> Boundaries are imho critical to give structure to society.
Looking at history I would even say that boundaries, as in the "need" to give a superior moral position to a favored class, whether an economic class, intellectuals, a military class, or priesthood, was always where these boundaries were. The thing you can't see is that your/our "boundaries" are no different.
And every single time, those boundaries turned out to be, not "for trade" (e.g. the Roman Empire), "for the military" (e.g. the second Islamic dynasty), intellectuals (e.g. the French revolution - the first part, or Communism in Eastern Europe) or "for morality" (e.g. the West in the middle ages). I mean, I'm sure there was a period of, say, a decade, where they actually did what it said on the label. It never lasted.
Every single time, those "boundaries" served to guarantee the comfort of a favored class. Firstly, to safeguard their positions of power and comfort, their fortunes, but later even their ideas and egos.
The real boundary we are wanting to impose is that "we are right".
And it's real, real simple. There is a tiny little issue:
We
Are
Wrong
Boundaries do impose structure. The structure does not change, and the world does. That's fundamentally why the boundaries are wrong and the structure will not hold.
I do not know how or where exactly we are wrong, but we are wrong (although I have some ideas: any 5 year old, old enough to talk intelligently, but not old enough to be assimilated yet, will tell you when you walk with them through any city what we are terribly wrong about. There's plenty, I might add).
And that sucks. If it turns out that we are most catastrophically wrong about a moral issue, it will suck REAL bad. And that's happened before. Plenty of times.
It is funny how you see the bay area aging. When we started out, most were in our late teens, early twenties at best. And of course we all felt the same: society is VERY wrong. In all sorts of ways. For instance, women are not different, and certainly not inferior. We KNEW that 20 years ago. But now we're 40, and we feel that, dammit, we're right. And these kids, who seem to prefer economic gains over social issues. Lazy bastards !
And, like the rich 30 years ago, we've decided (whilst having pretty much every creature comfort we like) that moral issues (that just happen to keep our place in society safe and secure) are real important. And these upstart youngsters (who do not in fact enjoy many of our creature comforts), they're bad, mmmkay ! Dammit ! They MUST be stopped.
They will, of course, defeat us. Nothing can stop them.
And they will clobber more than some of our ideas.
And, they will abandon some of our morals.
The thing is, this is a good and healthy thing to happen.