[jessaustin]

It takes a village, yet the western world runs on a two parent system that inherently creates conflict...

This isn't the only drawback of capitalism as we practice it. While it might not have featured much modern comfort, the traditional village also wasn't relentlessly commercial, relentlessly measured. There was some space for humans to live as they would, without accounting for every square inch of real estate and minute of life. (i.e., a child who wanted to stay somewhere else in the village than her parent's hut for a few weeks simply would have done that) Over time, these slack areas have been eliminated. Everything must be legible to the bean counters. What isn't, is made a crime against shareholders or taxpayers or security or democracy or property values or whatever. Of course, slack areas are the only source of resilience humans have. We just don't allow ourselves to think of that. "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."

Some will dismiss this as theorizing about conspiracies. The whole "conspiracy theory" meme is a distraction. Quasi-rational actors don't require coordination to respond identically to identical incentives. In general, that's how society has functioned, for millennia. The capitalist "innovation" is to tie more and more individual incentives to the preferences of capital. Capital cannot tolerate a village.

[inglor_cz]

Please don't idealize the mythical village. Too many people do, because they are distant enough (in time and space) that they view premodern life as some sort of Golden Age paradise.

My grandmother (1926-2016) grew up in a remote eastern Slovak village well before it acquired electricity and other perks of modern life. You cannot get much more traditional than that.

Wealth and poverty still played a role, it does everywhere. The village wasn't "relentlessly measured", but it was relentlessly judgmental and hierarchical. You couldn't do shit if the most powerful people mistreated you. And you carried an unshakeable burden of your ancestry with you. If your mother was considered a "witch" (seriously) or a "slut", your place on the village pecking order was somewhere down below.

Plenty of people escaped traditional villages to get rid of this burden. Urban anonymity has some positives. Capitalism can be cruel, but at least it is not utterly rigid. Often, you can make money somehow - perhaps not millions, but enough not to be a pauper. But in a traditional, closed village, you could never shake off the stigma of a "slut's daughter" etc. If you didn't want be disdained forever, you had to move out, end of story.