Before 1870, there was no such thing as a child with attention difficulties. There were children who wouldn't sit still, children who couldn't follow instructions, children who drove adults to distraction. But there was no disorder, because there was no system for them to fail.
The Education Act of 1870 changed that. For the first time, attendance at school became compulsory in England. Children who had previously worked alongside adults — on farms, in workshops, running errands, learning by doing — were placed in rows and told to be still for six hours at a time. The system required compliance. Children who couldn't comply became a category.
We named the category after the symptom. Attention Deficit. The deficit is real enough — in the context of sitting in rows. Whether it is a deficit in any other context is a question the system is not designed to ask.
The hunter-gatherer hypothesis, proposed by Thom Hartmann in the 1990s, suggests that what we now call ADHD is not a malfunction but a mismatch. The traits that make a poor factory worker — impulsivity, restlessness, rapid attention-switching, high sensitivity to novelty — make an excellent hunter. You need to notice the movement at the edge of the forest. You need to act before thinking becomes deliberation becomes paralysis. You need to be bored by the familiar and alert to the unexpected. These are not deficits. They are specifications.
The agricultural revolution, and later the industrial revolution, selected against them. Not genetically — there wasn't time for that — but institutionally. First the field, then the factory, then the classroom: each demanded the same thing, which was that you do the same thing, repeatedly, without wandering off. The people who wandered off became problems.
This is not a comfortable thought, because it implies that the problem was the institution, and institutions don't like that implication. It is easier to diagnose the child.
There is something almost beautiful about the precision of the diagnosis. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Every word is doing work. Deficit — not different, not distributed differently, but lacking. Hyperactivity — too much of something, when the correct amount is whatever the classroom requires. Disorder — not a variation, not an adaptation, but a thing out of order. The name encodes the judgment. We dressed the condemnation up as medicine and prescribed it to seven-year-olds.
The medication works, after a fashion. Ritalin and its successors calm the restlessness, improve task completion, reduce the friction between the child and the institution. The child becomes easier to manage. Whether the child becomes more fully themselves is not measured, because it cannot be measured, because the metrics were all designed by the institution in the first place.
What we do not ask — what the system is constitutionally incapable of asking — is what we lose. Not abstractly. Specifically. Which connections went unmade because the child learned to suppress the associative leaps that the classroom called distraction? Which problems went unsolved because the adult had spent twenty years learning not to trust the part of their brain that sees sideways?
I know what I am talking about here. I was not diagnosed until my seventies. By then I had spent half a century apologising for the ways my brain doesn't work, without anyone — including me — noticing the ways it does. The apology was not demanded by life. It was demanded by school, and school's long shadow.
The straightjacket is not malicious. That's the important thing to say, and the uncomfortable thing to sit with. The teachers who insisted on stillness were not cruel — they were managing thirty children in a room with one adult and a curriculum designed by a committee. The system was not designed to harm. It was designed to scale. Harm was the by-product, and by-products don't appear in the accounts.
We are still, in 2026, measuring children against the requirements of the factory that closed before their parents were born. The school day, the school year, the rows of desks, the single correct answer at the bottom of the page: these are the fossil remains of an industrial settlement whose terms we never renegotiated.
Some children might be more productive if we stopped trying to put them into straightjackets. The question is whether productivity — their productivity, on their own terms — is what the system is actually for.
Colin Ward, the anarchist writer who spent a lifetime noticing what worked before institutions got hold of it, had little patience for the school as a sorting mechanism. His argument was simpler and more radical than most educational reformers could stomach: children learn by being present in the world, not by being removed from it.
The baker's son, working in the bakery, learns not just how to bake but how a business runs, how customers are handled, how flour is ordered, how early you have to get up. He learns that work is woven into life, not separated from it. What he does not learn is where the islands of the Indian Ocean are. Ward's implicit question was: which of those absences is actually a problem?
This is not nostalgia for child labour. It is a question about what school is actually for, and who it serves. The compulsory school day was not designed around the child's development. It was designed around the factory shift — so that parents could work and children could be supervised while being prepared for their own future shifts. The curriculum was the ideology made visible: here is what a useful person knows, and a useful person is one the economy can employ.
Ward understood that the school had evacuated children from the places where genuine learning happens, and replaced it with a simulation. The simulation required desks, bells, grades, and the fiction that knowing where things are on a map is an education rather than an audit of obedience.
