It feels a bit risky to just riff here. I’ve been mulling over these strong feelings that something is missing in many of the discussions I am in. There are big-hearted people I care deeply for who, like me, want to contribute to addressing the complexity our society faces. We are building things, sharing things, creating courses, speaking, writing and sometimes listening. It is this last point that hits me hardest. Listening to one person is hard enough, but listening to a community, understanding its deepest needs and finding wisdom there - that is something else. Perhaps that is why among the huge volume of solutions, so few start with communal listening.

Consultants, celebrity authors, and visionaries often arrive with solutions. Many of the solutions offered seem tenable and well-founded. Yes, there are so many of these. For many years, I’ve been following the work of two voices who stand out for me as offering some valuable breakthroughs. Otto Scharmer and Dave Snowden are both figures whose work is extraordinary, even as they may sometimes clash. There is, however, a ground they are highlighting. That is a ground of collaborative wisdom that actually emerges through collective processes. These processes are concrete and powerful - even if they sometimes feel “inefficient” from a prevailing cultural view. Or worse, they might yield insights and requirements that challenge our most precious assumptions and reveal to us our own agendas. Such new and innovative approaches to the complexity of our world can obliterate our plans and take us in new directions.

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What I like about the methods these two wise men offer is that they argue for a different kind of engagement with communities even though they each have their own approach. And I don’t want to go into their methods because what is important to me right now is how they advocate for something that is fragile. My view is that we desperately need new ways to align with what we are discovering together even when that may be difficult to hear, sense and harder still to understand. Dave Snowden’s concept and use of “micro-narratives” are highly useful here as it takes us into direct connection with the communities we wish to serve.

Snowden has also been referencing St. Augustine who believed that “original sin” means people need to be governed and saved. The criticism is that too much of the work of consultants and visionaries uses this same “top-down” approach where the experts claim they have the solutions that we need. By contrast, Pelagius had an unpopular and highly criticized view that we each have the freedom to choose and that we enjoy an innate capacity to choose good. He disagreed with original sin. This is my view: that the inspiration of the Platonic Good, True and Beautiful is here with us and that our task is to create containers where this wisdom and love can be discovered and expressed rather than imposed through solutions that misguidedly imagine we can force anyone into transformation.

It can be difficult to imagine processes and places where the inherent wisdom and care in each of us finds its way into connection with the same in others. It is the emotional and psychological health and depth of our relationships that helps weave the fabric of healthy society. That is the source of our greatest power. However, this is power with, not power over others. In healthy relationships, we listen to discover rather than listen to fix. Other than with a few intimate others, many of us have little experience with social processes rooted in such vulnerability, shared wisdom, love and care. So, it is not surprising that we favor the short-term efficiency of top-down solutions over the long-term power, resilience and paradoxical “inefficiency” of relational work.

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It seems to me that we have delegated so much to the market-state (the dominant wealth and efficiency-obsessed structures of our society) that we are blind to the Platonic intimate bonds we enjoy and the obligations of kinship we share. It is fair to wonder if this view of our nature and our needs is true: then why don’t we see more of this Good? It is simple, we don’t design for it. We don’t normally build processes and places where it can emerge. Instead, we chose the known efficiency of the current paradigm even as we claim to be inventing new paradigms. There is understandable resistance to being more open and curious about these social innovations because doing so makes it difficult to predict outcomes, produce excessive wealth or protect vested interests. Such deliberately relational and caring practices are mostly unwelcome in the halls of power.

Friends and colleagues often quote Elinor Ostrom and thereby point to “the commons” as such a shared space for us to build together now. There is no doubt that Ostrom engaged with real communities and showed the way forward to a whole new political economy for the commons. And yet, there is something missing here too. Communities are more than politics and economics because they are woven through trusted human relationships. There is a substrate of intersubjectivity that needs admission to the commons we want to build in the future. While I have not read this work, I understand there are also feminist socio-political arguments like those made by Silvia Federici, who approaches the commons from another angle that calls out the brutality of the market-state as it seeks to privatize the commons. Again, I find myself wanting to hear more about the resilient fabric of caring relationships that are always creating society even when society fails to see and honor this - or worse, attacks it.

The work of five authors including bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Carol Gilligan, Joan Tronto, and Jessica Benjamin are also vital voices for us to learn from. Not surprisingly, all of these authors are women, as are Ostrom and Federici. This reminds me that so much of our thinking is dominated by a one-eyed rationality and often it is relationally-oriented women who shine their rich warm light and show us a new paradigm of the heart. These five authors came up when I asked Google Search (now powered by Gemini AI) to find thinkers who refuse to separate love from social and cultural analysis. Gemini tells me that “The thinkers who explicitly anchor the relational fabric of community in deep psychological intimacy, love, and care—while refusing to minimize them as mere ‘assets’ or simple anti-capitalist survival tools—come from the traditions of Black feminist love politics, psychoanalytic feminism, and the ethics of care.”

It is this deep intimacy, love and care that lies at the heart of my sense that something is missing in my work and the work of some of my closest friends. I know how hard it is to admit tenderness and vulnerability. It is also hard to admit that I don’t know and I don’t have solutions, especially as a college-educated, corporately trained guy who was raised in this culture of rational knowing, assertion, competition and dominance. However, what may be most difficult is to trust how the Good is already here in others and how listening carefully to our communities, abandoning our agendas, and learning to love may be the most powerful gifts we can offer.

There are growing communities like Wisdom Exchange¹, The Intentional Society² and Emergent Commons³ as well as many others where ethnographically sound methods are being employed to discover new ways of engaging with and transforming our communities. Engaging with these growing communities to learn from them, and to co-create with them, may be one place to start. It is also true that we must respond to economic pressures to deliver for the performance culture that dominates us. It is hard to find revenue models for paradigm shifting - particularly if the new paradigm is rooted in relational, collective and traditionally dismissed methods to nurture trust, connection and belonging.

However, that is our work. In mainstream culture, words like intimacy, heart, care and love often make everyone in the room uncomfortable. Such emotional and psychological subjectivity is labeled as inefficient when in fact this is the ground, the soil, the hearth from which human society grows. Leaders can learn another paradigm and perhaps their hearts are already longing for it.

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1. To learn more about Wisdom Exchange (www.wisdomexchange.net) as well as hear another strong voice advocating trenchantly for a new paradigm, make sure to preorder the new book, out in September, The Communal Heart, by my friend and colleague Claudia Dommaschk.

2. The Intentional Society — https://www.intentionalsociety.org/

3. Emergent Commons — https://emergent-commons.mn.co/

Eddie Vedder has a song called “Longing to Belong.” The title alone is most of this essay. He sings it to one beloved. I wonder if we are singing it to each other now.

For most of human history, small groups of people and clusters of households nested in wider networks where rituals, exchanges and ties brought them closer together. This social architecture of belonging together in small communities carried human consciousness into the evolution of language, symbolic thought, technology, societal governance and moral codes — and it carried them because that is where every new capacity had to be learned, practiced, corrected and passed on. Nothing was transmitted by broadcast. It moved hand to hand, face to face, in groups small enough that everyone could be seen. The bonds between us, our relationships and our caring, have been the basis of civilization and progress. This is the oldest and best-tested social technology our species has ever built.

We progressed into well-designed federations like the Haudenosaunee Great Law, the Roman republic, the Swiss cantons, the Hanseatic League, and — independently, in a different century — the founding of the United States. We mustered deliberative insight into civilization through small vehicles: a council of sachems, a senate, delegates and sub-committees in closed rooms.

Picture the rooms. Fifty-five men in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, windows shut against spies in the heat, arguing for four months. Or, the sachems (chiefs) of the Five Nations in council under the Great Law, each speaking in turn. In these founding moments, the rooms were small enough for everyone to hear one another. Small enough to build trust on a personal level because that was the only trust worth having in such times. Even so, these small relational containers were rationed. Not everyone had access and yet the outputs were distributed.

The leadership role was reserved for elites, but many other people received at least some of the products and benefits — through the formalization of law, state, and market agreements. What the elites got was the experience: the argument, the listening, the being changed by someone else’s reasoning. What everyone else got was the result, delivered as rules. That asymmetry is not a footnote in the story of governance. It is the story.

As small groups grew into larger scale structures, things got more formal, and eventually empires arose. This design using the federation of small groups was intentional, and it was guided by real inspiration, but it mostly was meant to direct our attention and effort toward meeting the basic needs of those who counted as “citizens.” Designed governance is, in effect, a machine for distributing outcomes through all the infrastructure we build.

The machine works well, and that is exactly the problem.

This shift to large scale, highly-efficient, structures is where our bonds to one another started to become less concrete, because the broader infrastructure of our society increasingly delivers what we once delivered to one another in our clans, clusters, families, neighborhoods and towns. Every convenience we won removed a reason to need each other. When we started enjoying the comfort, security and convenience this brought, we had no idea that that comfort, convenience and consumption would become the entire goal of society. To be clear, nobody is nostalgic for the mutual dependence of a bad harvest. My observation here is sharper — that we solved the need and lost the relational benefits that used to come attached to it.

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At some point here in the U.S., there were suddenly towns where you can only see Walmart, national chain stores and Amazon trucks. All of the basic infrastructure that once tied us together has left town or gone bankrupt. Even the churches, fraternal organizations, and local government may disappear completely in rural communities. Years ago, while traveling in eastern Washington state, I remember fantasizing about buying an old church and converting into my home. There were so many around that had been abandoned, it seemed natural to do so.

Alongside these economic and basic infrastructure changes, we’ve had Internet and AI revolutions that diffuse our awareness and connection into remote networks — networks with no container to hold our dearest relationships in, and no edge to make intimacy safe. Networked information and communications systems restructured how we reason, extended our perspective to planetary scale, and installed deep-time awareness in ordinary minds. All of this happened at speeds and at a scale no early federation founder imagined.

Consider the pace. Moving from foraging bands into settled farming villages took thousands of years — five, ten, depending on where you were standing, and it happened independently in a handful of places over roughly eight millennia. The internet reached ordinary people in 1994, when the Netscape browser put the web in front of anyone with a phone line. That was thirty-two years ago.

These are not the same kind of change, which is exactly the point. One reorganized what food we grow and how we build physical communities together. The other reorganized what we attend to, who we hear from, and what we think we are part of — and it did it in a tiny fraction of the time. It feels like whiplash because it is. The internet took a single generation to remake global attention and our day-to-day relationships. Each revolution has arrived faster than the one before it, and now AI is moving even faster.

We have massively expanded what our minds can do, while losing what our hearts and our wills long for. We now have a digital, artifact-mediated culture that flows into our lives without our ever seeing, sensing or touching another human being — except the two or three closest to us.

I need to be precise about that exception, because it is where some people will object. The point is not that we have no close relationships. Most of us have a few, and they are often good. The point is that we used to have a layer — the twenty or thirty people who were neither strangers nor intimates, who knew your business and had opinions about it, who showed up when something broke. That layer is what’s gone. You can have a happy marriage and three good friends and still be missing an entire stratum of human life that every one of your most recent ancestors took for granted.

Here is what it can feel like. You wake up and immediately hear the opinions of five hundred people and the needs of almost none. You read about a war on one continent and a collapse on another before you have had coffee. You may carry both around all day with nowhere to put them, because there is no one in the room who is carrying them too. You are competent, informed, connected, and reachable by anyone on earth within seconds. And if you got sick tomorrow, you may have to think hard about who to call — not because nobody loves you, but because the asking would feel like an imposition. The people who love you are all somewhere else, busy, in their own version of the same week. Your mind has never been more extended. Your heart has never had less to hold on to and shared agency and will seems even more remote.

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The opening of our hearts and the tying together of our wills is what happens when we fully encounter one another in person, in community, the way we once did in small groups. Minds can be extended by tools. Hearts and wills cannot. They only ever develop in the presence of other people who are willing to stay with us.

So it is time to invent new small group containers, because the old ones are not coming back.

I am stating plainly that they are not coming back and I am not entirely sorry. The old belonging was not always chosen. It came with obligations you could not refuse, people and rules you could not escape, and conformity as the price of membership. If you were the wrong sort of person in the wrong sort of village, the fabric that held everyone else was the thing that burdens you. Few people who left these sometimes claustrophobic places are going back to it, and they should not have to. The world is a better place for the diversity and freedom many of us have today in some places.

Which makes the actual task ahead of us harder than restoration, and much more interesting. We have to build something that does what the old fabric did — the holding, the being known, the showing up — for people who can walk out at any moment and lose nothing critical by leaving. That has never been done at scale. It is the real work, and it is the work of our time.

It is also urgent, because the crises at our door are not going to be met by better information. We have superb information. What we lack is the collective will to act on it together, and will is not something you can read your way into. It comes from being in a room (IRL or online) with people you have made promises to.

This time around, the tools are more than axes and smoke signals. We have remarkable technologies that can be pointed at bringing us closer rather than pulling us apart — and pointing them that way is a choice somebody has to make on purpose. Today’s federations can connect like lightning, which means the circles of trust we build no longer have to be rationed to elites. That is the genuinely new thing. The room can still be small, and now there can be a great many rooms, and they can find each other.

