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The social view of humanity, namely that of social ecology, focuses primarily on the historic emergence of hierarchy and the need to eliminate hierarchical relationships. It emphasizes the just demands of the oppressed in a society that wantonly exploits human beings, and it calls for their freedom. It explores the possibility of a new technology and a new sensibility, including more organic forms of reason, that will harmonize our relationship with nature instead of opposing society to the natural world. It demands sweeping institutional changes that will abolish a competitive "grow-or-die" market society -- frankly, called capitalism, not such politically safe and socially neutral words like an "industrial," "technological," or "post-industrial" society -- and replace it with an ecologically oriented society based on free, confederated, humanly scaled communities in which people will have direct, face-to-face control over their personal and social lives.