Once upon a time there was a planet called earth. It was small but beautiful. Full of trees, air, rain, wind and climate which supported life. Thousands of years of humanity, patriarchy, civilization and science by 2025 we (thinkers) loved power more than anything else. We had destroyed our future not just by our habits but our religions like capitalism.
Humans had become so vain they focused on how they looked, what they owned and where they stood on their inherited pecking order. When I began working as a clerk typist, a friendly man wanted to help me. He said its all about the pecking order and where you sit on that. It was a large engineering company, most people were politely kind. This meant to me, we are civilized.
What I couldn't see was the effort it took to civilize our world. As years passed I learned the pecking order has no morals. Capitalism was organized by the principles of the economy. But I believed we were becoming civilized because we moved away from glorifying the wealthy and powerful and talked about serving the greater good.
I believed we knew too much to allow Hitler or Mussolini to bring back authoritarian rule. We were calmed by advertising and the use of the idea of "we". America was very powerful even more than Great Britain. The power was in the money though and I didn't see capitalism as having the will to control everything. I had swallowed the idea that democracy was here and safe. We had learned to get along as a member of the greater good.
I read some of Carl Jung, and other wise people whose ideas were stacked safely in the local library. I went to church and listened to a man preach on Genesis. I was pregnant with my first baby then. The man was a bishop and he quoted the story of eve and how women will always suffer in childbirth because Eve disobeyed the "Lord".
This was a new perspective for me. I thought mothers were revered because they incubated the embryo that would become civilization. I saw it as a sign of honour not punishment. So then I left the Anglican church which I had always thought as advanced in its theories.
Fifty years later, having joined the Unitarian fellowship I was aware that power was available to us all if we lived in peace and love. And I learned things I didn't want to learn.
Patriarchy is a constant influence.