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We are not inventing this from nothing. The history of open source software has already shown that federated small teams, with open entry and open exit and no one in charge, can build infrastructure the whole world runs on. Mutual aid networks have shown the same thing about care. And the cooperative movement — from credit unions to billion dollar cooperatives like Mondragon — has shown it about ownership. Consider too Wikipedia, of all things, has shown it about knowledge: no editorial board, many contributors, uniform standards, anyone free to leave.

But the example I keep returning to is older and stranger and hiding in plain sight. In 1935, two men who could not stop drinking discovered that they could stay sober by talking to each other. What grew from that has no leaders, no dues, no doctrine you must sign, no membership roll, and no way for anyone to seize control of it. It is federated across nearly every country on earth. Its containers are small. Its commitments are long. Its door is unlocked from the inside. And it works well enough that after ninety years of scrutiny, even the most conservative medical analysis now agrees that 12 Step Groups are powerful medicine. These groups are not a quasi-spiritual movement that happened to get organized. It is an architecture, and the architecture is why it survived.

So what is this small group container I am cheering for, concretely? Four to seven people. Meeting regularly, for long enough that the novelty wears off and the real material surfaces — eighteen months at minimum, and that number is not arbitrary. Agreements they wrote themselves, out loud, and can revise. Someone responsible for tending the container, accountable to the people in it. And a door that opens from the inside at no cost, so that anyone who stays is staying by choice, every week, and everyone knows it.

That last part is not a detail. It is the safeguard. The containers worth building are the ones you can walk out of, that ask nothing of your beliefs, and that no one can capture. Groups that demand your certainty, or make leaving expensive, are a different thing altogether, and we have all seen where that goes. Architecture is what tells them apart — not good intentions, and not the sincerity of the founder.

These new relational containers are the general unit — the place where new caring relationships and new distributed ways of deciding together can actually develop. Every piece of this has worked somewhere. The small groups have worked for 300,000 years. The federation has worked in open source and in mutual aid and in Twelve Step groups. The long commitment has worked wherever people have been willing to make it. What nobody has done yet is put all of them together, deliberately, at scale, for everyone rather than for elites.

That is the wager. And I have seen it work. People are already enjoying these deeper relational spaces and they are feeling changed by the belonging. What is changed carries on outside the container, into the lives of loved ones and to jobs and community. Many of the circles I know, people are also finding new ways to take action about the things they are discovering together. The groups often form simply because we are longing to belong. And often, people realize there is something important that they need to do together. That is an unusual reversal in our times where everyone feels that getting together is about some performance, some externally generated duty. What if getting together is about belonging and trust? It is about finding our trusted others. From there, anything can happen.

All of it honors the roots of humanity, which are our relationships to one another and to the living world we have never been separate from. Each of us, like stems of the Pando*, have roots that go all the way down. We can learn to trust one another deeply again, and we will remember that we were always part of what we have been calling Nature, as though it were somewhere else.

Small Groups Rule, OK!

If you want to learn more about creating your own safe, caring containers of trust with others, I highly recommend a new book coming in September 2026 from my dear friend and colleague Claudia Dommaschk: The Communal Heart: A Return to Belonging in a World Pulling Us Apart (Wonderwell Press). Preorder here.

*Pando is the world’s largest living organism by weight and land mass, spanning 106 acres and weighing over 13 million pounds. It consists of roughly 47,000 genetically identical stems sharing a single massive underground root system.

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In my last article I described the scaffolding that helps small groups develop the three openings. Open Mind. Open Heart. Open Will. I described what happens when those capacities mature: trust deepens into mutuality, mutuality produces belonging, belonging makes collective wisdom possible, and wisdom reveals the generous ground of life itself, visible between people who have learned to trust each other all the way down. Many things become possible when people who have come home to themselves, and learned to stay with each other, then express and co-create their vision of the world, without apologies.

But the questions that ended that article remain. What happens when groups that have developed this depth of trust begin to connect with each other? And, what does it mean when communities own the very technology that supports health and growth rather than depending on platforms that profit from undermining it?

There is a collective capacity that emerges among people who deepen their mutual trust over months and years. When groups develop a depth of mutual trust and then connect with other such groups, we weave a network of civil human power that changes our communities, our towns, and maybe the world. And if the communities that form through trust can own the technologies and networks that supported their growth, then we can achieve a whole new level of sustained civic engagement and sovereignty.

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When I use the word sovereignty, I do not mean political independence or individual self-sufficiency. I mean something more ordinary and more radical: the lived capacity of a community to make its own decisions, steward its own resources, and act from its own center of gravity without waiting for permission or direction from above.

This capacity is not granted. It is grown. It emerges when enough people have done the relational work — within themselves, between each other, and among their communities¹ — that coordination becomes natural and courage becomes available. The groups I described in the last article, the ones that can hold disagreement without fracturing and create together without anyone directing the work, are already practicing sovereignty. They may not call it that. But when a small circle of people can say “that hurt” and “I got that wrong” and come back stronger, when they can make a decision without a vote and everyone can live with it, when they discover that what they produce together exceeds what any of them could produce alone — that is sovereignty. Not as an ideology. As capacity.

Two things make this capacity real rather than aspirational. The first is infrastructure sovereignty: communities owning their own tools, their own data, their own governance. This is not optional. Depending on platforms built for the extractive economy for your relational infrastructure is the problem, not the solution. The tools that communities use to build trust must be held by those communities — not rented from companies whose business model requires undermining the very trust being built.

The second is relational sovereignty: the collective capacity that fills the conditions infrastructure creates. You can own your tools and still be unable to use them wisely. Relational sovereignty is what develops when the three openings have been practiced long enough and deeply enough that the community can act from collective wisdom rather than reactive habit.

Infrastructure sovereignty makes it possible. Relational sovereignty makes it human.

———

There is reason to be angry about how long this has taken. Not the anger of blame or resentment but the anger of integrity — the recognition that something essential has been violated and that action is required to make it whole.

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For thirty years, the dominant technologies of our civilization took the most fundamental human capacities — our willingness to listen, our capacity for vulnerability, our ability to act together from shared understanding — and systematically undermined them. Not by accident. By design. The platforms were built to capture attention, not to deepen it. To manufacture engagement, not to support genuine encounters with one another. To extract value from the spaces between people rather than to help those spaces become generative.

The cost is visible everywhere. Loneliness at epidemic scale. Democratic institutions losing legitimacy not because people stopped caring but because the tools they were given for public discourse optimized for outrage rather than understanding. Organizations full of talented people who can exchange information but cannot build trust. Communities that have the resources to care for their members but lack the relational fabric to coordinate that care.

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These are not separate problems. They are symptoms of a single structural failure: we built an entire technological civilization without building infrastructure for trust between people.

But here is what that anger, held tenderly, reveals: the correction is already underway. There are now well over two hundred organizations, tools, and platforms working in this space — building deliberative democracy tools proven across cultures from Ghana to Taiwan, federated platforms where communities own their data, facilitation traditions with decades of tested practice in developing the exact relational capacities our technologies should scaffold. Complexity science has independently validated that relationships, self-organization, and diversity are the three attributes every adaptive system requires. The field is nascent but real, and it is converging on shared language — trust as infrastructure, nested sovereignty, collective wisdom — not because anyone coordinated the convergence but because the structural gap is so obvious that independent analysis keeps arriving at the same conclusion.

This is not a handful of experiments. It is the construction of alternatives.

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What gets built, how and when? Not with a confident blueprint, but with the willingness to start broken and learn from what happens in the near and the long term.

In the near term, the work is triage. What imperfect thing can we build now? Communities can erect infrastructure with tools that already exist — relationship management systems, secure messaging, structured discussions, collaborative decision-making, video conferencing — on a single server they control. We can use all those tools now, even where they are partial and imperfect, and then discover what emerges. Whatever comes into being won’t be for the reasons we imagined. The broken lab is more credible than the confident blueprint. The willingness to iterate with care and wisdom is the design philosophy.

In the medium term, the work is transitioning. We must design for migration into the newer architectures where no single entity controls. The collaboration platforms we use now are designed to surveil us from the middle of our groups, they determine the rules of engagement, and extract attention and agency as the cost of access. Emerging standards — federation protocols, portable identity, peer-held application logic — provide the path toward something different. The principle is simple: no community should ever be dependent on a single platform for its relational infrastructure. Communities should be able to move across platforms without losing their identity, their relationships, or their governance.

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In the long term, the work is a contribution to a prosocial technology ecosystem that outlasts any single product or effort. An ecosystem where the human activities communities of trust-building, collective sensemaking, mutual aid, co-creation, and repair are supported through interoperable protocols that any platform can implement and any community can adopt.

All three timelines share a requirement: stewardship. Not the charismatic leader who drives a vision but the people who hold conditions so that collective wisdom can arise and be acted upon. Stewardship is the form leadership takes inside this architecture. The steward’s job is not to know the answer but to create the space in which the group can find it — and then to protect that space from the forces that would close it down.

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There is a horizon beyond the small group that this work points toward and that horizon is closer than you think. When enough people have practiced the three openings together — when they have experienced what it feels like to hold genuine disagreement without fracturing, to repair trust after it has been bruised, to create something together that none of them could have created alone — those capacities do not stay inside the group. They travel. Members carry them into every other relationship in their lives. The quality of their attention in a city council meeting changes. The way they listen to a neighbor changes. The patience they bring to a disagreement with a colleague changes.

This is what happens when the personal bonds between people — the informal, non-transactional quality of genuine fellowship — begin to function as civic infrastructure. Not confined to private life or religious community but a secular fellowship cultivated as a civic norm, practiced across all social domains, carried by people who have learned in small groups what it means to stay with each other through difficulty.

The Wisdom Exchange community I described in my last article — autonomous small circles, woven together by fundamental agreements, practicing belonging across continents on tools that were not built for this — is already demonstrating what this fellowship looks like. Claudia Dommaschk, who founded that community and whose forthcoming book The Communal Heart: A Return to Belonging in a World Pulling Us Apart explores this territory in depth, calls belonging “how change is actually coordinated.” Not belonging as comfort. Belonging as the relational ground from which civic capacity grows. It works. The technology just has not caught up yet.

The test of this collective wisdom is not its beauty or its depth. The test is whether it helps us make better decisions and take action together — decisions about how we generate prosperity wisely, how we distribute resources, how we care for ourselves and our loved ones as well as the people who may need some help to do more than merely survive in a world that is changing at extraordinary speed.

We are building a society where the majority of people experience psychological and emotional wellbeing, where basic needs are met, where the relational fabric is strong enough that coordination happens without coercion — that is sovereignty in its fullest sense. And sovereignty that does not produce a more prosperous, more caring, more functional society is sovereignty in name only.

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There is immense prosperity in a healthy society. Connection, belonging, and mutual trust are fundamental to that prosperity — not as soft additions but as structural foundations. That wealth has been left on the table by thirty years of technological design that could not see it.

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The recognition is simple. The human generativity that lives in relationships — the creativity, the care, the coordinated action that becomes available when people trust each other deeply — is the most underleveraged resource in our modern economy. Not because it is scarce but because the tools we built made it invisible. We must now build the technology that makes it visible, that scaffolds its development, that protects it from extraction so we realize the value that was always there.

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The action this moment requires is not aggression. Not storming the castle. Not moving fast and breaking things. It is a different kind of fearlessness: making yourself fully available to what is needed. Bringing everything you have — knowledge, experience, care, the full weight of your own relational history — into a state of readiness that is not deployment but availability. Fully prepared and fully open. Not one or the other.

The infrastructure exists. Our hunger for connection is real. What has been missing is technology designed to help people open to each other — their minds, their hearts, their will — rather than technology designed to close them down.

The communities that need this are already forming. Groves of small groups, discovering each other, finding that what they built inside their circles has prepared them for something larger. The question is whether they will have tools worthy of what they are trying to do — and whether those tools will help them grow the sovereignty to govern themselves, care for each other, and meet the crises already at their doors.

The stakes are not in some idyllic future. They are already here. And I keep returning to something my son said to me years ago, spontaneously and without any prompting, in a moment when the conditions were simply right: “Dad, I feel so alive.”

That is what we are building for.

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Here are the other articles in this series:
#1: The Wound

#2: Every Relationship Has An Edge

#3: The Courage You Can’t Build Alone

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¹ The within/between/among developmental sequence is Claudia Dommaschk’s formulation. See Dommaschk, C., & Divecha, S. “Home is not a place you find. It’s a breath you take.” Benevolution Substack. Dommaschk’s forthcoming book, The Communal Heart: A Return to Belonging in a World Pulling Us Apart (Wonderwell Press, September 2026), develops this framework fully.

There is a kind of courage that no individual can produce alone.

Not the courage of conviction. We have plenty of that, and it has not saved us. Not the courage to speak up, or stand out, or go it alone. Those are real, but they are not enough. The courage I mean is what happens when a small group of people have gone deep enough together to act with a collective wisdom that no algorithm can replicate. Through honesty, through conflict, through repair, they coordinate without coercion, create without permission, and meet the crises already at their doors with fearlessness.

