I feel like I’m writing for future archeologists. Remember, you who read stones, if you have peace and prosperity and contentment, you will lose it if people think they have something to gain by it.

I’ve known since people elected Reagan, the guy who made selfishness respectable, that we were headed for a time of trouble.

(Yes, now that we’re walking into the future some of us have chosen, it’s obvious I need help with my marketingspeak. “Trouble?” Just “trouble?” I know, I know. But any other word will also be too weak.)

I didn’t know it would happen so fast. I didn’t know it would take only a few years for people to actually, willingly, in reality, elect a demented criminal carnie barker because they hoped he’d give them, and only them, the shards of the world he was selling for parts.

Remember in future, if the parts have healed and grown back and you’re able to try to read stones again, if you let some people take what they want you will lose it all.

Societies live by rules. Whether it’s might makes right, or the divine right of kings, or that money confers power, or whatever they are, the rules are taken for granted as true and justified and the way things are.

A few hundred years ago, people started the greatest experiment so far: they tried rules based on justice instead of justifying whatever they had. They thought long about what justice entailed and they came up with rules based on the ideas that truth exists, that it can be discovered, and that it can be applied.

The truths they held to be self-evident were that we’re all equal in law, that we all have the same rights, and rights are those rules that let us find our own path without interfering with others.

It’s led to bloody revolutions. But it’s also led to the greatest growth of ideas and inventions and prosperity and peace that the human species has ever seen.

So, naturally, we do everything we can to make sure we can use those rules, right?

No. Apparently, no.

It’s more important to make mountains of money (because we really do believe that money confers power). It’s more important to keep any scrap of status you manage to feel (because we’re social animals and status is life itself to (most of?) us). Sadly, the rules forgot to make sure that equality in law reflected equity in fact so they forbade rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, and here we are.

The rules of equality and rights for all never filtered down to everyone. Recently they stopped filtering at all and we’ve been going backward. Which infuriates people. All the money stuck at the top is a bone-deep corrosive, but taking power away from billionaires is not something we know how to do. Our credo is that it belongs to them, so there’s no effective way to solve the problem.

Misogyny provides the small continuous hits of status to compensate. (Racism works too, but not as well from the standpoint of the perps. Racism, for most racists, provides only occasional or theoretical help because there’s not enough interracial contact. Besides, out-and-proud racism generally leads to ostracism.) Putting women down so you can stand on them and feel a bit taller, that’s available all the time.

Misogyny has been used to the max to keep people voting for the billionaires and against themselves. Because, after all, a system that says you’re winning couldn’t possibly be making you lose. Could it?

Millions of people, mostly men but plenty of women too, inhale the misogyny and vote for the end of any solutions.

Remember that, you who survived. Misogyny is a hell of a drug. Stay away from it unless you want to end like us.