But the democratic age had finally, on Mars, emerged from the capitalist age. And this age too, following the logic of Charlotte’s paradigm, was necessarily a clash of residual and emergent— between the contentious, competitive residuals of the capitalist system, and some emergent aspects of an order beyond democracy— one that could not be fully characterized yet, as it had never existed, but which Charlotte ventured to call Harmony, or General Goodwill. This speculative leap she made partly by studying closely how different cooperative economics was from capitalism, and partly by taking an even larger metahistorical perspective, and identifying a broad general movement in history which commentators called her Big Seesaw, a movement from the deep residuals of the dominance hierarchies of our primate ancestors on the savanna, toward the very slow, uncertain, difficult, unpredetermined, free emergence of a pure harmony and equality which would then characterize the very truest democracy. Both of these long-term clashing elements had always existed, Charlotte maintained, creating the big seesaw, with the balance between them slowly and irregularly shifting, over all human history: dominance hierarchies had underlain every system ever realized so far, but at the same time democratic values had been always a hope and a goal, expressed in every primate’s sense of self, and resentment of hierarchies that after all had to be imposed, by force. And so as the seesaw of this meta-metahistory had shifted balance over the centuries, the noticeably imperfect attempts to institute democracy had slowly gained power. Thus a very small percentage of humans had counted as true equals in slave-holding societies like ancient Greece or revolutionary America, and the circle of true equals had only enlarged a bit more in the later “capitalist democracies.” But as each system passed on to the next, the circle of equal citizens had bloomed wider, by a slight or great margin, until now not only were all humans (in theory, anyway) equal, but consideration was being given to other animals, and even to plants, ecosystems, and the elements themselves. These last extensions of “citizenship” Charlotte considered to be among the foreshadowings of the emergent system that might come after democracy per se, Charlotte’s postulated period of utopian “harmony.” These glimmerings were faint, and Charlotte’s distant hoped-for system a vague hypothesis; when Sax Russell read the later volumes of her work, poring avidly over the endless examples and arguments (for this account is a severe abridgment of her work, a mere abstract only), reading in an excited state at finding a general paradigm that might clarify history for him at last, he wondered if this putative age of universal harmony and goodwill would ever actually come about; it seemed to him possible or even likely that there was some sort of asymptotic curve in the human story— the ballast of the body, perhaps— which would keep civilization struggling there in the age of democracy, struggling always upward, also away from relapse, and never getting much further along; but it also seemed to him that this state itself would be good enough to call a successful civilization. Enough was as good as a feast, after all.