, fall under the rubric of “intentionality” as that word is defined and explained in the Intentionality section of www.churchoftimeunited.com, meaning, in short, free will plus the ability to take action based on that free will.