A thought experiment:
Imagine you could help create the society you would be born into, but with one condition: you couldn't choose your place in it.
You wouldn't know your skin color, the country you were born in, or the language someone would first whisper your name in. You would not know whether you would be a man or a woman, transgender or cisgender, queer or straight. You could not choose your abilities, your health, your religion, or the family whose arms would receive you. You might inherit a fortune. You might inherit a debt. You might arrive in a home where food was abundant, or in one where your parents quietly went hungry so that you could eat.
You could help write the rules, but only afterward would you discover whose life you would live beneath them. Before you know whether those rules would shelter you or expose you, whether they would put power in your hands or leave you pleading with someone who had it, what would you choose? Would you preserve the society we have?
Before you answer, I want you to travel with me—not as a spectator looking backward through the safety of history, but as someone who might have been born into it. Imagine entering the world through a different door, into a life as immediate and precious to you as your own.
You are a child born into slavery in the American South. Before you can speak, the law has declared that your body, based primarily on the color of your skin, belongs to someone else. Your mother can cradle you, sing you to sleep, and recognize your distinctive smile; however, she cannot guarantee you will be allowed to stay together. Another person has the legal authority to sell you at auction. You could be beaten or killed at any time. What your mother knows as her child, whom she loves deeply, the system recognizes only as property and an economic asset.
Or you are born among the commoners of eighteenth-century France, beneath a monarchy and a social order that formally distinguishes clergy, nobility, and everyone else. When representatives gather in 1789 to confront the kingdom’s crisis, the privileged orders seek voting rules that preserve their advantage and keep you in poverty. Imagine discovering that even the doorway to reform has been built to favor those already inside. That this feels like the nature of hierarchy and has always been the place of the poor, the peasants, the serfs, those deemed less than.
Perhaps you are a poor tenant farmer in Ireland in the 1840s. The potatoes your household depends on begin to rot. You dig into the earth and find the food you had counted on disappearing in your hands. The blight is a biological disaster, but the catastrophe unfolds within a system of unequal landownership, poverty, and British rule. Government failures deepen the suffering; food continues to leave Ireland while people starve, and tenants face eviction from the land. Imagine trying to understand how a country can produce food while your child grows weaker beside you and you have no voice to share your outrage, unless you want to be jailed or eliminated. What does property protection mean when it fails to protect the people living on it?
Perhaps you are a woman like Agnes Sampson in early modern Scotland, known in your community for caring for the sick. You have deep knowledge of the natural world around you, understanding its ecology long before the word existed. You know how to listen to plants and recognize how they can support people’s health. Agnes Sampson was such a healer before she was accused of witchcraft and executed in 1591. Her life reminds us that someone once welcomed for help could become someone a community was persuaded to fear. The wider witch persecutions arose from many unfounded beliefs, and women who practiced healing were among those caught up in them. Imagine your neighbors’ suspicions becoming testimony, and the authorities’ beliefs becoming a sentence you cannot escape.
Or imagine being born into an Indigenous community in California as the gold rush brings an influx of settlers and violence. Your people already have names for the places newcomers describe as discoveries. This is a place of relationships, obligations, memories, and ways of living that existed long before anyone arrived seeking wealth. Your nation is rich in community and connection—not only among its people, but also with the land. Now your family faces the genocidal violence that accompanies the seizure of your homeland, driven by a culture’s insatiable greed for gold. Imagine hearing that this destruction is part of another people’s progress. Who gets to call a place a frontier, and whose home disappears within that word?
Perhaps you were a Vietnamese child like Phan Thi Kim Phúc during the Vietnam War. You knew the path beside your home, the sound of your family’s voices, and the small pleasures that made your childhood yours. Then the napalm fell. In June 1972, nine-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc was severely burned in a South Vietnamese napalm attack by US soldiers near Trảng Bàng. Behind the photograph that introduced her to the world was a child who once had a life of her own and now struggled to live beyond that moment. Imagine being that child—seeing your family and village burn, feeling the trauma, pain, and horror, and not understanding why it was happening, or that the US was there, as France had been before, to keep colonial power in place.
Alternatively, imagine being in Nagasaki on the morning of August 9, 1945, with someone you love nearby. Ordinary tasks remain unfinished; people expect to speak later, and no one believes the future will end that morning. At 11:02 a.m., the atomic bomb dropped by the United States explodes over the city. Tens of thousands of lives are lost, while survivors endure injuries, bereavement, and the lasting effects of radiation. Consider what it would mean to be beneath that deadly light. Whatever baseless arguments governments advance to justify war, those who suffer its consequences remain human beings: someone’s child, someone’s parent, and someone who hoped for another day.