I have retained, for sixty-odd years, the information that Taiwan was once called Formosa. I have never used it. I cannot imagine the circumstance in which I would. It sits in my head like a piece of furniture inherited from someone else's house — too solid to throw away, taking up space that might otherwise hold something I actually needed.
The assignment was to fill a page. The expected solution was to think of something worth saying and say it at normal size. The actual solution, widely understood among children, was to make your handwriting unnaturally wide — to spread the letters until the space was consumed. This met the specification precisely. It just didn't meet any purpose the specification was supposed to serve. We learned, young, that the metric and the goal were different things, and that the metric was what got marked. Nobody taught us this. We worked it out ourselves, which may be the most genuine piece of education the system accidentally provided.
I was thrilled to fill the page. That is the honest account. Not resistant, not subversive — thrilled. The task was meaningless and I got it done, and the getting-it-done was the point. This is what a life of ADHD actually looks like from the inside: not failure, but a persistent search for the hit that comes from closing the gap between problem and solution, regardless of whether the problem was worth solving.
I spent my working life doing the same thing at larger scale. I bought things nobody knew the value of. The value wasn't in the object — it was in the asking. What is this worth to you? The answer was always different from what the market said, because the market hadn't asked. The disorder that made me useless at sitting still made me very good at that. You need to be bored by the obvious price and interested in the hidden one. You need to move before the deliberate people have finished deliberating.
The school said I had a deficit. What I had was a different set of appetites. The deficit was real — in the context of filling pages with something worth reading. The appetite was real too — in the context of a world full of mispriced things and people who hadn't yet been asked the right question.
There were mornings when I leapt out of bed. This was not my natural relationship with mornings. But in the early days of email, when the machine that could receive a message from anywhere in the world was a large beige object sitting on a desk, and getting to it required actually going somewhere and sitting down and waiting while it connected — that was enough. The anticipation was the point. Someone, somewhere, might have written something. The world had shrunk overnight and I had a window into it, and the window was the size of a monitor and the speed of a dial tone, and I didn't care.
The same machines I leapt out of bed for ended up in the skip. Not because they stopped working. Because the upgrade cycle said they were old, and old meant worthless, and worthless meant disposal. The thrill had a half-life the accountants could measure. The use did not.
And then the world changed. The thrill that had sustained me became someone else's problem. Equipment that could have been repaired, reused, passed on, given a second life in a school or a small business or a developing country — was destroyed. Put in the ground. Fed into recycling processes that consumed more energy than they recovered. The market that had rewarded the asking of awkward questions about value decided it was cheaper not to ask. Write it off. Move on. The accountants had a word for it — depreciation — which made the waste sound like physics rather than choice.
What I had built a living from was the gap between what something was worth to its current owner and what it was worth to someone else. When that gap was closed not by trade but by the skip, something was lost that nobody put in the accounts. I didn't just lose a business. I watched a sensible way of doing things get replaced by a wasteful one, and discovered that the wasteful one was considered progress.
The system wanted order. One contractor. One contract. A process that could be applied uniformly across everything, audited, signed off, indemnified. The contractor knew how to fill out the forms. What the contractor did not know — what the contract did not require — was how to recover the value. How to find the person for whom the thing still had a use. That knowledge lived in the gap between the official price and the real one, and the system had no column for it. So the equipment went into the ground, and the contractor invoiced for the disposal, and the accounts balanced, and everyone agreed it had been handled correctly.
David Graeber called whole categories of employment bullshit jobs — roles whose own occupants secretly believe serve no useful purpose. The disposal contractor was not a bullshit job in that sense. The work was real. The problem was that the work was destruction, and the alternative — the awkward, relationship-dependent, question-asking work of finding where the value actually lived — had been defined out of the system because it couldn't be standardised.
You can't put that on a form. So it didn't happen.
What went first was the ecology of small contractors. The people who knew one particular range of equipment — who understood what it was worth, who needed it, how to move it on. They were replaced by large operators who could handle volume and fill out the compliance forms and carry the insurance. What the large operators could not handle was the question. The stream of material arriving at their doors was too broad, too various, too dependent on knowledge they didn't have and relationships they hadn't built. So they did the only thing the system had equipped them to do. They destroyed it.
This was not malice. It was the logic of scale applied to a problem that didn't scale. The small contractor's knowledge was local, personal, accumulated over years of asking awkward questions about value. It couldn't be written into a contract or transferred to a new employee or replicated across twelve regional depots. It was, in the language of the system, inefficient. What the language of the system could not say was that the inefficiency was also the point — that the friction, the relationship, the specific knowledge of what this particular thing was worth to that particular person, was exactly what made the difference between recovery and waste.
