[eevilspock]

> I do think it's harder to be intentional about our value systems when we pass everything off to the optimizing machinery of capitalism and the free market - in my mind, it's too easy for that machinery to optimize for pleasures that skirt our values.

Agreed, but I think that will fall out naturally from having a non-selfist value system, which would dispense with the current world's elevation of selfishness from vice to virtue. As long as we continue to worship at the alter of selfishness, no alternative to capitalism is going to do much better. To your point about some monolithic value system: we wouldn't want that. Just as for physical evolution diversity of the values "gene pool" is healthy. But the selfish gene (intentional play off Dawkins' idea) needs to become recessive at most. It's both fine and healthy if people disagree with how to create a better community and how to share the world empathetically and morally as long as we share the same intention: sharing the world empathetically and morally. Selfism by definition is immoral as morality by definition by my reckoning is all about choosing the common/greater good over one's personal gain. Moral conscience is that voice that tells you "Yeah, I know you want that so much, but you have to resist because it hurts other people."

I haven't read the The Dispossessed yet. I'll move it up my list. I was introduced to LeGuin in a class at Berkeley titled Women in Religion offered by the Berkeley School of Theology / Graduate Theological Union (separate from UC Berkeley but they have a collaborative relationship, and students of each can take classes in the other) and taught by a feminist theologian woman... I'm an atheist leaning agnostic and it was one of my favorite classes I ever took at Berkeley.

I never heard of Big Thief and will give their music a listen, definitely!

It might be years before my writing sees the light of day, but if you would be so kind, shoot me an email so we can keep in touch. I'll send you one as well, given all the spam filters that hinder such first time comms.

Thanks for writing!