It is all good. I'm looking forward to reading your essay although I'm only a little afraid of how I might come off.

I think there is something big that is off with civilization in general. I have three separate essays about this started that I am not satisfied with. The crux of it comes from my reading of Patrick Joyce's recent book Remembering Peasants. His thesis is that peasants around the world share ways of being in the world that constitute a separate and parallel civilization to the owning class civilizations. These peasant cultures were not literate, so the culture was contained in ritual, song, dance, textiles, and local magical beliefs. The peasant cultures were ones of reciprocity with each other and with the land. They were by definition sustainable, because the peasants had nowhere else to go.

Except over the last 400+ years the owning class civilizations have colonized and displaced almost every peasant culture. The owners privatized the commons and then brought an extraction model of agriculture. This model optimizes yields, while having all sorts of negative external effects that are pushed off onto others. This is only accelerated with capitalism and has led to the meta-crisis we find ourselves in.

So for 10000 plus years, almost all of us lived in communities of reciprocity. We had local gods and magic. We depended on each other and necessary relationships built into the agricultural year. We lived in a mostly gift economy of mutual indebtedness.

Then most of our ancestors become dispossessed and displaced. We become desperate enough to become exploited labor for the owning class. We were offered the potential rise into the ownership as a bargain for our participation.

But so much was lost. We are no longer necessary and needed parts of small communities. We are mostly isolated workers and consumers interacting with the edges of a huge owning class dominated civilization.

The balm we are offered is to try to dominate others in the ways that we are dominated. So men are offered "ownership" over women or at least we are offered porn. And adults are offered dominion over children. White folks are offered the illusion of racial superiority. USers are offered a wall.

But we need to rescue the interdependent communities where we are called to have relationships of mutual indebtedness. We need to somehow return to sustainability with each other and with the local ecosystems. This is tied to sex because we are (as a culture) full of people who are isolated and lonely and unable to fill the void with the false connection of porn.

Edit: Rereading this response it is easy to see why I haven't published those stories yet. To say that everything bad is related to the end of peasantry or the rise of capitalism or the invention of agriculture or human evolution in small bands of 150 people is too all-encompassing to adequately describe in a 6-minute essay, but it is also too all-encompassing to be a useful observation. It starts to look like an excuse to throw up may hands and say "Boys will be boys" and I'm not trying to do that.