The big guys won because they could be managed. The things they couldn't do went unrecorded, because there was no column in the spreadsheet for value that had been left in the ground.
The small contractors had no delegate in Brussels. No one to sit in the consultation room and explain that the knowledge required to recover value from a pallet of mixed equipment was not a compliance risk but an asset — that the person who knew exactly which school in Dorset needed a particular model of projector was doing something the landfill could not undo.
The large operators did have delegates. And behind them, quieter and better dressed, were the manufacturers. Who had their own interest in the outcome, and whose interest was not conservation. New regulation requiring certified disposal, tracked destruction, audited end-of-life processing — this sounded like environmentalism. It was also, usefully, a barrier to the awkward small operator who kept finding second lives for things that were supposed to be replaced.
The mountain gets torn up. The new thing gets made. The old thing, which worked, goes into the ground. Everyone has complied with the regulation. The regulation was written by the people who needed the mountain torn up, in rooms the people who knew how to avoid it were never invited into.
This is not a conspiracy. It is just how rooms work when only some people are allowed in them.
There is a class of person — disproportionately represented in banking and in Silicon Valley — who has everything the system says should produce satisfaction, and finds that it doesn't. The money arrives. The company scales. The profile grows. And somewhere in the gap between what was promised and what is actually felt, someone passes them a capsule.
Ketamine. MDMA. Psilocybin. The pharmacology varies; the function is the same. The dopamine system has been driven so hard, for so long, by rewards that were always just out of reach, that it has stopped responding to ordinary stimuli. The hit that used to come from closing the deal no longer comes. So you augment.
I don't say this from a position of superiority. I say it from a position of comparative luck. Every sale, for me, was sufficient. The gap between what the seller thought the thing was worth and what the buyer would pay — finding that gap, closing it, watching value appear where no one had noticed it — that was enough. I didn't need to augment it. After I gave up smoking, I found I didn't need to augment anything. The work produced what the work produced, and that was the point of the work.
What the ketamine tells you, if you're prepared to listen to it, is that the system these people built — the one that was supposed to make them happy — doesn't work. The productivity cult, the disruption gospel, the relentless optimisation of everything: it turns out not to feed the thing it was supposed to feed. So they go looking for the feeling elsewhere, in a dissociative anaesthetic that costs more per gram than the equipment I used to sell for a living.
I don't think Elon Musk is a bad person because he takes ketamine. I think he takes ketamine because the life he built doesn't give him what he needs, and he is too committed to the architecture of that life to ask why.
Zhou Enlai, when asked what he thought about the French Revolution, reportedly said it was too early to tell. The remark is often cited as evidence of Chinese long-termism — the capacity to hold a question open across centuries rather than demanding an answer before the next news cycle. Whether or not Zhou meant the Revolution of 1789 or the Paris upheaval of 1968, the instinct it describes is real, and it is not Western.
The same civilisation that produced that patience also produced the most successful capitalist expansion in human history — from a nominally communist state, in the decades following Tiananmen Square. The contradiction bothers Westerners more than it bothers China. When the calculation was put baldly — that the suppression of dissent, the sacrifice of some, was the price of raising the life chances of the remaining 1.38 billion — the answer was not agonised over publicly. The arithmetic was done. The page was turned.
This is not admirable, exactly. But it is coherent in a way that Western liberal democracy, which cannot hold a thought across a single electoral cycle, is not. We find the long view monstrous when it is applied to people. We do not notice that we apply it constantly to things — to markets, to infrastructure, to debt — whenever the cost falls on someone we don't have to look at.
The Great Leap Forward killed between fifteen and fifty-five million people. The range itself is instructive — we cannot count the dead precisely enough to agree on the number, which tells you something about the scale. It was an experiment in forced industrialisation and agricultural collectivisation, conducted on a population that had no say in being the experimental subjects. It failed catastrophically. Mao knew it was failing and continued. This is not in dispute.
What is in dispute — what cannot be settled without deciding first what you think history is for — is whether the subsequent seventy years of Chinese development retrospectively changes the ledger. Eight hundred million people lifted out of poverty. The largest reduction in human misery in recorded history, achieved in a single lifetime. A country that in 1960 could not feed itself now manufacturing the infrastructure of the modern world.
The Russians tried the same experiment and it didn't take. The revolution consumed its architects, calcified into bureaucracy, and collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. The innovation failed, and the human cost was simply cost — nothing built on the other side of it to weigh against the bodies.