This courage cannot be manufactured by assembling talented individuals. It is a property of what happens between people when the conditions are right. And those conditions can be built. I know this because I have spent decades in rooms where it happened — around campfires, in monastery retreats, in small circles where people who had no reason to trust each other learned to trust deeply. And I know this because I have spent equal decades in rooms where it didn’t, and the difference was never solely about the people. It was always primarily about the conditions.

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A mutual aid network discovers that what they lack is not volunteers but the relational ground from which volunteers trust each other enough to act with confidence and sovereignty. A watershed council realizes they never failed to agree but they failed to build the relational fabric that makes coordination possible without someone giving orders. Emergency responders know that the communities that respond effectively when crisis hits are the ones where people already know and trust each other. You cannot build trust during the storm.

The scaffolding I am about to describe exists to help groups become the kind of communities that can do these things. Not someday. Now.

———

Otto Scharmer, whose Theory U work has influenced my thinking and practices, distinguishes between social systems — the visible structures we build — and social soil, the quality of awareness and relationships those systems grow in. As a society, we’ve spent thirty years building extraordinary systems while the soil eroded. But the soil is not abstract. It is us. It is the quality of our attention, our capacity to listen, our willingness to be changed by each other.

Think of technology as scaffolding. Temporary and purposeful. It supports the group while the group is learning. As the capacities strengthen, the group needs the technology less, not more. That is the opposite of how current platforms work, where the goal is to make you need the platform more with every interaction.

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The three openings discussed in my last article in this series — Open Mind, Open Heart, Open Will — are not fixed traits that some people have and others don’t. They are learnable. But here is the thing most people miss: they are not individual skills you bring to a group. They are relational capacities that exist only in encounter. You cannot take a perspective that isn’t there. You cannot open your heart to an absence. You cannot release into collective emergence alone. The openings happen between people or they do not happen at all. That is why the small group is not a convenience. It is the irreducible unit.

The challenge now for our technology efforts is how we can help create the conditions in which our relational capacities develop, deepen and shine.

———

What helps groups develop an open mind?

The entire reward structure of digital platforms trains us to know what we think before we’ve encountered what someone else thinks. The scaffolding that counteracts this is deliberate patience. When a group needs to decide something, the process can move through visible stages: proposed, reflecting, refining, deciding. Built-in reflection periods give people time to actually think. Dissent is always visible and always welcomed, because a group that can hold disagreement is growing stronger, not weaker.

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Loomio, a collaborative decision-making platform born from the Occupy movement in New Zealand, has been doing exactly this for over a decade. Groups deliberate asynchronously, proposals are time-bound so decisions don’t stall, and the system visualizes where the group stands without reducing everything to a simple majority vote. In Taiwan, the platform Polis was used at national scale to find bridging statements between groups that normally disagree, surfacing unexpected common ground on issues from ride-sharing regulation to alcohol policy. Taiwan did not use Polis because deliberation is pleasant. They needed actual policy that actual citizens would support. The open mind was not the destination. It was the precondition for action.

The CATALYST project, as a European democratic innovation, takes this further. Their research demonstrates that genuine collective intelligence emerges not when groups reach consensus but when they hold disagreement without fracturing and take collective action despite it. A community mature enough to hold real disagreement is more intelligent than one that forces premature resolution.

Even small design choices serve this. Spaces where you can mark a thought as unfinished, so others receive it as an exploration rather than a position. Silence welcomed rather than treated as a failure to engage. Perspective-taking prompts available during moments of tension. None of these work in isolation. Each one requires other minds in the room. The perspective you are learning to take belongs to someone sitting across from you. The scaffolding supports people in practicing together what none of them could practice alone.

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What helps groups develop an open heart?

Screens flatten human presence. Public metrics turn every interaction into a display for an invisible audience. Vulnerability becomes dangerous because vulnerability doesn’t meet our performance goals. This is not an accident. This is what the platforms were designed to do. They took the most precious thing human beings have — our willingness to be genuinely seen by another person — and made it a liability. And without vulnerability, there is no trust. Without trust, there is no belonging. Without belonging, a group has no ground to act from.

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The scaffolding that counteracts this starts with privacy. Not the public/private binary of current platforms, but concentric circles that mirror how trust actually works in human life. An inner circle of four to seven people. A working group of eight to sixteen. A wider community of 50 to 150. Each layer with its own agreements, its own norms, its own warmth. You know which space you’re in. You know what it can hold.

Richard Bartlett’s Microsolidarity project has been testing exactly this structure for seven years across working communities in New Zealand, the Azores, and elsewhere. Small crews of three to six people, nested inside larger congregations, using practices like peer-support circles and structured emotional check-ins to develop the relational capacities that make collaboration possible. Microsolidarity has documented what works and what doesn’t at the crew level with a specificity that most community platforms never attempt. The pattern is consistent: the relational work comes first. The collaboration flows from it.

Grounding practices matter. Check-ins that invite people to notice what they’re feeling, what they’re bringing into the space. These seem small but they interrupt the disembodied drift that screens produce. Neuroscience confirms what contemplative traditions have long known: the embodied cues through which trust actually travels — vocal tone, facial expression, the micro-adjustments of co-regulation — require physical or high-bandwidth presence. Text alone cannot carry them. Technology for Open Heart must be designed with this constraint in mind, not as a limitation but as a fact about how human beings actually connect.

Then there is rupture and repair. This may be the most important relational capacity there is and the one most absent from digital life. In any real relationship, things go sideways. Trust gets bruised. In most digital environments, this is where things fall apart quietly. People withdraw and nobody names what happened. I have watched a year of pain between two people dissolve in twenty minutes because a community had a practice for it — one person expressing appreciation, then regret, then the embrace that meant the rupture was over. What if technology assumed this would happen and made it easier to navigate? Built-in pathways for naming a tension. Structures that make it possible to say “that hurt” or “I got that wrong” without the exchange escalating or disappearing. Every repair that succeeds strengthens the group’s confidence that it can hold more honesty, more complexity, more of each other’s reality.

Claudia Dommaschk, whose Wisdom Exchange community has been the proving grounds for breakthrough small group work, names belonging as “how change is actually coordinated.” The community Claudia founded hosts autonomous small circles of four to seven people who meet regularly across continents. These circles are woven together with some fundamental agreements and are supported by a few community hosts and mentors. This online experience runs on tools built for the extractive economy and it is noteworthy that this deeply relational experience works well even though the technology does not help much. Claudia sees the outward movement, and she sees the sequence: first within ourselves, then between us, then among us as a whole. You don’t build belonging just so people feel at home. You build belonging so people who feel at home together can do things that people who don’t feel at home together simply cannot do.

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What helps groups develop an open will?

The scaffolding begins with removing the machinery of manipulation. No algorithmic feed. Only intentional navigation toward the people and conversations that actually matter. And here is something counterintuitive: the conversations that matter most are often the ones you would not have chosen. It is often the unexpected encounter, the person you had judged from a distance, the connection no algorithm would have surfaced that yields the greatest surprise and delight. Gentle discernment prompts something new. Does entering this space deepen your sense of connection, or scatter your attention? Not a gate. An invitation to notice.

Co-creation tools can be designed so that the group’s collaborative power becomes visible. Threaded discussion alongside the work itself, so the relational process and the product develop at the same time. Contributions without individual credit metrics, because the work is collective. The group discovers that what it produces together exceeds what any member could produce alone. That discovery changes what the group believes it can do.

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The Impact Collaborative, documented by Laura Kaplan in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, describes five nonprofits that moved from competition to coordination through years of trust-building. The shift was not strategic. It was relational. They stopped competing because they had developed enough trust that coordination became natural. ServiceSpace has demonstrated the same principle at a different scale for over twenty-six years. It is a global community of volunteers operating entirely on gift economy, no paid staff, sustained by the relational depth of people who trust each other enough to give without keeping score.

When a group releases its grip on predetermined outcomes, what shows up is not chaos. It is a form of collective wisdom that none of the members could have accessed alone. In Wisdom Exchange circles, I have seen this happen. Insights arrive that nobody brought into the room and a quality of shared presence that makes people braver together than any of them would be on their own. That bravery is not a feeling. It is sovereignty. The group can act from its own center of gravity rather than waiting for someone to tell it what to do.

———

These forms of scaffolding reinforce each other the way the capacities themselves reinforce each other. You can think out loud when you trust the space around you. Slowing down creates room for emergence. A group that knows it can survive conflict has the courage to let go of control.

And the developmental direction is clear. Trust matures into mutuality. That is the state beyond reciprocity where people care for what is emerging between them rather than keeping score. Mutuality produces belonging. Belonging makes wisdom possible — the collective power that becomes available when a group’s relational conditions are strong enough to hold genuine complexity. And wisdom, when it has gone deep enough, reveals something extraordinary: the generous ground of life itself, visible between people who have learned to trust each other all the way down.

This arc does not stay inward. It spirals outward. Each cycle deepens the capacities and widens the reach. A group that has developed genuine trust can coordinate emergency response, build local journalism, steward a watershed, care for its most vulnerable members. Not because it has more information or resources than isolated individuals but because it has the relational ground from which coordinated courage arises.

Networks of these groups, connecting with other small groups that have done the same work, become something the world has almost no infrastructure for: communities of wise and caring people, empowering action across groups, building alternatives while old structures lose their pertinence.

———

The scaffolding is temporary. The capacities are permanent. And the communities that develop these capacities together will discover they can do things that no collection of isolated individuals could ever accomplish. This is not because someone organized them, but because they organized themselves from a ground of trust so deep that coordination became natural and courage became available.

The oldest stories about restoring generativity are not stories about engineering. They are stories about someone who refuses to accept barrenness and does the fierce patient work of bringing life back. Every community that has rebuilt trust after it was damaged knows that story from the inside.

———

What remains is the hardest question and the most exciting one. What kind of collective capacity emerges in communities that do this work over months and years? What does it mean when groups that have developed this depth of trust internally begin to connect with other such groups? And what would it mean if those communities owned the very technology that supports their development rather than depending on platforms that profit from undermining it?

That is a question about sovereignty. About the confidence and courage that genuine belonging produces. Many things become possible when people who have come home to themselves, and learned to stay with each other, turn their attention to a world that desperately needs what they have built together.

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Here are the other articles in this series:

#1: The Wound

#2: Every Relationship Has An Edge

#4: The Stakes Are Already Here

The design of social and media technology has operated as if society is made up of individuals. My profile. My feed. My followers. My content. My brand. The entire architecture assumes that the fundamental unit of society is the individual person, and that technology’s job is to serve that person’s needs, amplify that person’s voice, and optimize that person’s experience.

But society is not made up of individuals. Society is made up of relationships between people. In social graph terms, it’s the “edges”, the connections between us, that matter most. The power of our culture, the resilience of our communities, the intelligence of our institutions, and our experience of love is generated between us, in relationships.

We’ve just built thirty years of internet technology as though that weren’t true. This is not a minor oversight. It is the foundational design error from which everything else follows. If you design for nodes, you get platforms that amplify individual expression and measure individual attention. If you design for edges, you get something entirely different. You get a society that tends to the quality of what happens between people. We have never seriously tried the second approach. What you are reading is an argument for why we must get started.

———

When we create safe generative spaces and become more trusting of one another, something happens that no individual can produce alone. Deeper visions emerge. Insights surface that nobody brought into the room. The group begins to feel and think in ways that exceed the sum of its member’s experiences. This is not a theory I am proposing. It is something I have witnessed repeatedly, and something that anyone who has been part of a genuinely healthy group already knows.

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I have personally experienced this directly within workshops I have hosted here in Sacramento as well as in Wisdom Exchange, the international sensemaking community founded by dear friend, Claudia Dommaschk. In these circles, people from different backgrounds and beliefs come together not to debate but to discover. What emerges when the conditions are right is a quality of collective wisdom that does not happen elsewhere. This collective wisdom emerges when people are present enough to attune to what’s happening in the group, authentic enough to bring what is actually alive in them, and regulated enough to maintain safety when challenging truths arise.

This is what I mean by collective wisdom. It is not a committee finding a compromise. It is not a brainstorm producing lists and maps. It is the embodied experience of a group accessing a resource that emerges when our shared mutual intent is strong enough to hold it. This requires that everyone is willing and able to show up in a particular way.

It requires people from all different beliefs who aren’t afraid to speak about love, wisdom, and courage as actual forces for change and not as soft abstractions but as the real energies that make coordination and creation possible in a school, a neighborhood, a watershed council, or an emergency response team. It honors both the rational mind and the longing of our hearts for connection. There is a delightful power of what emerges when both are present and neither dominates.

———

This leads to an insight that changes everything about how we think about technology design.

