"it’s difficult to untrain our minds and our expectations, which have likewise been immersed in the corpus of stories that have come before, to create something that not only shows a blueprint for a better world (rather than reinforcing the status quo)"

You know which book just opened my mind widely in respect to how different things could be, and that how things are now is in fact not an unchangeable fact? I read "the dawn of everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

I had been asking myself for a while: what would an egalitarian society look like in practice, how would you keep people from being greedy and jealous and trick their neighbors. I was looking for a vision for the future besides "not capitalism". And there are so many different answers in this book.

I hope some authors read it and make some of the patterns in it into fiction, so they can inspire a bigger audience. I don't have that talent, sadly.

I found it absolutely fascinating how you get a glimpse into what modern archaeology and anthropology can read just from what would look like a heap of leftover stones to most of us.

And how difficult it is even for them not to let their own preconceptions dictate what they read in their findings!