To have some workable model for education, healthcare, size of government, regulations of markets, don’t we need to agree on what is “the right way to be” with our fellow humans?

But we clearly don’t agree.

For all our economic theory of people doing what’s in their best interests, what is it about certain people that leads them to be so rapacious, nothing is ever enough, and it doesn’t matter what happens to the others around them, as long as they are top of the hill? If you have everything to yourself, how can others afford to buy what you are selling?

Others seem to see the world quite differently. We might say naively. Can’t we all just get along? Be our brother’s keeper? Co-operate so that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed in life, or so that together we create the City on the Hill? Divide the pie according to an ideal of justice…although no one seems to quite be able to agree on what is just. In my family it was one person cuts, the other chooses. But that’s a bit awkward to do as a whole country sorting things out.

Is it dog eat dog, or turn the other cheek? Does either really make sense relative to our lives as we live them? And what about that sense that beyond our everyday perceptions, something is going on “with life” that we want to “honor” but can’t really grasp what the hell it is. Values seem implied by being human, but what exactly are the ones we should “believe in”?

Suppose some of these contradictions and conflicts are in our genetic background to a certain extent… the needs of survival, the realities of power… which is ever-present, and must be accommodated. Like energy in the universe, it can’t be changed in quantity, only in form. The fiercest struggles are often internecine.

And humans must collaborate to survive too. We must form associations, which have power hierarchies…whatever we might prefer… but working together we do accomplish more than each man as an island.

Or was Ayn Rand right that it’s the solo individual that creates everything? Perhaps sometimes, but not so much in the cloud Ayn…not at Wikipedia. Yet there’s something to that idea of the importance of the individual as opposed to “we are Borg”. Creativity by committee can get ugly fairly fast.

We also have a sense of progress, of purpose, of meaning, of solving problems, of climbing out of the primeval muck into higher levels of consciousness and civilization. We have faith hope and charity, at least some of the time, almost all of us, to some extent.

Freud had a fairly cynical take on this: Civilization and it’s Discontents, for example. How do we accommodate the human condition…his big question. Jung said well, why don’t we transcend it?

A tribal brain in a transcendent global consciousness world. Our inner lizard brain knows what it knows and wants what it wants. Our frontal lobe begs to disagree. It won’t work if we just eat up all the other kids at day care, but if we don’t eat we will die soon enough.

How ignorant we are about where we came from, who we are, and where we are going. So how do we begin to design what a “good education” should really be?