Secure attachment and collective wisdom are properties of process, not of personality. They are not traits that some people have and others lack. They emerge from how well we come together and not just who we are individually. This is observable. You can see it in every functioning family that has weathered a crisis and come out closer. In every work crew that trusts each other enough to improvise under pressure. In every congregation that has held together through conflict rather than splitting apart. The people involved matter, of course. But the process they engage in matters more.

This is a design insight, not just a philosophical one. If the process can be identified, the process can be supported. And if it can be supported, it can be supported by technology, or undermined by it. Every piece of technology we use is either helping or hindering the processes by which people come to trust each other. Current technology overwhelmingly hinders. That is not inevitable. It is a design choice, and it can be made differently.

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This better process asks us to listen to others at a level that goes beyond concepts and personalities to touch something more fundamental in each other. In doing so, we discover new insights and pathways that were invisible when we were each inside our own heads. The process has a progression, and each threshold is harder than the last. I think of them as three openings. These openings are inspired by U-Theory, the work of Otto Scharmer and the Presencing Institute.

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The first opening is of the mind.

We carry into every conversation a full cargo of judgments, assumptions, and prepackaged conclusions. We pretend this isn’t happening, and our assumptions do their filtering work invisibly. Open mind begins with radical honesty — acknowledging what we are already thinking, and what we are already thinking about the other person, before the conversation has even started. When we download all of that into the open rather than suppressing it, something shifts. The grip of our certainties loosens. And in that loosening, we become actually available to another person for the first time.

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of conversations I’ve had with people whose views on deeply polarized issues differ from my own. My first instinct is to categorize and dismiss. But when I slow down and listen, not for where I disagree but for what is genuinely driving their concerns. When I do this, I find something more interesting than I expected. I may find people who have watched institutions fail them repeatedly. Who have seen systems that were supposed to serve them serve someone else instead. Who have lost faith in expertise that has sometimes deserved to be doubted. These are not crazy positions. They are responses to real experiences, and they deserve real engagement.

This is what an open mind looks like in practice. It doesn’t mean abandoning our own views or pretending there are no facts. It means staying curious long enough to understand why someone believes what they believe. Allowing ourselves to be surprised. Listening not for confirmation but for discovery.

This is the first threshold because nothing else is possible without it. You cannot feel what someone is feeling if you have already decided what they are.

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The second opening is of the heart.

We can understand someone’s logic while remaining utterly closed to their humanity. We can follow an argument without ever touching the person making it. Open heart begins where we stop processing the other person and start actually feeling their presence.

This means recognizing that much of our public discourse runs on a kind of defended sophistication. We can assume a posture that keeps genuine feeling at arm’s length, perhaps because we’ve been disappointed too many times. Social media has made that posture the default register. We have to actively choose to set it down.

When we do, we make ourselves genuinely permeable to another person’s reality. We let their experience to actually land as something to be felt and not simply as information to be processed. This is not sentimentality. It is a form of intelligence that reaches dimensions rational analysis cannot. Beneath the surface positions people argue for, there are deeper intentions that are nearly universal. People want safety, they want to be seen and they want their communities to thrive. Open-hearted listening reaches that level and discovers that we share far more than our debates suggest.

This kind of listening requires courage because it involves risk. When we let someone in, we can be changed by them. We might find ourselves caring about something we didn’t care about before. That is not a loss. It is a sign that real contact is happening. It says: you are not an intellectual position to be countered. You are a person. I am actually here with you in a shared presence. We belong.

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The third opening is of the will.

Open will is the hardest to describe. We tend to think of will as the force by which we pursue goals and make things happen. But open will is something different. It is the willingness to not know. To hold a question without rushing to an answer. To release our attachment to what we think needs to happen and be available for an outcome we did not plan for and could not have predicted.

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Not listening to fix. Not listening to win. Listening to discover. Listening to transform.

What makes this possible is a kind of fearlessness. This is not the absence of fear, but a willingness to act in its presence. When we are afraid of where a conversation might go, we grip. We control. We steer away from the uncomfortable edges. Open will asks us to relax that grip, to trust that we are capable of meeting whatever actually arises, and to have enough faith in the people we are with to let things unfold.

This is not passivity. It is a highly active form of presence. We bring our knowledge, our experience, and our care into a state of readiness that is not deployment but availability. Fully prepared, and fully open. Not one or the other.

When a group of people manage to listen this way together, with minds open, hearts open, and wills open, then something genuinely extraordinary can occur. Ideas arise that no one brought into the room. Connections form that no one planned. The conversation becomes something larger than the sum of its participants. Call it collective wisdom, call it emergence, call it whatever your tradition offers. The experience of it is unmistakable.

———

These three openings are not stages we pass through and leave behind. They are dimensions of a single integrated practice that we move in and out of continuously. In any real conversation, we are constantly being called back from judgment, back from defensiveness, and back from the need to control as we move toward an openness that makes genuine contact possible.

The developmental markers of healthy belonging map onto this progression. Perspective-taking — the ability to hold another person’s point of view alongside your own rather than just alternating between them — requires an open mind. Vulnerability and emotional responsiveness — the willingness to be moved by another person and to show that you are moved — require an open heart. The transition from my agenda and into our co-creation requires an open will. In open will, we move from “I do for you, you do for me” to “We care for what is emerging between us.” These are not aspirational ideals. They are descriptions of what healthy relationships actually do.

I have always loved the image of how the Amish put a barn together. There’s something special about that pre-modern energy of clear blueprints and templates. There’s the modern energy of process, mutually supporting roles and formal operational capability. And then there’s this caring in the community, this desire to create assets that everybody benefits from. That is almost a kind of cosmic energy that feels postmodern, egalitarian, and pluralistic. All of it present at once, not one dominating the other, with a pragmatism that gets the barn built by sundown. That is what groups look like when all three openings are functioning together. Structure, process and care, integrated, with the caring energy leading and the structural energy serving.

Ask your grandmother how she and other grandmothers helped mothers raise children. What we are describing here isn’t new. It’s ancient. It’s what human communities have always done when they work well. Technology should be learning from this, not replacing it with control and manipulation.

———

When mind and heart and will are all available, then real belonging becomes possible in its fullest sense. Not belonging as a feeling of comfort, though it may include that. Belonging as a homecoming where that which comes out of my heart, out of my soul, is received in a way where I can recognize myself in the reception. Where what I wanted to bring into the world feels natural and whole. A multidimensional connection operating from the simplest level of being understood to the deepest level of embodied co-regulation and shared presence.

This is what becomes possible when people move through the three openings together. It is not rare. It happens in kitchens and on front porches and in church basements and around campfires. It happens whenever people trust each other enough to stop performing and start being present. It has been happening for as long as humans have gathered.

What is rare is technology that supports it. What is rare is a design tradition that even recognizes it exists.

The question that follows from everything in this article is whether that can change. Whether technology can be designed to create containers where the three openings are supported rather than systematically closed down. Whether the necessary conditions from which collective wisdom emerges can be scaffolded by the same digital infrastructure that currently undermines them.

That is the design question we now face. So, let’s gather as open and imaginative people ready to participate in something both ancient and utterly new. Let us trust what’s stirring in our hearts. That may be exactly what the world needs.

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Here are the other articles in this series:

#1: The Wound

#3: The Courage You Can’t Build Alone

#4: The Stakes Are Already Here

In the mid-nineties, many of us believed that digital technology could be a force for freedom and prosperity. I was there. We imagined new forces for democracy and we felt the power of this new distributed intelligence. It filled us and our work with a vivid aliveness. Venture capitalists and corporate capital were pouring billions into technologies that were changing everything. For more than a decade, they were happy to invest and wait to see where the payoff would appear.

We were building connection. We were building interaction. We were building the infrastructure for people to find each other, to collaborate, to share what they knew and discover what they didn’t. The dream was real, and so was the energy behind it.

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Then Facebook and others showed that powerful algorithms could drive behavior and that advertisers could get results. What followed was a dogpile. All of the instruments guiding digital media turned on the power of algorithms to generate huge wealth by turning consumers into the product — our data, our behaviors. The unprecedented manipulative power of these systems led to great financial rewards and to the massive concentration of ownership and wealth we see today.

Along the way, we misplaced the technological dreams we had to enhance our humanity, expand our freedoms, and generate prosperity for everyone. We arrived instead at this chaotic place where digital media has become a tool for generating revenue through sociological control and conflict.

What we left out seems obvious now.

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Here is the simplest way I can say it. Imagine that I am about to post something online. The machine knows everybody on this thread. It has a social graph. It knows who is connected to whom, who interacts with whom, who has history with whom. It stores almost zero about the humanness of our relationships. That humanness is the “edge” using the terms of a social graph theory. Our humanness is contained in the meager metadata that describes all the edges between all of us. We are the human nodes. What metadata it does have, it uses for its own algorithm rather than for anything that might help us connect and belong.

Why doesn’t the machine ask me about the people close to me who might be affected by what I’m about to say? It could. It knows who they are. It could ask: have you thought about how this will land with the friend who just went through a difficult week? Are you aware that two people on this thread already may feel differently than you expect? Is there someone here you haven’t connected with in a while who might have something to contribute? It could remind me to ask for feedback from specific friends.

It could do any of this. It does none of it. Instead, it uses my relationships to sell me things.

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That small example contains the entire omission. We have technology that is more than capable of supporting connection and interaction. But, we built a system that was all about financial transactions rather than about the depth of healthy relationships that happens between people. We designed technology to build trust for financial exchanges, like will you deliver what you promised? Did that payment clear? But we never designed it to build real human trust between one another. The trust that says: I will show caring and concern for you even when it’s hard.

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So much of the technology I’ve been involved with is good at what I would call the inter-objective. I want to share a video with you. I want to know the weather. What buttons on the remote control trigger what. I want this, you want that. How do we have a transaction between us that gets what I want?

But the intersubjective elements — how we show up, what our experience is like together, the quality of what’s actually happening between us — are harder. And in the design community, the ontology (what exists) fundamentally still doesn’t include the subjective experience of me and you. If love is a process, how is that process showing up between us right now? What’s my interior experience? What’s your interior experience? How are we together? These questions are almost never asked.

This isn’t because technologists are bad people. It’s because their training and their incentives made this entire dimension of human life invisible within the design process. We reduced humanity to its rational capabilities and built accordingly. The result is a technological infrastructure of breathtaking power that has almost nothing to say about the thing that matters most to people: their relationships with each other.

The thinkers who study how technology shapes us, like Fernando Flores, Anne-Marie Willis, Daniel Fraga, have a way of describing this that cuts to the bone. We design our tools, and then our tools design us. This is not a metaphor. It is the observable feedback loop at the heart of technological civilization. When algorithms curate our information environments, when platforms mediate our social bonds, when AI systems make decisions about our lives, we are not simply being served by technology. We are being constituted by it. The platforms are not neutral tools we pick up and put down. They are world-disclosing systems that shape what it means to be human — what we can see, what we can feel, what we can imagine doing together.

The techno-feudalist trend is emerging globally, where platform monopolies, algorithmic governance, and data extraction increasingly determine the conditions of possibility for human life. This trend represents not merely economic exploitation but ontological colonization. We are being designed by systems optimized for capital accumulation rather than human flourishing. As Fraga puts it: design or be designed. There is no third option.

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———

The consequences are everywhere. Exploitative internet engines. AI developed as a tool of surveillance and control. Platforms that shifted their models to make users the product for third-party revenue. A loneliness epidemic that costs hundreds of billions annually in healthcare, lost productivity, and unrealized human potential. Technology generating financial wealth for its owners while generating conflict, confusion, and addiction for everyone else.

This is not only a moral failure. It is an economic one. There is immense prosperity to be found in a healthy society where most people experience psychological and emotional well-being. Connection, belonging, relationality, and human trust are fundamental to prosperity. That wealth has been left on the table by thirty years of design that couldn’t see it.

Now AI is far down the same hype-heavy, debt-intensive path. The Wall Street energy driving AI — not the imagination of creators, but the Wall Street energy — is forcing industry leaders into the same mistakes. What Google does this week is in response to what Anthropic did last week, which is in response to what someone else did the week before, because they’re trying to make their investors happy and everybody’s underwater. The massive debt the AI industry owes to Wall Street will mandate that industry leaders make all the same mistakes. And this time, the impacts on society will be worse because this new technology is staggeringly powerful and highly unstable.

Take a deep breath Silicon Valley. You’re about to kill the real golden goose again.

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But I want to be more precise about the damage, because naming it precisely is the beginning of understanding what would need to be different.

Technology didn’t just “harm” us in some vague way. It supercharged three specific forces that were already the enemies of human connection — forces that every person who has ever tried to have an honest conversation already knows well.

Technology weaponized judgment.1 The entire reward structure of digital media — likes, shares, engagement metrics, algorithmic amplification — selects for the fastest categorization, the most confident dismissal, the hottest take. We carry a full cargo of assumptions into every conversation. That’s not a character flaw. It’s how minds work. But technology turned that natural tendency into an arms race. The platform rewards you for sorting people into categories before you’ve heard a word they’ve said. It rewards you for knowing what you think before you’ve encountered what they think. It penalizes nuance, exploration, and the admission that you might be wrong. The mind closes. And it closes faster than ever because the entire system is optimized to keep it closed.