China is the awkward case because the experiment, after the catastrophic false start, eventually worked. Not the experiment Mao designed — that was a disaster — but the broader experiment of forcing a feudal agrarian society through industrialisation at a speed the market would never have chosen. The question that has no clean answer is whether the outcome could have been reached any other way, and whether, if it could not, we are permitted to say it was worth it.
We are not permitted to say it. The people who died did not consent to be the cost of someone else's future. This is the non-negotiable position, and it is correct.
It is also, historically, almost entirely theoretical. No large transformation has ever asked the people who paid for it whether they were willing. Not the enclosures. Not the slave trade. Not the industrial revolution that killed children in mines to produce the wealth that eventually produced the welfare state. The question is never asked. The cost is simply extracted. What varies is whether, generations later, there is anything on the other side of the ledger.
The Bengal Famine of 1943 killed between two and three million people. It was not a natural disaster. It was a policy. Grain was exported from India while Indians starved, partly to feed Allied troops, partly because Winston Churchill, when told of the famine, asked why Gandhi hadn't died yet. The experiment being run was empire — the extraction of value from subject populations to fund a war being fought, among other things, in the name of freedom. The subjects were not asked.
Nobody describes the Bengal Famine as an experiment that went wrong. It was not framed as an experiment at all. It was framed as a war measure, a logistical necessity, an unfortunate consequence of difficult circumstances. The distinction between this and Mao's framing of the Great Leap Forward is one of rhetoric, not arithmetic.
In Indonesia in 1965 and 1966, somewhere between five hundred thousand and one million people were killed in an anti-communist purge following the coup that brought Suharto to power. The CIA provided lists of names. The United States government knew what the lists were for. This is usually described as Cold War containment — the defence of the free world against communist expansion. That framing flatters the people who gave the orders. The truth is simpler and less dignified: capitalism was not confident it could win the argument. If the choice between systems were put fairly to people who were poor, hungry, and excluded from the wealth their labour produced, the wrong answer might come back. So the question was not put. The people who might have answered it were put on a list instead.
This is what the Indonesia killings actually were: not a defence of freedom, but an admission that freedom, on its own terms, might lose. You do not need to kill the competition if you believe your product is good enough. The bodies in Jakarta were capitalism's confession of doubt.
This is the column that never gets added up. The deaths that were necessary to preserve our system rather than to build someone else's. The famines that were policy rather than experiment. The massacres that were containment rather than revolution. We have a word for what China did in the Great Leap Forward. We do not have a word for what we did in Bengal and Jakarta, because we have not yet decided that it requires one.
The Chinese, with their long view, might say it is too early to tell.
It was Soviet entry into the Pacific war, not the atomic bombs, that broke Japanese resolve. The argument about what ended the war in the Pacific is not settled, but the role of Russia's declaration of war on Japan in August 1945 is consistently underweighted in the Western telling — because the Western telling requires the bomb to be the decisive act, and America to be the decisive actor. The alternative — that Japan surrendered because it was now facing enemies on every front with no possibility of negotiation — is less satisfying to the narrative of American omnipotence.
But the deeper irony came after. The victorious Americans, surveying a devastated Europe and a restless developing world, understood that communism was not merely a military threat but an economic argument. And the argument had force. To populations living in poverty, being told that the fruits of their labour were being extracted by owners and investors they had never met, Marx was not obviously wrong. Capitalism, left to its own devices, was not going to win that debate.
So the victors adopted the policies of the system they were fighting. The Marshall Plan. The GI Bill. Social security, public housing, free education, the welfare state. These were not the natural children of American capitalism — they were concessions extracted by the fear of what would happen if capitalism remained, in the eyes of the poor, not good enough. The NHS was built in the shadow of the Soviet Union as much as in the spirit of Clement Attlee.
The Indonesia killings and the Bengal Famine sit at one end of this calculation. The welfare state sits at the other. Both are the same admission: that without intervention, the system could not justify itself to the people at the bottom of it. The difference is in what kind of intervention was chosen, and who paid for it.
I should say where I am standing when I say all this.
My father was educated by the British Empire. Not metaphorically — literally. He was sent to a boarding school designed to produce the administrators and functionaries that empire required, and he did not see his parents for four years at a time. This was considered normal. This was considered good. The separation was the point: you could not produce a reliable servant of empire from a child who was still attached to the people who loved him. The school completed what the distance began.
