Last updated 3/31/2026 // Image: a photo of suburbia, an icon of "The American Dream"
For most of human history — several thousand generations of it, what historians curiously label "pre-history" — human societies lived with a basic sense of cultural relativity. What worked for one people didn't have to work for another. There was no universal template.
Then, roughly 10,000 years ago, one culture in one part of the world decided that its way of life wasn't just right for them — it was the only right way for humans to live, and every other way was wrong.
After millennia of colonization and conquest, that idea now dominates virtually the entire planet. Our society is guided by an invisible moral compass that says there is one right way to live, and all other ways are wrong.
This is the most dangerous idea in our culture. And most of us have never thought to question it.
The Consequences
When we believe "we" are right and "they" are wrong: wars break out, slavery is born, inequality deepens, and bigotry becomes justified. It all stems from one toxic meme: that there is One Right Way to live and everyone on Earth should live the way we do.
This idea is forced on us from every direction: from the government, from religious institutions, from social pressures, from the ad industry, from our family and friends, from books and TV shows, and even from within our own minds, simply so that we may belong in a world that demands sameness rather than a world that celebrates diversity.
Such uniformity of thought is so ubiquitous it may even be hard to know what I'm talking about, so here are a few examples from where I live in the US:
One right economic system: capitalism.
One right sexual orientation: straight.
One right country: the country you were born in.
One right relationship model: monogamy.
One right religion: the religion your parents have.
One right education system: western mass compulsory schooling.
One right political ideology: whichever one you subscribe to.
One right sub-genre of anarchist philosophy — even our activist movements have internalized the ideology of the systems we wish to overthrow.
One right gender binary: masculine or feminine (trans, queer, and two-spirit people are aberrations).
One right way to live: Western civilization.
One right language: English.
One right set of manners and formal etiquette among polite society. There were books about this not too long ago!
One right role for women: in the kitchen and caretaker of the children.
One right role for men: the breadwinner, head of the household.
One right way to be an activist: militant or peace-loving (there are about a hundred factions on the left with their own opinions on this, and if you don't agree you may quickly find yourself "othered" by your local in-group).
One right way to change the world: I've got the solution! This is the only way we can change the world! My solution is best!
Along with right and wrong, our culture has a deep tendency to rank life into hierarchies of superior and inferior. Not everyone accepts these anymore — that's real progress — but they remain embedded in our institutions, our economics, and our unconscious assumptions:
On race, here in the USA: white is superior to Black, brown, and indigenous.
On sex: male is superior to female.
On species: humans are superior to all other life forms.
On wealth: the rich are superior to the poor.
On power: the powerful are superior to the powerless (might makes right).
On civilizations: Western civilization is superior to the 10,000 other ways of living which once existed on this planet before thousands of years of conquest and colonization wiped most of them out.
Stepping Outside the Fishbowl
It's not hard to understand how this evolved. Our schools, mass media, and every other institution in our society have all been shaped by people who were conditioned to believe the same. And so the people conditioned by these beliefs perpetuate systems which then condition the next generation of children born into the culture.
When I was 14, I read Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, and this entire mode of thought — the rankings, the hierarchies, the assumption that our way is the only way — suddenly looked insane to me. And yet it is the dominant mode of thought in our society, and everyone within our cultural bubble takes it for granted.
We, as the fish in water, must somehow step outside of the fishbowl. We need to stop seeing all this as self-evident to the nature of life and see instead how this very dangerous meme — that there is one right and superior way to live and be — has infiltrated all aspects of our lives.
As we go about our normal routines, start to notice the thousands of ways, big and small, that the cultural forces in our society are set up to reinforce a monoculture of ideas, lifestyles, and ways of existing that stifle the range of debate and possibility in our lives.
Now someone might say, "Hey, I can still think of lots of examples of diversity within this system. While we may face pressures to conform, we still have the freedom to choose how we want to live." Sure. And thankfully, despite centuries of violent colonization and the globalization of Western culture, there still remains a great deal of cultural diversity in the world. Thanks to the tireless human rights movements that have been fighting against this homogenization of being, we've seen real progress. Being straight, white, Christian, and American is no longer considered the only right way to be — at least for a growing number of people.
But the forces of homogenization are not going quietly into that good night. In the United States, the second Trump administration has made this unmistakable — a government openly hostile to diversity, to dissent, to the very idea that there might be more than one legitimate way to organize a society. The authoritarian impulse that drives this project is the "one right way" meme in its most concentrated political form. A resistance to this resurgence must continue with more vigor than ever.
And beyond the obvious conflict and violence spurred by this belief, there is a subtler concern about its effects on how we even think about solutions and alternative ways of being. Think about any issue which is important to our lives, and more often than not, the debate is framed between options A and B. On top of "A" usually being the only "right" choice, this constraint on the range of discourse erases from our imaginations the fact that there is a whole alphabet of possibility beyond this.
What I Want
In this world of increasing and oppressive sameness, I have learned to be resistant to one driving trend that dominates our lives — the belief in the "one right way." One culture, one belief system, one way of life to rule them all. This belief equals death — not just literally, as we have seen throughout history, but the death of our highest potentials and truest selves.
I want diversity.
I want to replace capitalism with participatory economics, workplace democracy, socialism, and the gift economy. I want to replace isolated, single-unit housing in the suburbs with sustainable eco-communities with shared resources, public spaces, and vegetable gardens. I want to replace the rigid gender binary with a spectrum of ways to be — where everyone can embrace whatever qualities feel true to them and no one feels boxed in. I want to replace American consumer values with permaculture values — reciprocity, interdependence, care for the land and each other. I want to replace homogenous mass-compulsory schooling with community learning centers, democracy schools, and learning villages fostering autonomous, creative, and diverse educations. I want to replace a corrupt government maintained by an apathetic consumer society with a people's government maintained by the direct participation of an informed and engaged citizenry. I want our consolidated, for-profit mass media owned mostly by a handful of corporations replaced by 100,000 independent media outlets.
And I want the toxic meme that says "there is only one right way to live and my way is it" to be replaced by a much more powerful, universal, life-sustaining meme: there is no one right way for people to live.
I want people to see that there are ways of life that work and ways that don't, but there is no one right way — and that a world with thousands of beautiful, peaceful ways of living is infinitely more amazing than a world where we all live the same.
The One Book on the Shelf
The template-stamped social-life pathway dominant in Western culture is not the only way there is to live. But right now there is only one book on the shelf — a one-size-fits-all life template culturally reinforced and maintained by our present worldview: birth, thirteen years of compulsory schooling, then college or skip directly to getting a job, making money, acquiring possessions, seeking social status, finding a monogamous life partner, getting married, buying a single-family house in the suburbs, having 2-3 children, and then working and seeking happiness through possessions for forty years until retirement or death.
One day I want to see a library shelf filled with books chronicling the radically different life pathways available to a young person — and guides on how to think in new ways to make their own.
There is no one right way to live. There never has been, and there never will be.
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