Society

Sociologists bemoaned the death of the third place in American Life. Then companies shifted to remote work, and we got rid of second places. We just live in our first and only places now, in our sweat pants.

But we can build the kind of world where they don’t have to suffer because of the vagaries of fate, where we decide as a society that people shouldn’t be defined by those things that the individual can’t control, that their parents can’t control, that nobody can control.

The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that

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First, we climb the school ladder.

Then we climb the corporate ladder.

And then we climb the status ladder.

We go from cradle to cubicle to casket, forever competing in games we never cared for, nor designed for us to win.

The size of the effect is astounding. Cross-class friendships are a better predictor of upward mobility than school quality, job availability, community cohesion or family structure. If these results are true, then we have largely ignored a powerful way to help people realise the American dream.