Is it possible at all that we moved from apples to oranges, or is it important to you to feel like its "better"? Because, I get it, something like optimism is important, but that means you end up being forced to argue this way, which leaves you in possibly a worse kind of fatalism than the one you are pushing against: that economic and societal oppression is baked into the fabric of humanity, that we can only look at degrees of oppression, rather than the structures and first principles that sustain them, and say "yeah its good enough for me that I don't have it as bad as the last guy".