I am enjoying this dialogue. I would like to take up your last paragraph. But first I do have to go back to a couple of comments related to civilization.

I did not say the more powerful treat others as “nothing;” I said they treat them as nothing but means to their own ends. I do not say that all outcomes of civilization are bad, but most of the ‘positives’ (indoor plumbing, etc.) are things we would not miss if we had no knowledge of them in the first place. As for the rest of your comments regarding non-civilized society, there is at the least much room for debate. (Haley Kynefin has published a couple of excellent alternative pieces here on Medium.)

Violence can take many forms: slavery is violence of a kind being perpetuated every minute against every slave (and the same goes for prisons/prisoners — criminal and political). Non-civilized societies did sometimes have slaves (from outside the group), but it was not the basis of the economy, as it has been for the entire history of civilization (counting wage slavery, which replaced bondage slavery).

Though I do regard civilization as humanity’s ultimate wrong turn, I do accept the reality of it. It would be impossible to go back without stupendous suffering— though global warming will get us there before long, anyway.

Meanwhile, as I see it the only thing worth doing is to attempt to bring justice — real justice — to society. Most people do live most of the time according to the ethos of the culture within which they live. A new and better ethos would transform not just the functioning of society as a whole — its ‘basic social processes’, the political process and the economy — but also (over time) encourage people to act on the basis of the new ethos in the course of their daily lives. I’m not saying real justice would usher in Utopia, but we could do way, way better than civilization has ever done.

I have spent my adult life working on a new approach to justice — which I call ‘real justice’ [because its determiners and its referents are contained within material existence; there is no reference to anything outside material reality, e.g. any belief — religious (theological) or secular (ideological)]. I would like very much to discuss it with you, if you would be so inclined.