You have to be able to accept the natural reality of human cultural life

Empire builders never could.

That even includes social-engineering-type leftists with visions of
universal … socialism, justice, egalitarianism
universal … eradication of oppression, domination, hierarchy.

A post-socialist consciousness involves a degree of being chastened, realistic, tolerant.

It evens involves a degree of sense of humor about human affairs. Because our heads are all over the place and we plenty suck.

So forget about making things perfect, don’t expect too much, and … have compassion.

https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/mother-of-all-an-introduction-to-bioregionalism/

I feel I must add here a note that may be painful for those whose allegiance to the precepts of fragmentation and diversification tends to crumble halfway through. Bioregional diversity means exactly that. It does not mean that every region of the Northeast or of North America or of the globe will build upon the values of democracy, equality, liberty, freedom, justice, and other suchlike desiderata. It means rather that truly autonomous bioregions will likely go their own separate ways and end up with quite disparate political systems — some democracies, no doubt, some direct, some representative, some federative, but undoubtedly all kinds of aristocracies, oligarchies, theocracies, principalities, duchies, and palatinates as well. And some with values, beliefs, standards, and customs quite antithetical to those that the people on the left, for example, hold dearest.

We need systems that accommodate people who are not good. There’s no point, it seems to me, in dreaming that people will be good, because there’s every reason to suppose that it is simply not likely to take place on this planet in this galaxy. We must dream of systems, rather, which allow people to be people in all their variety, to be wrong upon occasion and errant and bad and even evil, to commit the crimes that as near as we know have always been committed, and yet systems in which all social and civil structures will work to minimize such errancies and, what is even more important, hold them within strict bounds should they occur.