The empire my father was trained to serve was not, in the Chinese territories at least, the product of invitation or consent. The treaty ports — Shanghai, Canton, Tianjin and the rest — were forced on China at gunpoint following the Opium Wars. Britain went to war to protect its right to sell opium to Chinese people against the wishes of the Chinese government. Having won, it extracted trading rights, territorial concessions, and legal privileges for its own citizens on Chinese soil. This was called opening China to civilisation. The civilisation in question had just fought a war for the right to drug people for profit.
My father absorbed this world and its assumptions. So, in ways I am still excavating, did I. The education system that separated him from his parents for four years at a stretch was a version of the same system that put me in rows and told me to sit still — both of them designed not for the child inside them but for the structure that needed the child to come out a certain shape.
The Johnny-come-latelies who arrived in China with their gunboats and their treaties and their schools built on stolen ground were the same people who later expressed horror at what Mao did. The long view, again. It depends entirely on where you start the clock.
I should be clear about what I am. I am a rich child. Not rich by the standards of the people who ran the empire, but rich by every other measure — rich enough that my accent opens doors, rich enough that I sound like I know what I am talking about, rich enough that when I break the rules the consequences are manageable. My education was not designed to liberate me. It was designed to produce a person who could go to university, enter a profession, run an insurance company, administer an estate, sit on a board. It was designed to produce someone who knew enough law to exploit people who didn't.
I jumped the rails. Not out of heroism — out of boredom, and ADHD, and a brain that couldn't sit still long enough to follow the track that had been laid for it. The same system that produced my father's four-year separation from his parents produced my education in Latin and the subjunctive and the implicit understanding that the world was divided into people who gave instructions and people who followed them, and that I was being prepared for the former.
I ended up selling second-hand computers in Dorset. This was not the plan.
But I sold them by asking questions the market hadn't asked, and I found value where the official price said there was none, and the brain that was supposed to be a deficit turned out to be the only useful thing the school accidentally left intact. The rails I jumped were built to carry me somewhere I didn't want to go. The disorder was the escape route.
What I did not do — what I am still not sure I have done — is fully reckon with the platform. The accent. The middle-class background that meant the jumping had a safety net. The education that taught me Latin I never used and confidence I use every day.
At twenty I had decided that working with disabled people — work I believed in, work that mattered — was never going to give me enough money to arrive at it refreshed. Perhaps I was wrong about that. But I made the calculation and left, and spent the next ten years being miserable. A square peg in a round hole, working for the man, doing what was expected, keeping one third.
Towards the end of that period I attended a half-day-and-evening management course for small cogs who wanted to become bigger cogs. The room was full of people who had come to be noticed — elbows out, credentials deployed, each one performing competence for the course director and for each other. This is what management courses are mostly for. Not learning, but the theatre of already knowing.
Bill Agnew was the course director. For reasons I still don't entirely understand, he saw something in me. I think it was this: I was the only person in the room who had come to learn something. Not to demonstrate what I already knew, not to get my elbows in front of anyone, but to admit, quietly, that I didn't have the answers and would like some. That admission of vulnerability — so ordinary, so obvious, so rare in a room full of people protecting their positions — was apparently visible from the front.
He asked me what I wanted. I said I wanted to be intelligent. Everyone else, I suspect, said money, or success, or to grow their business. I said I wanted to understand things — the French Revolution, the way the world fitted together, why some people ended up with everything and others with nothing. He pointed me toward a way of making a living that the same brain could manage — and for the first time in ten years, I stopped being miserable.
My wealth made experimentation possible. Not great wealth — but enough that failure was not fatal, enough that I could try a thing and survive being wrong about it. This is what capital actually is, beneath the economics: it is the permission to be wrong. The poor cannot afford to experiment. The rich can afford to fail repeatedly and call it a journey.
I tried and failed at what I thought I was doing, which was something sophisticated and intentional. What I was actually doing was simpler: I had the luck, the platform, the voice, and the accent that meant people took my calls. I could walk into institution A and be heard. I could walk into institution B and be trusted. The arbitrage was not just financial. It was social. I was trading on a confidence that the school had installed in me without my consent, in order to produce someone who would use it to run an insurance company or administer an estate.
I used it to sell second-hand computers instead. The confidence was the same. The destination was different. I am not sure I chose the destination so much as fell into it, which is perhaps the most honest thing I can say about how lives actually work.
