all we really need to know we learned in kindergarten

The most essential issues seem to be straightforwardly dichotomous . . . either/or. One is:

Do you want to live in a class-divided society or a classless society?

Consider: You’re in kindergarten. 25 kids. They each have distinctive personalities, of course. You pretty much know them all. Now someone says: “When you grow up a few of you will be in the upper class and the rest of you will not.” You say: “WTF. Aren’t all kids created equal?”

And, of course, you’ve got a point. Class division of society is scandalous. If the issue is: Do you want to live in a class-divided society or a classless society? of course the answer is: classless.

The seemingly straightforward dichotomy can be thought of in another, related, way:

Should the productive assets of society be owned privately or socially?

Simple: It’s scandalous for an entity that’s as socially significant as, say, Ford Motor Company, to be owned by a person or a small team of people who can treat it as their private property. Henry Ford owned a house. It was his private property and he could paint it any color he wanted to. The Ford Motor Company has hundreds of thousands of employees, millions of customers, affects the fate of dozens of communities, etc. Everything about it is vastly social and should not be subject to or guided by the whims of a single individual or a small team of private-interest individuals. It’s a social entity.

Class divided or classless? Private ownership or public? Capitalism or socialism? Thinking about the essential issues seems to simplify the question of our allegiance. Which side we need to advocate for seems straightforward. Yet:

Our society is not just unjust. Our society is insane and the insanity is a consequence of other issues: Scale and disorientation.

Class division, wealth accumulation, empires (political and economic), war, conquest, wage labor, over-exploitation of people and the environment, urbanization, mass production and consumption … are insane phenomena. They are the result of being socially and ecologically ungrounded.

The kids in kindergarten would find it insane to hear that they will wind up being class-stratified in society. They can see that they’re all “just us” similar. What’s straightforward to them is that class division, empires, war, conquest, over-exploitation, urbanization, massification, etc. . . . are insane phenomena. Adults are crazy to countenance those things.

But the adults became disoriented when they lost their grounding in community and earth-based culture.

Until their traumatic transition into our cultural insanity the kids live more grounded. We need to hope that they will save us.