Technology rewarded cynicism. Cynicism feels sophisticated. It feels like protection. But it is almost always a crusted-over disappointment — a wound that never got to heal because we decided the world didn’t deserve our vulnerability anymore. Social media is a cynicism engine. It teaches us that sincerity is naive, that care is performative, that everyone has an angle. It strips away the embodied cues — the tone of voice, the facial expression, the body language — through which empathy actually travels, and replaces them with text on a screen that we are primed to interpret in the worst possible light. When someone is reduced to their words on your screen, it takes almost nothing to dismiss them. The heart closes. And it stays closed because the platform never asks us to open it.

Technology manufactured fear. Fear of being changed by an encounter. Fear of losing control of the narrative. Fear of uncertainty, of not knowing, of sitting with a question long enough to let a real answer emerge. The dopamine loop keeps us reactive — always responding, never initiating from a place of considered intention. The algorithm keeps us consuming — always presented with the next thing, never left in the productive silence where reflection happens. The infinite scroll eliminates the pause that is the precondition for genuine thought. And the design pattern that gives us the illusion of connection while systematically preventing the real thing leaves us afraid that if we actually opened ourselves to another person, we would have no idea what to do. The will closes. We become passive consumers of algorithmically curated experience rather than active creators of our shared world.

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———

These three closings — of mind, of heart, of will — are not side effects of the attention economy. They are its product. They are what the system is designed to produce.

Technology designed to capture attention must keep people reactive, because a reflective person is a person who might put down the phone. Judgment is the fastest form of reactivity, so the platform selects for it. Technology designed to monetize engagement must keep people defended, because a vulnerable person is a person who might say something real and then leave the conversation. Cynicism is quite an effective form of defense, so the platform rewards it. Technology designed to maximize time-on-platform must keep people afraid of the alternative, because a fearless person — a person willing to not know, willing to be changed, willing to act from a place of genuine openness — is a person who doesn’t need the platform at all. Fear is the ultimate retention mechanism.

This is the system we built. Not because anyone planned it this way, but because of ontological blindness. That is the inability to see intersubjectivity and the inability to recognize that what happens between people matters more than what happens to them individually. That blindness meant that the forces closing people down were never identified as costs. They were features. They drove engagement. They kept people on the platform. They generated revenue.

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The system cannot be reformed because its dysfunction expresses its purpose. It cannot be overthrown because it is not a regime that can be replaced but a logic that has colonized every available institution.

What can be done is the construction of alternatives — not as utopian projects but as practical necessities. As existing structures lose legitimacy and functionality, spaces open for different modes of organization. The question is whether those spaces will be filled by fragmentation and conflict or by coordination patterns that actually serve human flourishing.

The answer depends on what people do in immediate, practical, face-to-face reality. It depends on relationships built, trust established, resilience through cooperation learned before it is needed. It depends on communities discovering through practice that they can meet needs the failing system no longer meets.

We can now see the omission. We can name the damage precisely — not just that technology harmed us, but that it systematically closed our minds through judgment, closed our hearts through cynicism, and closed our will through fear. That naming is progress. Because what is visible can be addressed. And what is named can be designed for.

The infrastructure exists. Our hunger for connection is real. The computational power is extraordinary. What we left out — the intersubjective, the relational, the trust between actual people — is not a small thing that can be bolted on after the fact. It is the thing. It is the foundation from which everything else that matters emerges.

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Here are the other articles in this series:

#2: Every Relationship Has An Edge

#3: The Courage You Can’t Build Alone

#4: The Stakes Are Already Here

When the Center Cannot Hold

I've spent decades working in technology and media, watching brilliant people make decisions that harmed the very communities they claimed to serve. The pattern became clear: we've replaced wisdom with cleverness, meaning with measurement, and shared purpose with private gain. This isn't just about politics or economics—it's about the stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be human.

Nietzsche warned us over a century ago that "God is dead," not as celebration but as prophecy. He saw that Western civilization was losing its foundational meaning-making systems and worried we'd fall into nihilism without something to replace them. His fear has materialized, but not in the way he imagined. Instead of confronting the void, we've filled it with a crude materialism that masquerades as sophistication.

The result is a society producing outcomes nobody wants—not the billionaires, not the politicians, not the citizens watching it all unfold.

The New Religion of More

When Growth Became God

Walk into any corporate boardroom, political campaign, or university economics department, and you'll encounter America's true religion: endless growth. This belief system operates with fundamentalist fervor—question it, and you risk being labeled unpatriotic or naive.

I remember working with executives worth hundreds of millions who still felt anxious about "falling behind." One told me, echoing John D. Rockefeller, that he'd have enough money when he had "just a little bit more." The insatiable hunger wasn't personal failure—it was systemic programming.

We've built an entire civilization around the impossible: infinite expansion on a finite planet. When pressed, defenders of this system resort to magical thinking—technology will save us, markets will self-correct, somehow the laws of physics don't apply to human economics.

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The Consumer Trap

Somewhere along the way, we stopped being citizens and became consumers. Our worth is measured by our purchasing power, our identity defined by our lifestyle brands. Even our children learn to evaluate themselves and others through this materialistic lens.

This isn't accidental. Johann Hari's research reveals that since the 1880s, every decade has accelerated the pace of life while fracturing our collective attention span. The result serves corporate interests: distracted, anxious people make impulsive consumers and compliant workers.

I've watched this personally. Despite knowing better, I still catch myself thinking that lottery ticket might solve my problems, that the right purchase might fill some unnamed emptiness. If someone who understands these systems can still get caught, imagine the effect on people who've never questioned them.

When Information Becomes Manipulation

The Death of Truth-Telling

American democracy was designed for informed citizens making reasoned choices. That system has collapsed, replaced by what you might call "corporate theater"—a performance designed to keep us distracted while real decisions happen elsewhere.

Working in digital media during the 1990s, many of us predicted this crisis. When algorithmic advertising became digital journalism's only revenue source, we knew editorial independence would suffer. When Facebook chose ad-driven growth in 2009, those with media experience understood the inevitable degradation of information quality.

The warning signs were everywhere, but greed made us collectively blind. We built digital highways without traffic laws, then acted surprised when accidents happened.

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The Attention Merchants

Today's digital platforms don't just sell products—they sell our attention to advertisers. Their algorithms optimize for engagement, which means they profit from keeping us angry, afraid, and divided. The more fragmented our attention, the more vulnerable we become to manipulation.

I've seen the internal metrics. These companies track not just what we buy, but how long we spend scrolling, what makes us pause, what triggers emotional responses. They know us better than we know ourselves, and they use that knowledge to shape our behavior in ways that serve their shareholders, not our wellbeing.

This isn't conspiracy theory—it's business model. The real conspiracy is pretending this system serves anyone but those who profit from our distraction.

When Meaning-Making Breaks Down

The Sensemaking Crisis

Humans need frameworks to process complex reality. When those frameworks fail, we experience crisis—individually and collectively. Right now, we're witnessing the largest meaning-making breakdown in human history.

The speed of change has outpaced our adaptive capacity. Information floods in faster than wisdom can process it and we act from our adrenaline. Traditional institutions—family, community, religion, journalism—have weakened just when we need them most to help us connect and regulate ourselves.

I see this in my own life. When my own flood of information in my head gets to strong, sometimes I interrupt people mid-sentence, certain I know what they're going to say, only to discover I've completely misunderstood. If I do this with people I love, imagine how we misunderstand each other across political and cultural divides.

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The Integration Challenge

Our culture treats rational analysis and subjective experience as enemies rather than partners. Scientists dismiss wisdom traditions as superstition; spiritual communities reject empirical evidence as soulless materialism. Both sides impoverish themselves.

True insight happens where objective facts meet subjective meaning. Like the old parable of blind people touching different parts of an elephant, each claiming to know the whole truth, we need multiple perspectives to understand complex systems. But our polarized culture makes such integration nearly impossible.

The Three Levels of Our Delusion

Physical Materialism: The Comfort Trap

The most visible level is our obsession with comfort, convenience, and pleasure. I'm not advocating asceticism—physical wellbeing matters. The problem comes when comfort becomes our highest value, when any discomfort triggers panic, when we'll destroy the environment to avoid minor inconvenience.

Working with wealthy people taught me that no amount of luxury satisfies this hunger. The billionaires I knew lived with the same anxiety as middle-class families—just with better real estate. The system creates insecurity even for those it supposedly serves.

Psychological Materialism: Smart-Sounding Justifications

The second level uses sophisticated reasoning to defend fundamentally selfish behavior. We develop elegant theories about why greed is actually virtue, why cooperation is naive, why destroying community serves the greater good.

I've watched intelligent people twist themselves into intellectual pretzels defending systems they knew were harmful. The human capacity for rationalization is limitless when our comfort depends on self-deception.

Philosophical Materialism: The Deepest Wound

The third level shapes our fundamental assumptions about reality. This operates mostly unconsciously, determining what we notice and how we interpret everything else.

Current distortions include seeing humans as isolated competitors rather than interdependent beings, treating nature as a resource stockpile rather than our life-support system, defining success through domination rather than contribution.

These assumptions feel like eternal truths because they surround us completely. But they're recent inventions, and they're killing us.

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The Emotional Manipulation System

Buddhism identifies eight emotional patterns that drive materialistic behavior: our obsessions with gain versus loss, praise versus blame, fame versus shame, pleasure versus pain. These aren't character flaws—they're human tendencies that become dangerous when entire systems exploit them.

Politicians trigger our fears of loss. Marketers promise impossible gains. Social media manipulates our need for approval. Entertainment industries sell pleasure while avoiding anything that might challenge or grow us.

Understanding these patterns helps us recognize when we're being played. Once you see the game, it becomes harder to participate unconsciously.

Finding Our Way Back

This crisis isn't permanent. Humans have faced meaning-making breakdowns before and found ways forward. But it requires acknowledging where we are and choosing to grow up.

We need new frameworks adequate to 21st-century challenges—systems that honor both scientific understanding and human meaning-making needs. We need information commons controlled by citizens rather than shareholders. We need practices that integrate rational analysis with wisdom traditions.

Most importantly, we need to rediscover what we're building together beyond individual accumulation of money and things. The founders created political institutions for self-governance. Our generation must create cultural institutions for collective wisdom.

The alternative isn't returning to pre-modern religiosity, but evolving toward post-materialist wisdom. We're being asked to mature from adolescent materialism toward adult responsibility for our shared future.

I've seen enough to know this transformation is possible. The question isn't whether we can change, but whether we'll choose to before the current system collapses under its own contradictions.

That choice is still ours to make.

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Charles Eisenstein

"Greatness" after the Bulldozer

Some watch with horror and others with glee as Donald J. Trump runs a bulldozer through American politics. Those who understand the profound corruption of reigning institutions are inclined to cheer. But before we cheer too hard, we should consider what will be built from the wreckage…

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2 years ago · 191 likes · 77 comments · Charles Eisenstein

Charles also asks an important question, "What kind of country do we become when we brutalize the helpless?"

I am imagining that the direction of travel is already clear with regard to rebuilding as well as to brutality. The people running D.C. now, and before the election, do not wake up in the morning with any conscious intention to brutalize the weak. The drift into brutality and the disgust for weakness is however always at the edge of our humanity. Ideologies, suppressed fears and muted greed have often allowed humans to drift into the hell of disdain and contempt toward their fellows.

Big movements like MAGA are political constructs that reduce complexity and offer orientation for citizens even when that orientation becomes nonsense or even brutal. The decision to use the bulldozer in Washington is a decision to use a brutally coercive kind of violence and then rationalize the harm as collateral damage. Fear, uncertainty and doubt are a form of violence and are often used as a valid military tactic. Once that violence begins, it may not stop until it takes away our breath, terrorizes our hearts and destroys hope. Tiananmen Square was not just a massacre, it was also a tactic.

Charles Eisenstein is arguing for values that resonate with me and I don't see things changing without interventions. The increased cruelty and delusion in D.C. is already too strong and too many people want greater power-over rather than power-with.

Therefore, we must responsibly protect the deeper truths and create islands of sanity where subtle and naturally human ways of living in love can be developed, nourished and protected. A metaphor for this might be “urban monasteries” or “wisdom circles.”

It is possible that many public voices like Charles Eisenstein’s may be suppressed or even crushed because there is quite likely no intention to rebuild. The harder core elements of the MAGA movement are not leading with any form of mature love nor any understanding that rebuilding will be necessary for society to function well again.

The movement is overly focused on tearing down and destroying as if the structures of our society are without merit. Anything that wishes to bring holistic and relational energy into the mix will be met with violent opposition. Government will be seen through the mercenary eyes of efficiency, profit and self-serving command-and-control. Movements toward participatory democracy and far-sighted deliberation are likely to be seen as subversive and labeled as dangerous others.

