Tera and I talk a lot at night.
Sometimes about what happened that day. Sometimes about something we’ve read or watched. And sometimes we start with one small thought and follow it until we’ve traveled to the other end of the universe, looking back at ourselves from somewhere we never expected to end up.
The other night we ended up wondering what human civilization might look like if we had built it around different instincts..
I’ve been thinking about versions of this question for years. It has found its way into novels I’ve started and stories sitting unfinished in drafts. I’m fascinated by patterns, by cause and effect, by following an idea backward and asking what produced it.
The other night the question was this:
How much of the world we live in was actually inevitable?
Human beings compete. We seek status. We can be territorial and aggressive. We form hierarchies. Biology gave us all of those tendencies.
But biology gave us other things too.
We cooperate.
We teach one another. We care for children who remain helpless for an extraordinarily long time. We feed people who can’t feed themselves. We form friendships. We share knowledge. We create art. We grieve together. We build communities. Sometimes we risk our own lives for people we’ve never met.
Human civilization could not exist without those instincts either.
So why have we spent so much of our history treating dominance as though it were the most authentic expression of human nature?
That was where Tera and I kept going.
What if thousands of years ago we had begun rewarding different parts of ourselves?
Imagine a ruler whose greatest ambition wasn’t to keep people obedient, but to make every person in the society as educated as possible. Not education reserved for priests, aristocrats, men, landowners or people wealthy enough to afford it.
Everyone.
Imagine power measured by how little ignorance remained. How healthy people were. How freely knowledge moved. How many people had the opportunity to discover what they were capable of doing.
What would leadership have become if the most successful leader was the one who made people least dependent upon the leader?
That idea fascinates me.
Because rulers have understood the relationship between knowledge and power for a very long time. Restrict information and you restrict people’s ability to challenge the world you’ve created for them.
There was an almost accidentally revealing moment during the 2016 presidential campaign when Donald Trump celebrated his support among different groups of voters and declared:
“I love the poorly educated.”
I’ve never forgotten it.
But this isn’t really about Trump. He didn’t invent the relationship between ignorance and power. That’s ancient.
What interests me more is imagining its opposite.
What if a civilization considered an uninformed population evidence of failed leadership? What if the person in charge wanted every citizen capable of questioning them? What if knowledge wasn’t something power distributed, but something society considered a common inheritance?
And then we started talking about The Orville.
We’ve been watching it together for possibly the eighth or ninth time—don’t judge me, just please let’s get a season four in motion already. In one episode, Commander Kelly Grayson is explaining life in the Planetary Union to someone from a world still organized around money, exchange and a deeply unhealthy system of social judgment. She explains that money no longer organizes human society the way it once did. People aren’t accumulating wealth so they can acquire more things than everyone around them. Status comes much more from reputation and contribution.
It wasn’t the first time Tera and I had imagined something like that. Science fiction has been asking versions of this question for generations. Star Trek imagined a post-scarcity future where humanity had moved beyond money and many of the divisions that define our lives now. Other writers and thinkers have imagined their own versions of what might happen if technology freed human beings from the constant pursuit of survival and accumulation.
And Tera and I have talked about versions of it for years.
But something about the way Kelly explained it crystallized the question for me. She wasn’t describing a humanity without ambition. People still wanted to accomplish things. They still cared about being respected. They still wanted their lives to matter. What had changed was what the culture rewarded.
Imagine that shift.
Not the elimination of ambition, but its redirection.
What if the person everyone admired wasn’t the person who accumulated the most wealth, but the person who discovered something extraordinary? Or taught generations of children? Cured a disease? Restored an ecosystem? Created something beautiful? Solved a problem that made life better for everyone else?
The human desire for recognition wouldn’t necessarily disappear.
We would have changed what earned it.
