Hey, sincerely: thank you for hearing what I had to say! I agree, you can only write from the perspective you have, and I love hearing that perspective.

"[T]he one that we've chosen to use moving forward in modern times is the one I am drawing from and one that has built itself on classes and hierarchy."

The problem is, I didn't choose it, and so it's not what I prefer to draw on. And it's more than "modern" to me, it's contemporary: I'm only the /second/ generation of my family raised inside the West: my mom was stolen by the U.S. government from her Native family and raised by Catholic folk. And there's all sorts of people who continue to not choose it, and haven't been forced into it. Sure, they're forced into working /with/ it, but like, inside their own villages and homes? Relationships are organized very very differently from how most Western folk view them.

I think it's worth recognizing - not just because like, they're human people worth our empathy, but because there's a /vast/ amount of knowledge that these communities hold. Folk like you and me, who are trying to find new ways to live, might be able to learn a lot from them - maybe we don't need "new" ways of life, but just "different" ways of life, and can get by pretty well by taking lessons from our ancestors and kin with more experience living with different social systems. Did that make sense?

Like you say: "we should all be able to choose which [cultures] we like best and congregate around that." I think there's a lot of diverse cultures out there right now, that would have a place in these conversations - but sometimes our habits as Westernized people keep them from having that place.

I enjoyed our little chat, enjoy the rest of your day!