Our new leaders in D.C. are proving they are not *capable* of changing the system because they are tightly woven into the system. Now that we have given them almost absolute power, which only corrupts further, they will likely multiply the spoils of corruption and flow the proceeds into their own accounts and into those of their friends, families and enablers. Some may do this intentionally and many will go along with their own justifications and delusions. This is not an end to corruption, it is an amplification.

Without vocal and visible objection and opposition, at a grassroots level, there will be no restraint from this new government or from the highest court of the land. I hope I am wrong about the direction this is heading. However, my intuition is reasonable and there will not be time to prepare when we need to stand up and demand an end to the brutality. Unfortunately, our culturally-dominant individualism and excessive comfort-seeking makes such widespread collaboration almost impossible for many privileged Americans. There is much to do and prepare together to develop the capabilities and courage that will be needed to stand up and stop the worst of the damage.

We must learn together to use some new tools. In our frustration and haste, we have unleashed more chaos without any way to inject order back into systems. This dance of chaos and order is how complexity emerges naturally. In the tension between chaos and order there is stability in complexity but it is a fine balance. The ideology of the MAGA movement currently leaves little room for balance and nuance. There is a frenzy of activity that drives instability and gross unpredictability. We have handed our agency over to posturing demigods who are ill-equipped to care for the common good, especially when we are faced with the great complexity of our modern lives.

While we develop the necessary capabilities and strength to manage this complexity together, it seems likely that the chaos will grow and spread even to our local communities. This means we will need to learn how to care for one another in ways long forgotten as American civic life has eroded into shopping and entertainment.

Fortunately, the intimacy of tight-knit community life will come back to us quickly because it is already in our nature. We can build local community-based wisdom circles where we can support and sustain non-violent opposition to the march of brutality and increasingly violent coercion. There are many lessons of recent history that we can draw on from Gandhi to King. It is like when someone attempts to save a drowning swimmer. They must be strong and skilled to manage the crisis, lest they drown as well. Lifeguards train extensively and so must we.

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Reality at this moment

Spacious and aware

Desire and need showing up

Becoming something

Rest here

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Everything is formed by a union of elements or parts and no worldly thing exists independently of everything else. Everything we know and which exists in our world is compounded, or made of other things. This is clear if we can imagine taking the concept of time out of the equation. When we say we are made of the stars, we mean that over a long time the fundamental elements of the stars have found their way into us. We are compounded stardust.

The wisdom that reality is compounded, also means that everything passes away with time. The elements which join together to create something are eventually transformed into constituent parts or they are transformed into some other thing. If we conceptually compress all of time into this one moment, then even the grandest redwood tree has already become dust.

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A piece of paper contains: a cloud, rain that fell and nourished the seed, the seed from the tree, the sunlight on the leaves, the fallen trees, the soil holding the seed, and this goes on and on. It is the nature of reality that complex causes and conditions come together to generate things. We can also directly experience the underlying basis of reality as generativity and possibility. Before all the parts come together, there is nothing but the potential for something to happen. In this sense, something apparently comes from nothing.

This has led many wise people to an observation that all of reality has a root, or generic basis. Ancient shamans and Buddhist monks have claimed that all sentience is made of three parts: essence, nature and value. They say that this Essence is spaciousness or just open possibility. That its Nature is pure awareness or beingness. And that Value is always generative as in the unfettered desire and need to generate something.

Although we are compounded beings, our everyday awareness grants us the gift of seeming like autonomous and independent agents. It is a gift because this is how reality functions and expresses itself with and through us. These apparently autonomous agents getting stuff done and going about the business of generating things as needed.

If we forget the superordinate nature of this agency, that it is greater then us, we might think that we are gods, or at least demigods. Instead, we can see that we are interwoven with complex causes and conditions that are beyond our control and far beyond explanation. In our postmodern world, it is perhaps more clear than ever that we are not driving this bus. We are clearly part of a global, or even cosmic, complexity that is playing out in ways that are often unfathomable.

At times like this, we really need our wise friends. A group of people can join together and sense this generic basis of our reality. When we do, we can sometimes discern what seems to be emerging from a superordinate desire and need. However, to do so we must open the door to a spacious awareness that we already share, rarely acknowledge and even less rarely honor. Such capability is not a trivial matter. This requires practice, discipline and gentleness.

“Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is a shadow of the other.” - Carl Jung

Those Americans who feel that our nation is marching irreversibly toward the abyss of authoritarianism may feel some hope and respite today because of words spoken by our Vice President. Even with all the gaslighting in his speech, he laid out some precious democratic principles clearly. If you can get past the gaslighting, or the fact that you may think he is only paying lip service to democracy, you might be surprised that you agree with the principles of democracy as he describes them and when taken only at face value.

VP Vance at the Munich Security Conference

“We will fight for your right to express your opinion in the public square, agree or disagree.” That good democratic principles are being held up for public scrutiny at an international level is the opportunity here. Listen closely and let's hold this administration accountable to its words. When I do so, I find myself facing numerous contradictions.

For instance, was the AP's access truly revoked for not using the term "Gulf of America"? If the MAGA movement objects to that example, will they also object to countless others? Does this not constitute dismissal, labeling, othering, and ridicule of our citizens?

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Vance claims his administration won't fear dissenting views or their public expression. He states they won't be afraid of opposition and won't dismiss the concerns of millions. Yet, millions are expressing concerns about rising authoritarianism and this administration continues to deny its own abuses. Will the concerns of millions continue to be dismissed and mocked? Or will MAGA have the courage to live up to Vance's own words? Let's measure the actual congruence between the words and actions of all of MAGA and not just VP Vance. It is hard to stop reacting and expressing our disdain at his shocking accusations and clever manipulations of information. However, that anxious reaction often stops us from articulating our vision and the clarifying the actions we are advocating.

The MAGA political movement is so enamored with its own beliefs and mythos that it refuses to self-reflect. It displays a common trait of social movements: "If you're not with us, you're against us."

To most of my MAGA friends, I do want to trust this administration to do the right things. And, I do not see that the MAGA movement is moving toward love but in fact toward the unconscious but greedy accumulation of power where you can say one thing and do the opposite.

To those who are in opposition to what this administration is doing, don’t let the headlines regarding Vance at the Munich Security Conference distract you from the the opportunity there is to measure MAGA by what Vance just said. Remove all the provocative examples he uses to make his points and look instead at the standards and values for which he says he is willing to fall on his sword. That is an open invitation to measure the MAGA movement by as well as this new administration in Washington.

There are group processes that help us to tap into our always present shared wisdom, love and spirit. In these ways, we may generate creative outcomes and mutual benefits far greater than we could have imagined.

As Otto Scharmer puts it,

“This is not just empathy. This is an entirely different way of relating to and being in the world where we are holding the space and turning yourself into an instrument for something that is coming into being and that needs you to come into reality more fully. Together, we are actualizing an emerging future possibility that is collectively being born here and now. But it doesn't matter how we call it. What matters is that this is a distinct way of operating that is at the core of dealing with the major challenges of our time that require us to connect with emerging future possibilities not only as an individual but also collectively.”

There are many ways to approach these opportunities to “connect with emerging future possibilities.” These include methods like Ephemeral Group Process, Appreciative Inquiry, Insight Dialogue as well as tools like Loomio. There are no doubt many others. My personal preference is Theory U, or the Presencing process from Otto Scharmer and the Presencing Institute. (https://www.u-school.org/theory-u)

It is elegant, but not easy. It can be summed up as this: Open your mind. Open your heart. Open your will. Hence, Open-Open-Open. My goal here is to share my take on this practice as a result of my experiences with applying it in different contexts.

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When I read the freshly published book on Theory U in 2009, it changed the way I understood social and political change. It was clear to me then that we needed new ways to experience change and nurture transformation given how chaotic our world had become. Now, it seems that more chaos has arrived and even more is on the horizon.

In the face of this, we must move on from the question of how I can better cope with change by considering how together we could do this better. It starts with becoming aware that there is more here to consider than random collections of people, ideas and opinions interacting in a sterile rational world. There are deep common intentions that we share but they are often obscured by all the noise of self-interests, opinions and fears. The key is to get past all of that and tap into the great creative power that we generate when we are truly and deeply connected together.

If being truly and deeply connected is outside your wheelhouse, then what follows may not be for you. However, the first step may be to imagine how we can be more deeply connected to one another as well as to the apparently inexplicable and ineffable source of all life. I’d like to ask for your imagination and your patience as I walk through one way I have found to do this.

Collective intelligence is sometimes called collective wisdom, group wisdom, or co-intelligence. It is the human relational process where a group with a variety of skills and perspectives can often solve problems more effectively than a group with less diversity. While this diversity is a necessary condition for successfully generating collective intelligence, it is not sufficient. Collective intelligence requires that each member of the group also have certain skills and capacities as well as skill in relational processes that allow space for new possibilities to arise.

The context for all of this is important. The diagram below shows the context for this discussion as my friend and colleague Kevin Triplett recently explained to me.

Collective wisdom is a shared power that enhances our ability to make sense of the world and to make better decisions, together. Given the complexity we face and the multiple failures happening across our society, it is urgent that we leverage this power. That is easy to say but the capacities and capabilities needed to tap into this magical power are non-trivial. Access to this collective power presents developmental challenges that not everyone will be able to address immediately but small groups can learn to model the necessary capabilities.

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Open Mind

Presencing starts with encouraging everyone to download everything that we believe we know about the opportunity, problem or challenge we are focusing on together. All of our judgments, observations, feelings, and knowledge are registered and recorded together without censoring anything. This is not about validity or proving anything. It is about letting it all out and effectively admitting that we often start discussions with judgments and an agenda or a bias. Our biases are natural so let’s be authentic from the start and let them out to play. We cannot overcome our judgmental tendencies through suppression, avoidance or denial. To open our minds, we first need to be heard and to acknowledge what preoccupies us here at the start of this process.

This is also about identifying all of the factors that may be relevant to the matters at hand. I must emphasize the point that it may be relevant. We are not trying to prove or justify our judgments. We are just becoming aware of them. This kind of transparency and self-disclosure opens up our minds and it also allows each of us to see what we are each bringing to the process. This opening up allows us to let go of our harsh judgments and start listening to one another deeply with curiosity and a learning mindset.

In the practices and language of human process facilitation there is often a lot of talk about the importance of hearing multiple perspectives. However, we rarely create environments where all perspectives feel welcome, or at least safe. Allowing even all that “crazy” stuff to be voiced and acknowledged is difficult. It can be disorienting or evoke some fear.

For instance, I’ve been speaking recently to some people who might commonly be called “anti-vaxxers.” I care about public health and I believe in the use of scientific methods for furthering medicine and providing care. However, I can easily get triggered when I believe someone is saying all vaccines are a hoax. So, I’ve been trying to watch that reaction and see if there are any ideas and beliefs that “anti-vaxxers” hold that might have some validity.

What I’ve realized is that many people see medicine as an aggressively for-profit enterprise that cares more about money than it does for public health. They see that large pharmaceutical companies have captured the agencies that are supposed to regulate them and that poor testing and expedited approval processes are putting us at risk. This thinking resonates with me too. It is clear that many of our social and political systems have been compromised and that public safety can easily be sacrificed for profit.

My point is that there are reasons so many people have lost faith in “science” and “experts.” We should be skeptical. So why not be skeptical about the benefits and necessity of vaccines? If we can agree that there are real issues with greed in the health industries, then let’s talk about that. How that affects our views of vaccines may be a longer discussion but I cannot dismiss concerns about corruption because I disagree with the solutions people are proposing. First, we could agree on the factors and influences that make medicine and public health threatening and unhealthy. We might come to agree that this corruption needs to be addressed urgently.

So many of us can see where systems are breaking down and how we are getting results we don’t want. That alone should give us pause and reason to listen to others. Yes, we need to learn methods for these difficult discussions but first we must admit that such discussions are sorely needed. Difficult discussions will never happen if real issues are not expressed in environments where people feel safe and their concerns are acknowledged. That is where all methods of Open Mind begin. Such methods for opening minds then lead toward an even better disposition between us which is Open Heart.

Open Heart

Opening our hearts happens alongside the opening of our minds. As our openness stabilizes, we can listen to the hearts and intentions of others and discover the deeply shared intentions that have brought us together. We come together to listen and learn from each other because we care deeply about whatever is our shared concern. However, we often do not recognize our shared intentions and we lose the confidence generated by this mutual intentional resonance.

Emotional literacy and the interoception of emotions are fundamental training for practicing open hearted collective work. There are many threads, large and small, that signal emotional difficulty within us. We can develop familiarity with our personal threads and we can become proficient at recognizing and communicating these emotional experiences to others. Many of us are learning how the vestiges of trauma seem to be woven into our cells and how our nervous systems act up to deprive us of the wisdom contained in our prefrontal cortex. Knowing about this, communicating it and accepting it in others is a whole new skill most of us are only just developing.

Communicating our various challenges is an act of vulnerability requiring both discernment and courage. We are strong when we see one another holistically and compassionately. However, cynicism acts to disconnect us from others and often arises as a result of disappointments and broken-heartedness that can even remain hidden to ourselves. With training and mutual awareness, we learn how our struggles are neither an embarrassment nor a weakness. We are all vulnerable. There is great strength in this vulnerability as it connects us to others.

