Understanding Yancey Strickler’s new vision for America means first accepting a notion that is somehow both obvious and unsettling: the superstructures guiding the actions of your day-to-day life are completely made up.

“What a piano looks like, why we drink orange juice for breakfast, the shape of the letters you read right now,” writes the co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter in the beginning of his book This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World. “We can’t imagine the world without these things. We think of them as ‘how it is.’ But those are all concepts that were totally made up by someone just like you or me.”

These “hidden defaults,” Strickler points out, are “the customs, traditions, and social codes that form our tribes and nations.The rituals around births, weddings, and death. Why we wear one color and not another. They’re the narratives that we live within. The currents that pull us through life that are easy to miss.”

Instead of questioning the myths we opt into, Strickler argues, we just go on believing that how it is, is how it ought to be. The problem? There’s one American current in particular that is especially pernicious: the idea of financial maximization, which dictates “that in any decision, the rational choice is the one that makes the most money… It’s a hammer that turns all of life into a nail. There’s just one goal: to make as much money as possible.”

But—maybe you’ve noticed—financial maximization ain’t exactly working. It has created extreme economic inequality, contributed to the degradation of our climate, and helped generate political instability and incivility. And yet “we struggle to see how any other way of operating is possible,” Stickler writes. “We watch this car crash thinking we’re outside it. Other People are the cause of it and Other People will fix it and Other People will suffer the consequences if they don’t. Every single one of us has it in our minds that we’re separate from it all.”

Strickler’s book, then, is a call to action, to work towards a paradigm shift that would upend society’s guiding principle—from the singular value (namely, money) back towards the plural values, those ideals that give us morality, meaning, and purpose. (Kickstarter, for its part, became a public benefit corporation in 2015, which means that it’s legally committed to balance its profit with “producing a positive benefit for society”—Patagonia is another notable PBC.)

His solution for getting ourselves back to more values-based living is rooted in a philosophy he calls “Bentoism.” It involves using a decision-making tool that is a box divided into four quadrants (like a Bento box). Each quarter represents a different perspective, and when you are faced with making a decision, you think through the options using each section of the Bento before acting: the “Now Me” quarter is concerned with what you, in this exact moment, most wants, it is myopic and self-interested; “Now Us” considers how your immediate behavior will affect the needs of the family, friends, and community around you; “Future Me” represents the “person you want to be,” making sure how you’re acting is in accordance with your principles and beliefs; and “Future Us” takes the view from “the world you want your children to have, how things ought to be.”

Strickler believes that operating with this tools allows us to deepen our self-awareness and to manifest a life that isn’t just self-interested (acting selfishly) but self-coherent (“living in integrity with yourself”). His ultimate belief—lofty as it may be—is that if people start practicing Bentoism (and they already have, in workshops Strickler leads) then one day so too may companies and corporations. He knows all of this might sound radical, but, he’d argue it’s no more radical than a kid from Virginia who liked indie rock growing up to launch Kickstarter. “Me, an ordinary person from a farm in rural Virginia, made a ripple in the world,” he writes. “It showed me that things were way more fragile than I was taught to believe.”