Is There a Layer to This We Haven’t Even Considered?

I've been watching people argue about the same thing for as long as I can remember. As a boy, I'd listen to adults get heated over divisions I couldn't quite feel the weight of myself, and I'd wonder, quietly, why something that seemed to matter so much to everyone else didn't move me the same way. All these years later, listening to a recent, passionate conversation about equity and inclusion, I noticed I still don't feel it the way the room around me does. Not because the goals don't matter to me. Because something underneath the goals keeps catching my attention instead.

Movements like these exist to do something worth doing: make sure people have fair access to opportunity, and a real sense of belonging once they're in the room. I don't doubt the sincerity behind that, or the real harm it's responding to.

Here's what keeps catching my attention, though. These efforts operate almost entirely within one layer of reality, the civilizational one, roughly ten thousand years old, built by human decisions, for human purposes, serving human structures. Real decisions were made inside that layer, hiring patterns, pay gaps, access denied for generations, and those decisions left real residue. That residue doesn't dissolve on its own. It has to be addressed directly, in the layer where it was created, because that's the layer we're actually living in right now, whether we like its rules or not.

A Layer Underneath the One We're Standing In

But there's an older layer underneath that one, billions of years old, where connection was simply the rule, applying to every form of life without needing to be earned or defended. Civilization is young against that. Painfully young. And somewhere early in it, without any way of knowing what they were setting in motion, its architects made a choice, a shift in perception from connected to separate, that started a chain reaction, like dominoes, still falling today.

I don't think that was malice. I think it was a mistake made by people with no science, no written record, no way to look back at their own thinking and test it against consequence. We have all of that now. We can see, with real clarity, roughly when the first domino tipped, and we're living inside the acceleration of everything that's fallen since.

A hundred years is a long stretch for a single human life. Against two million years of the species we actually are, it's barely a breath. Which means the perceptual shift that started all of this is still, in the truest sense, recent, and still falling through generation after generation, showing up now as exactly the kind of division these movements are working so hard to repair.

Holding Both at Once

I'm not suggesting anyone stop that repair work. The debts built up inside civilization's layer are real, and they don't wait for anyone's perception to shift before they need addressing. What I keep wondering is whether these movements might accomplish more, and hold longer, if they included the deeper layer alongside the immediate one, not instead of the urgent work, but underneath it, patient enough to outlast any single campaign or policy. We were a connected species for two million years before any of this began. That memory hasn't vanished. It's just been quiet a long time.

What if the fastest, most lasting path to real equity was never choosing between healing the structure and healing the perception underneath it, but holding both, starting the slower one now, even knowing it might take generations to finish what it starts?

This idea runs alongside Chapter 17 of The Lens That Changes Everything, on what changes when connection becomes the starting point instead of one more problem to solve inside the old frame. If it's the kind of thing that stays with you, Being Jonas Wilder brings it into the room, live.