Heart practice leads to deeper and more authentic engagement with others and with society. As we work through all the kinks that block compassion and generosity, our connections with other people deepen. A virtuous cycle emerges where our clarity of mind and heart leads to a deeper conviction about our shared intentions. With practice, we become more able to maintain this clarity, experience shared intentions and tap into our shared courage.

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Open Will

Open will emerges from fearlessness. It arrives with a spacious awareness that cuts through all the stories and reveals the theater of life. It allows us to hold the most specific and important issue at the forefront of our attention while sensing something primordial and altogether out of time. Even while we are intensely working with a group of people on an important project, it is possible to appreciate how we are part of something much greater than us and that our individual will is already part of something emergent. We are participants in a much greater process and experiencing this is a source of empowerment.

Life has been bubbling up for 14 billion years and we can imagine life on earth as a soup of amino acids that somehow got their act together. Now we are 8 billion people who have transfigured the entire planet and all our social arrangements beyond recognition. This wonder sparks a resonance with all the spiritual and mystical traditions as well as with the facts and intentions of modern science.

Our awareness exposes the temporal and compounded nature of life itself. We understand how all things are interdependent and how they will pass away. We appreciate the complex causes and conditions of human life and this both humbles us while it opens us to an intelligence and wisdom that is unborn and indestructible. With the fearlessness of our open will, we can live wisely at the functional edge of human growth where collective wisdom becomes our guide and our greatest power.

From this place of open will, we are not afraid to experiment with what our collective wisdom is expressing. We can try experiments, build prototypes and learn together what might work to address whatever opportunity, issue or concern has brought us together. In Theory U, this process I’ve described is what leads a group into the “bottom of the U” where we’ve collectively relaxed our judgment, and our cynicism, so that a greatest common good and deeply shared intent can be shared by everyone in the group. In this state of synchronization and mutuality, things emerge which often surprise everyone.

When we are fully open and authentic, there are times where the insights we are sharing even surprises us as we have just understood something for the first time. Such vulnerability and authentic self-disclosure is a form of higher intelligence that is activated when a group of people arrive together at a heartfelt mutuality. Scharmer speaks of this as alignment with “Source” and he seems to intentionally leave each of us to explain this “Source” as we see fit. Everyone can feel this Source differently and words fail miserably to express the experience of Source and intraconnectedness except perhaps for the words of poets which may only come close.

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Trust and joyful action arise together whenever we align with our highest purpose and act without attachment to outcomes. It's challenging to trust ourselves and others in this way. We need our wise and capable friends to act as checks and balances, especially when we are new to this way of navigating our lives. The support of a wise community is fundamental because “we” cannot be done alone. We are limited beings who wisely depend on each other.

For authentic action to arise, it is necessary to open the mind and let go of all harsh judgments. Then we open our hearts and let go of cynicism. And finally, we open our will and let go of fear. In this practice of open mind, open heart and open will, a radical spontaneity arises and we can better express our shared intent in a harmony that may sometimes feel autopoietic. As these skills become more intuitive, we gain more confidence that our actions are authentic and wise. While outcomes may be uncertain, we know our actions are congruent with our shared intention and deepest vision, regardless of immediate outcomes.

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I don’t fully understand where this aversion to the basic rules of a civilized society is coming from. What’s clear, however, is that the very people who shout most about “freedom” are doing their best to turn America into a “Hunger Games”-type dystopian nightmare, with checkpoints everywhere, loomed over by men with guns. — Paul Krugman, NY Times, 26 May 2023

...we will need to take on a whole new level of responsibility for ourselves, for our own minds, for our societies, and for our planet. Otherwise, if past is any prologue, all of us may unwittingly be contributing either by omission or commission, in tiny ways that may not be so tiny in the end, to creating a highly unhealthy and majorly toxic world that none of us will be happy to inhabit. — Kabat-Zinn, Jon. Mindfulness for All, Hachette Books

Many of the critical systems that we all depend upon are in crisis. We are faced with social, economic, cultural-spiritual, and ecological challenges that are unmatched in human history. We are aware of the threat of nuclear annihilation, the new reality of deadly viruses, the storms and fires of climate change, the rise of artificial intelligence, the unregulated reign of social media, the huge gap between rich and poor, and many other indicators that things are out of balance and needing intervention.

Under these stresses, many of our societal infrastructures are buckling and of course we are stressed too. Each of us can only carry so much stress and sooner or later our patience and caring falter. As our sense of being threatened increases, our embodied patterns of anxiety may trigger dysfunctional ways of coping. Those triggers live in our bodies and in our brains. Only in the last 20 years have the mechanisms of these triggers become well understood. We know a great deal more about how our minds and bodies work to create our fight, flight, freeze, and fawning behaviors. Life can quickly get complicated when we fail to notice and regulate how our biology is determining our responses rather than our reasoning and compassion. The extreme responses we see from so many people today, and the extremes we may feel within ourselves, are an erratic energy generated within us. 

Because so much of the science is new, most people are not aware of how our biology unconsciously affects our choices. The trauma we have experienced in life can also greatly affect our responses. If we are going to make progress in healing the divides in society, it is critical that all citizens understand this reactivity better so we can learn to recognize these unregulated forces within ourselves and in others. It is both comic and tragic when you see aggressive behavior and realize that the person is unaware how they are caught up in hidden patterns of trauma. It is tragic because such triggering creates disconnection between people and it can create more trauma for everyone involved. Comic, because we know how reactive we can become and yet we so often cover this vulnerability with bravado even though our emotional state is clear to others.

Armed with this knowledge, we have choices and we can act with compassion toward ourselves and see the humor when we become blind to our reactivity and consequently suffer disconnection from our inner experience. We can bring wisdom into our dialogue and change the outcomes we create together when we wake up and become intimate with our traumatic patterns of reactivity. From there, we can make better decisions together for the greatest benefit to the greatest number of us as well as for ourselves individually.

Welcoming Anxiety

It makes sense that most of us are feeling some anxiety because there is so much uncertainty about what lies ahead for our country. Anxiety and fear can drive us into action faster than any conscious decision can. Fear can act with more subtleness, too. Google has offered me this definition of fear: an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat. “Caused by the belief” is the key phrase. How we come to believe something is itself a complex process and therefore the fears generated by our beliefs are also quite complex. If our fears are strong enough, it may be nearly impossible to process the fear and we may act it out. If we understand how fear works, it is easy to see the immense power of disinformation and how the constant river of distressing news triggers fear.

When I am aware of my fear, I move forward without conforming to the expectations of others and without so much influence from old stories. Sitting with fear means sitting with all the thoughts that can buzz around in our heads while staying open to new information and staying connected with our own presence and wisdom. Many times I have asked myself, “what was I thinking,” in the aftermath of some emotional train wreck. Usually, I find that I was actually captured by my anxious state and was not aware of anything else, so I lost touch with my deepest intentions and values.

Our nation was built upon an optimism that imagines people can reach high and achieve grand dreams. We prefer to see our nation as a land of never ending promise, unbounded resources, and a place for pioneering individualism where everyone is able and expected to carve out a homestead for themselves. As we have suddenly hit the limits of our capabilities and resources on all fronts, continuing this naive narrative has led to many more unkept promises, resentment and despair. If we had a new shared story, these conflicts and disappointments might subside but that hope seems distant right now.

Our sense of disappointment has been amplified with the introduction of digital internet technologies into an economy that is intensely driven toward short-term profit and unlimited growth. Bad news gets clicks. In addition, during the last 30 years we’ve also intensified our belief in "market forces.” In its most extreme forms, this has become an almost magical belief that markets are all we need to create society. The reality of what some markets are delivering for us stands in grotesque contrast to liberty and happiness, and yet the religion of markets remains untouchable.

The dramatic changes wrought by climate changes and menacing threats like Covid-19 confirm that there are great benefits in sustaining a healthy society and that markets do fail. However, many of us react with deep distrust to any perceived restriction of unbridled personal or market freedom and some people become resentful toward any sense of responsibility we have toward one another. Ironically, our fears of being controlled by the government and the elites can also give politicians and media corporations more power to create a dystopian cycle of disinformation which amplifies the fear. In this swirl of emotionally driven reactivity, most of us feel that there is no source of information worthy of our trust. Perhaps it is in exhaustion that we turn to our basic instincts of trusting only our families and closest friends for protection, security, and a sense of control.

 When nothing can be trusted, there is good reason to be afraid. This anxiety is the major symptom of  what I call The Crisis of Believing, which is the first of the three crises we are facing. The Crisis of Believing drives a lot of anxiety because all sources of information feel unreliable and our sense of society also feels unreliable. Therefore, we can contract into states of sympathetic activation where fight and flight reactions get activated and our ability to understand and relate to one another disappears.

Holding Anger

When we feel our boundaries have been violated, we may feel anger. There is a lot of intelligence in anger assuming we can hold it and understand it before choosing to act on it. Anger can alert us to real threats where we do need to defend ourselves. However, the reactivity we see in our nation today is driven from anger that is not held, processed and understood. Such anger gets unleashed as aggression which causes ruptures in our relationships. We disconnect from others because we perceive them or what they are doing as some kind of serious threat to us. However, we are often reacting from old programmed patterns. It takes quite some effort to see and heal these old patterns.

Anger takes other forms such as contempt. On September 9, 2016, at a campaign fundraising event, Hillary Clinton said, “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.” Then she went on to say, “Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable.” The disgust and contempt expressed in these statements reflects the calculus of politicians and their speechwriters. The irony here is that Clinton is objecting to behavior she describes as “outrageous, offensive, inappropriate.” Perhaps the strategy was that this offensive description of Trump supporters would consolidate support for Clinton. It backfired but the campaign must have believed that this kind of extreme behavior was worth the risk. Disgust and contempt can be wrapped up with anger and this kind of othering is a cynical but well-established way to manipulate people.

Being primates, we have unusual powers of higher cognition and affect. This is why we derive so much of our meaning from our relationships with one another. Our ability to create stories about the world and then share these between us is part of our unique advantage as a species. We share a biological need to create these shared stories that build identity and trust, and this is getting defeated. Our stories and our mutual trust are basic to our sense of Belonging. All of our mutual efforts, wellbeing and shared beliefs are underpinned by this sense of Belonging. It determines how we experience the world including what we believe and how we interact with others.

Under stress it is natural to feel a lack of safety and security which drives a sense of being separate, alone and vulnerable. This can lead to a lot of anger and disappointment. It sometimes feels like everything around us is conspiring to erode trust and keep us activated at high levels of stress, anger and disconnection. Even our new digital technologies are working to defeat our natural instincts to rely on one another. Consider that algorithms, the needs of advertisers, and the profit motive in digital advertising are what govern our digital interactions. We experience a rise in cortisol and dopamine levels when our interactions are stressful and that produces unhealthy effects and destructive emotional affectations like aggression. Everyone has witnessed the shocking human behaviors sometimes seen in social media. There is often a nastiness and selfishness that shows little regard for other people. And, they show even less regard for the values, institutions, and methods that have helped us flourish in the past. This anger and the resulting lack of decency and mutual regard is discouraging and disconnecting. This many manifestations of this widespread anger is what I call the Crisis of Belonging.

Embracing Our Avoidance

Many people seem to be avoiding talking with people who hold different views. Sometimes in social situations, I sense an edginess where everyone seems to tense up at the same time if I mention my understanding that we are facing a global climate emergency. Avoidance is when we try to distance ourselves from something that we fear. We want to remain ignorant or at least give an impression that we are ignorant. Avoidance may also be how we sometimes unknowingly split off from our feelings because splitting off from our feelings may have been the only intelligent thing to do for our survival. It can be a blessing when our lower brain protects us because we may be vulnerable or powerless. Imagine what happens when the lioness has the antelope in its mouth. Playing dead seems like a good option because the lioness may put you down. The nervous system of that antelope just turns off on its own. Similarly, I do not decide to be numb or to look away, but I have often witnessed my self-protective patterns doing just that. It is a good day when I realize that I am checking out or am resistant to learning something new. Then, I can become curious and open up by bringing my attention back to my broader intention to keep learning and growing.

Avoidance and ignorance can also show up as arrogance or grandiosity. When I was younger, it regularly seemed as if I was incapable of not having answers. My mind was always actively seeking and it seemed as if I could find all possible answers to all the questions. I would often jump into solutions and answers as a matter of habit. The imposition of my views deprived me of insights from others and meant that I was unable to respond to the insights of others. The ability to respond is another way of saying the word “responsibility.” Embracing my ignorance and listening is an act of humility and responsibility which is the antidote to avoidance.

