Civilizational option value reframes heterogeneity. Variation across people — different capacities, temperaments, ways of seeing — looks like inefficiency to any system optimizing for control or uniformity. Treated as option value, it is the opposite: insurance against an unknown future.
Why it holds
Future conditions are genuinely unknowable, and different capacities become critical under different shocks. The contrarian, the caretaker, the obsessive researcher, the stabilizer, the sideways thinker — you cannot tell in advance which one the next situation will require. Preserving the full range keeps those options available; simplifying the system away toward fewer roles and narratives (the authoritarian tendency) spends them for the sake of easier control, and lowers the whole system’s adaptive capacity.
This is why No Wasted Geometry is finally a theory of system resilience rather than a moral appeal: variation is not inefficiency. See Variation Is Option Value.