Perhaps you were born Black in colonial apartheid-era South Africa, where the state assigned you a racial category and made it the basis of your rights and restrictions. Before anyone asked what you loved, what you understood, or what you might contribute, the government had imposed a racist classification that constrained the possibilities of your life. If you spoke out against this system, you could be beaten or killed. Imagine growing up in a country whose laws insisted that your right to belong must be more limited than someone else’s.
Or imagine being a Palestinian child born in Gaza during the war that began in 2023. Your family’s days are shaped by the search for water, food, and a safe place to shelter. Trauma and violence surround you, and you have already witnessed immense loss because of the violence of Israel. You experience displacement before you can even understand the word. Schools and homes are damaged or destroyed, while the adults who want to protect you search for safety in circumstances beyond their control. And yet, your life is more than what is being done to you. You have people you love, things that make you laugh, and a curiosity that deserves space to grow. Imagine the world discussing your future while you wait for the everyday conditions that would let you build one.
These histories are distinct, real, and ongoing. Their causes, responsibilities, and consequences deserve thoughtful consideration, not just a passing comparison. I bring them together here to explore a question each one makes impossible for me to set aside: what happens when some people gain the authority to decide how much another person’s life is worth? And what happens when a category becomes more visible and important than the human being behind it?
Across these different worlds, people have too often been reduced to labels and stories powerful enough to dictate what could be done to them: Property. Commoner. Witch. Inferior race. Obstacle to settlement. Enemy. When a story like this takes hold, it can become harder to see the person behind it. Their suffering may be explained away, their resistance mistaken for proof that they’re dangerous, and their deaths folded into accounts of necessity or progress.
And we’re born into these stories long before we’re old enough to question them. We learn whom to admire, whom to fear, whose authority to trust, and whose pain may feel far away. We also inherit explanations for why some people have more than they could ever use, while others struggle to get what they need to live. As these explanations are repeated in classrooms, institutions, conversations, and even silences, they can start to feel like reality itself.
No infant has earned a throne, and no infant deserves to go hungry. No newborn chooses the borders that shape their life, the fortune their family is born into, or the prejudices they’ll face. You and I could have been born somewhere else, Noah.
The tenderness I felt as I held you—the wonder of discovering you were here, breathing and looking back at me—isn’t reserved only for fathers whose children are safe. Somewhere, a parent has held a child beneath a sky crossed by b 52 bombers. Somewhere, a mother has loved a child whom the law permitted another person to take. Somewhere, a family has watched the food run out while those with the power to help debated what help should cost. Their love was every bit as real as ours.
I’d like us to sit with that recognition a little longer, so it can help reshape the questions we ask. If we didn’t know whether we’d own the land or need someone’s permission to stay on it, how might we care for it together? If we could be the person fleeing a war, what would we hope a border would mean? And if we didn’t know whether our differences would be welcomed or punished, what protections would we want to weave into a community's everyday life?
Would we want access to food, shelter, medical care, education, and a sense of belonging to depend so heavily on circumstances we never chose? Would we feel comfortable with unchecked power, knowing we might one day live under it? And would we still defend the arrangements we do now if we couldn’t assume they would work in our favor?
An egalitarian society—small enough for people to discuss issues through dialogue and closely connected to the natural world—would still include differences, disagreements, and difficult decisions. People would bring different gifts, needs, and perspectives. Some would have expertise others didn’t, while others might need more care at certain points in their lives. We would still need to learn how to listen, share responsibility, and respond when someone caused harm. But we could start with the understanding that differences don’t create a hierarchy of human worth, and that anyone entrusted with power remains accountable to those it affects.
Beneath the ranks we have constructed, our lives have always been shaped by the relationships around us. Someone cared for us before we could care for ourselves, and someone shared words with us that we didn’t invent. Our bodies rely on water, soil, sunlight, and the work of people we may never meet. Even the most powerful among us takes each breath from a world none of us could create or own.
I picture the roots of a great tree stretching beneath a wall. Above ground, the wall may seem to separate one place from another. But below, life continues to flow: water moves, and roots branch out, meeting the living soil. The boundary has real consequences, yet it has never divided the earth into two separate worlds. Perhaps something similar is true of us. We have created divisions with terrible consequences, but we still depend on one another. The Wholeness we have forgotten still sustains us, even as we build our lives around stories that make it harder to see.
I write this knowing that I, too, have inherited those stories. I’ve accepted things I should have questioned and benefited from circumstances I didn’t earn. It has taken me time to understand some forms of suffering, because I haven’t had to live through them myself. In part, this book begins with my desire to look more honestly—and to invite you to join me. So, Noah, imagine once more that you could help create a society without knowing who you would be within it. Imagine making its rules while your own place remained hidden, while every life was still one you might enter. What would you preserve? What would you change? What would you refuse to ask another person to endure?
Let us begin there, with the world we would be willing to enter through any door, and with the possibility that every child who arrives already belongs.