If you want the benefits of other people’s work in a society, then you have to contribute something back to that society that society values.

Although you have to contribute something that someone else will pay for such as not parenting. Our society disregards parenting even though it gains greatly from its benefit (or in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, suffers greatly when parenting is neglected) While we don’t literally toss our children out to the elements, the degree to which children are disregarded is conspicuous.

And for most of us, we are expected to contribute more than we receive, as demonstrated by the plutocrats who gain from and hoard those profits. For the rest of us, we get meager benefits from living as bonded servants in society, but we don’t get full benefits of mutuality. And for most of us, our benefits exclude healthcare, nutrition, etc. which should be communal. When we have the capacity to automate a particular duty, it is not the rest of us who gain from that benefit, but the elite who cease paying workers to do it.

We’ve yet to see a mutualistic community that assures its wealth and privileges are evenly distributed but we certainly see ones more mutualistic than the ones that have to rely on thought-terminating clichés like Living here is better than living in the wild (and yes, I suspect even all of Canada and Siberia is alloted and owned.) Living here might be better than in the wild, but it is still miserable for the most of us. It’s still feudalism and slavery only with extra obfuscating steps.

And now our civilization careens towards high existential risk, and we’re going to see if it really is easier to imagine the end of humanity or the end of capitalism.