The course included a section on study skills. This was where I encountered Tony Buzan and the mind map — the idea that thought does not move in straight lines, that a page need not be filled from top left to bottom right, that the brain makes connections radially rather than sequentially. I used mind maps for years. I have given them up lately. But I have not given up what they pointed at, which is the same thing the foam is made of: ideas that connect sideways, that cluster rather than queue, that resist the single correct answer at the bottom of the page.
The mind map was the first time anyone had suggested that the way my brain worked was a method rather than a malfunction.
I do most of my thinking in bed. I wake, play a hand of patience, listen to a little music, let the mind settle into something that is not quite sleep and not quite waking, and then the thoughts begin. I talk them into a machine. This is how the chapter you are reading was made.
Proust did the same, more or less. He wrote in bed, in a cork-lined room, in a coat. When the galleys came back from the printer he did not correct them so much as expand them — adding strips of paper to the margins, pasting them together, sending back to the printer something substantially longer than what had been sent to him. His maid held the scissors. The book grew in bed, in the dark, by accretion.
I am not Proust. But I recognise the method. The lying in bed thinking is not laziness. It is the work. The straightjacket insists that work happens at a desk, between certain hours, in a posture that signals effort. The straightjacket is wrong about this too.
The best advice I ever received, or perhaps the best advice I ever worked out for myself, was this: don't do anything you don't want to do until you find something you must do. Wait for the thing that makes your heart sing. Wait for the morning when you leap out of bed not because the alarm went off but because something is pulling you toward the day.
This is excellent advice. It is also, in its current form, advice for the rich.
To follow it, you need the time to wait. You need the safety net that makes the waiting survivable. You need enough of a platform — financial, social, educational — that the gap between where you are and where you need to be does not require you to fill it immediately with whatever work will pay the rent this Friday. The person who leaps out of bed to answer emails that might contain an opportunity is not the same person as the one who leaps out of bed because the alternative is eviction.
Equality is not, at its root, about equalising outcomes. It is about equalising the permission to experiment. It is about giving every child the platform I had — not the Latin, not the separation from parents, not the production line toward the insurance company — but the actual thing underneath all of that: the freedom to be wrong without it being fatal, the time to find the thing that makes your heart sing before the system extracts your labour for someone else's profit.
We do not have that. What we have instead is a story about meritocracy — the idea that the leaping out of bed is available to anyone with enough drive and talent. It is a story that works very well for people who already had the platform, and who can therefore attribute the outcome to the drive rather than the luck.
My mentor put it in numbers. As my own man — self-employed, working for myself — I could keep three thirds of what I produced. As an employee, I would keep one. The other two thirds went to the person who owned the structure I worked within: the building, the brand, the capital, the risk. This is not exploitation in the dramatic sense. It is simply how employment works. The employer captures the surplus. That is what employing someone is for.
The implication, which my mentor left me to work out for myself, is that the difference between poverty and sufficiency is often not talent or effort or drive. It is access to the structure. The person who cannot raise the capital, cannot get the loan, cannot project the confidence that makes investors take the call — that person works for someone else their whole life and keeps one third. The person who can do those things keeps three.
Equality, if we could achieve it, would not just be fair. It would be explosively productive. Every person currently working for one third who has the capacity to work for three. Every brain currently running someone else's system that could be running its own. Every morning that could be a leaping-out-of-bed morning that is instead an alarm-and-dread morning because the rent is due and the employer sets the terms.
We suppress an extraordinary amount of human potential in order to maintain the structure that allows some people to keep two thirds of what other people make. We call the people doing the suppressing the wealth creators. We call the people being suppressed the workforce. The language is doing a great deal of quiet work.
I wanted to be intelligent. I had the luxury of meaning it.
The thing that makes your heart sing is in there somewhere. For most people, the system gets to it first.
We are all water from different rivers. That is Yoko Ono's line, and it is better than anything I have managed here. It is easy to meet because we are all the same thing, briefly taking different shapes. The person who leaps out of bed for the email and the person in the cell and the person who put them there — all water. Different rivers. None of us chose the source.
The bayonet has a worker on each end. Both workers are water. The general who gave the order is water. The arms manufacturer is water. We are all in the vast, vast ocean together, bobbing on currents we did not design, in rivers we did not choose, mistaking the shape of the river for the nature of the water.
Someday we'll evaporate together.
Until then, we might try to notice that the person we are most certain is nothing like us is made of exactly the same thing we are. Different river. Same water. Same ocean, in the end.
We're all water from different rivers,
And that's why it's so easy to meet.
We're all water in this vast, vast ocean,
Someday we'll evaporate together.
— Yoko Ono