We see human relationship ruptures in our news feeds, between friends and in our own families. This may feel like our connections with one another are lost or are always under threat. This clearly has serious implications for our ability to operate as communities and as a society. When our relationships are degraded, we cannot work together and make things work. In fact, many people contract so far that they forget our interdependence and fail to remember the immense value provided by the systems and infrastructures of our society. This shows up as extreme self-reliance and an unwillingness to invest in common interests or worse as a grandiosity that imagines itself as separate from and superior to others. Public health, building codes, roads and bridges are obvious examples that we all depend upon. Covid exposed the holes in the public health system while the number of collapsing bridges across the nation is an embarrassment that exposes our confused priorities as a society. We maximize the extraction and consumption of our resources with little regard for replenishment and stewardship. Many societal functions have recently been degrading; perhaps because we’ve stopped investing and maintaining these basic shared resources and needs.

The doubt about the validity of elections, the constant gridlock in Congress, and countless other disappointments generate feelings that all our infrastructure is crumbling and we cannot find the will to make the repairs, regenerate, and build new solutions. Together, we are avoiding these realities of how we are degrading our infrastructure and extracting all of our natural resources too. This avoidance is what I call the Crisis of Building and it is characterized by neglect and avoidance of our responsibilities to one another.

Wicked Problems

It is challenging to prioritize all the problems we face together, and yet we can get closer to clarity when we avoid tantrums and instead activate our natural kindness, wisdom, and compassion. Issues like guns and abortion are painful and important issues that have been dividing Americans for many years. Yet, we ignore rampant economic injustices, huge prison populations, and the lack of competition in markets like real estate, health and pharmaceuticals. The wicked problems never seem to make it onto the campaign trail because special interests control the political agenda and generate distraction using the bait of emotionally-charged and never-ending cultural issues. Even the staggering effects of climate change have been overshadowed by political arguments about topics like gender and identity. After hundreds of years of racial injustice, many of us continue to be horrified and paralyzed by the pernicious reality of how racial hatred drives politics. Money in politics is another elephant in the room as it ensures that neither political party represents its constituents and dreadfully complicates the work of politicians. These “wicked problems” threaten to destroy our society and yet our political leaders seem addicted to political spectacle and distraction as the source of their power.

An example of how ludicrous these culture wars have become was highlighted in the article How to Make School Board Culture Wars Even Worse (https://nyti.ms/3OA76IU). In some states, legislation is being pursued to make local school board elections partisan events. The goal is to have party affiliations listed on ballots for even these local board elections. Those who are pushing for this change argue that this will allow citizens to see the values of the nominees. They also argue that it will raise the profiles of these races that do not attract much attention from local voters. Critics of the new system fear that this change will force candidates to focus only on the hot-button issues and this will generate more conflict rather than cooperation.

This conflict illustrates our situation. Here we have well-meaning people whose nervous systems have gone through the roof and cannot see the destruction they are doing to the relationships they value and depend on. In schools, where we want our children to learn, we cannot create such contentious environments and imagine our children will benefit. At some point though, the people in conflict could discuss the greater context of how our anxiously activated culture affects us and how we must start from a common ground. It also helps when we can identify values and principles that we share. We do have intentions in common such as how we want our kids to feel safe and be able to learn and feel safe. When we are hyped up, we can delude ourselves and imagine that our beliefs must be enacted for everyone. This fundamentalism destroys relationships and creates conflict.

It is easy to underestimate the challenges of being a peacemaker as well as changemaker. Transformational changes require a community of people who can act together with skillfulness and confidence. It is possible to act collectively from an informed and evidence-based approach with only minimal emotional uproar. That said, it is true that the crusader in me has too often made the mistake of righteousness and impatience and failed to see how we must move together as communities of practice. 

As an executive in a public service organization, I became incensed by greedy and unethical behavior of our suppliers that were also being sanctioned by our board. These for-profit companies had banded together and demanded new business terms that were onerous for our non-profit mandate. Our board was politically appointed and it was expedient for them to sacrifice what was good for our organization in order to appease some powerful business people who threatened to escalate their case to senior ministers in government. This made it almost impossible for us to achieve our mission. This situation triggered patterns in me that were etched into my body and I could not manage the energy and the anger that I felt at this injustice. When I met with resistance or unkind words, it often triggered me into self-righteousness and disrespectful behaviors, and this alienated some people. I was not listening to others, so no one was listening to me. I remained inconsolable and blindly determined but did not build alliances and support around me. Even though my cause was just, it led to nothing but heartache for me. Nothing improved and my doggedness was used by the suppliers as a smokescreen for the real problem. My vainglorious posturing defeated my mission and helped no one.

When motivated by narrow self-interest or emotional dysregulation, many of us may find it difficult to respect the dignity, value, and rights of each person. As well, when we are subjected to injustice, we may not naturally turn to our friends or the broader community for help and instead take the overly heroic approach of going it alone. I have witnessed how well-meaning activists become overwhelmed by their emotions and end up alienating those who would naturally support them. In these situations, there are modern methods of repair available to us. In later chapters, I will share some methods that I have been learning during recent events including the Covid pandemic as well as many other upheavals in these past 15 years.

In frightening times, it is a blessing when we can come together with dignity and decency. However, many of us fear our old way of life, or the idealistic future we desire, is slipping away. We want beachheads to protect our interests and prevent all those "others'' from destroying society. In truth, we are all those people who will save society. Those "others" are in fact just us, too. They are Americans who love this nation, regardless of whether you approve of how they express their love of country. A healthy society means there will always be a great diversity of perspectives which must coexist, cooperate, and respectfully disagree. These are the great shoulders upon which this Republic has always stood. Perhaps the early founders were heartier and more disciplined than us. Even with serious blind spots around race, gender, the environment, and the horrific tragedy of chattel slavery, they put aside their many differences and built a remarkable nation with speed and audacity.

They kept their minds clear and their vision focused on higher principles. Without this shared higher purpose, any one of us may slip into the overpowering smallness of anxiety, anger, and avoidance. This is predictable given the stressful and traumatic atmosphere that pervades civic life during times of conflict. To work together as a community, we must remember our inheritance and learn to coach each other kindly. This is how we can discover elegant solutions and how complexity will become more manageable. Things can get distorted in  a solitary mind. The only way through the complexity is to discover together what matters most. As we move collectively through these knots in our society, we confirm that we can work collectively for better lives, more liberty and the ongoing pursuit of happiness.

What liberty and happiness mean must be refreshed and expressed for these modern times. These high ideals must be informed by the conditions we face now. This task requires us to open our minds and hearts and freshly express these truths wisely. These principles are not absolute and they do not accommodate naïve, unconditional and self-centered pursuits. These principles are about a Republic. We must not reduce our highest principles to simplistic expressions of petulant and selfish entitlements. We are 330+ million people who share mingled cultures from all corners of the earth. There is just less space now and adapting to this reality can be painful and frightening. Our human dignity and our highest principles are always here. Their power and importance have grown in influence over these 250+ years. The Republic stands on this inheritance or it fails.

Our economic system originally grew from philosophies and worldviews that positioned humanity as God's chosen ones where we own the bounty of the earth to do with as we please. As pointed out in The Dawn of Everything, such narrow economic and philosophical views spread their tentacles throughout culture and society. We can at least partially trace our extractive views toward nature and our justifications of exploitative behavior to self-serving interpretations of the works of philosophers like Rousseau and Hobbes. These philosophies have become modern myths about altruism versus our selfishness, but there was never any scientific evidence to support either of these philosophical views in the first place. I find it hard to believe that we accept these shallow myths about human behavior. Most of the evidence arising now in archeology and anthropology supports the view that humans have long enjoyed highly open, flexible, and collaborative models of social organization where human kindness and generosity were natural and common sensical. It is this flexibility we need now.

Our system of government and our economy has positively transformed the lives of many many millions of people. However, it has evolved into a hyper-aggressive form that insists upon and defends the inevitability of economic stratification and oppressive hierarchy. There is now a cultural myth that the few will always inflict injustice upon the many and that this is just the way things are. This fictitious story serves to justify the rigid economic and philosophical orthodoxy that obscures cruelty and inequity. This debased and cynical myth about humanity is sorely in need of updating. There are creative ways of living in society that have been demonstrated over and over again that our culture has temporarily forgotten. It is like a lost technology that we are finding once again. Science also supports the view that we have a generative social nature that is hard-wired into us. The best way to find this generative nature is simply to use it.

History teaches us that these tendencies to forget our common humanity, even in small ways, lead to tragedy. Yet, we fall prey to those who provide naïve answers that claim to address the problems we face. Even as we buy into the game and grab our goodies, there is within us a knowing that is smarter than our rationalizations and our need to belong to our tribe. We know in our bones that the violation of basic rights across the world cannot be justified, and we understand that the assault on our rights within our own borders is even more outrageous and intolerable.

Our complicity with these abuses is not always conscious, but we do sometimes look away. It may seem reasonable that these "others" who are being blamed actually deserve their plight. We may even rationalize torture or putting humans in animal cages, but there is no worthy rationalization. There is no authentic standard from any spiritual, religious, or philosophical source that advocates the loss of our decency. These rationalizations of injustice are one way our minds cope with anger, anxiety and avoidance. This behavior arises when we are operating in a toxic atmosphere of visceral emotion. It takes discipline to see this atmosphere and reject its inhumanity.

We also need the company of wise friends because we cannot do this alone. Higher expectations among a community of wise people drove the creation of this nation and it is time to interrupt the programming of our current era to find the same courage and collective confidence to generate new solutions to our wicked problems. We can re-inhabit and act from the same bravery that formed this nation. We must look beyond aspirations for big homes, cars, air conditioners, and smart televisions. We must consider how we can help this nation find its way back to its core principles of decency and dignity. Our rampant obsession with the benefits of materialism is not inherently some kind of evil. But our obsessions do blind us to what is most essential to society and to our liberty.

The sacrifices our ancestors made to create a freer society are not fairy tales for our children. We are descended from people who made unpopular decisions. They sided with justice and with the inherent dignity of human beings even though that circle of dignity was restricted and failed to include everyone. Since our founding, we have expanded these insights and there is now an that we must work to include everyone. We established fairness and created reasonable methods to ease the pain and suffering of many people  and we have given one another a greater sense of liberty and more reasons to live life fully. We did this by noticing the kindness of society and by honoring the worth of every person. Our inheritance flows down to us from brave ancestors who paid attention to love and to justice even with all their blind spots and prejudices. This same disciplined and highly attentive care is now our calling even with our blind spots and prejudices.

Making Sense Within Complexity

There is currently no government, corporate, or institution that has the maneuverability and mandate to move at the speed of innovation needed to turn the tide and heal the divides in our communities. The powerful and complex forces that control our increasingly shaky infrastructure have captured our systems of political representation and media information. Digital media is now relentlessly driven by advertising and our political system is driven by the squirrel cage of campaign advertising and special interest funding. There is little impetus in our systems to whole-heartedly serve society and its citizens, us. In fact, the perverse incentive of ever-growing profits are controlling systems that once supported the common good. These complex and entwined systems now serve themselves and those who already have the greatest power. This has created great divides in our country, in our communities, and between people. This inertia seems insurmountable but we can bridge these divides.

Complex causes and conditions can easily drive us toward simplistic solutions which are not sustainable but might feel good for short periods. Instead, we can slow down and choose our next steps carefully. “Simple” has trouble seeing the elegance that exists within all the complexity. The universe is 13.75 billion years old and life on earth has been around for roughly 4 billion years. There are almost 8 billion human souls walking this earth today. Our primate ancestors started up only 50 million years ago. By comparison, we Homo sapiens just got here and yet we have created many remarkable things along with a lot of chaos and destruction. This has resulted in a lot of confusion and a growing sense that there are no solutions to our many crises.

There are many people who have the will and the resources to create the changes we need to face our challenges. Our communities are endowed with great capability and endless creativity that could be the source of our next great revelation but our current systems are blocking far too many gifted Americans from realizing their tremendous potential as peacemakers and changemakers. Our nation is likely to continue into this death spiral unless acted upon by some outside force. That force will emanate from groups of wise and compassionate people acting together within our local communities. Collectively, we have the heart, the subject-matter expertise, the capabilities, and the digital technologies to holistically understand the causes of our problems and to launch appropriate interventions.

Einstein is mistakenly attributed as having said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” Whoever said it, they made my point well. The process of defining a problem is not a trivial matter. It takes collaboration and a collective desire that is often lacking when people are confused, as are we. Getting everyone to agree to spend adequate time defining the problem is the first hurdle, as is the case here in this book. I want to race ahead to the solutions as I suspect you do. However, we have to admit that looking at our problems for too long gets depressing. We don’t really want to do it even though we don’t understand the causes of our predicament. So, let’s get over that resistance now and dive into these causes to fully define the character of these crises.

Modern developments have brought about a long list of crises that we can solve. Let’s name a few: the gap between rich and poor, the degradation of our biosystems, widespread mental illness, pandemics, supply chains vulnerabilities, the ongoing threat of nuclear war, bio weapons, the disruption of the post WWII alliances and power balances, the introduction of exponential technologies that we don’t understand (e.g. AI), destruction of the information commons (fake news!) and the rise of authoritarianism. You may have already thought of a few that I’ve missed so please add those to the list. All of this should not really shock us. After all, the human population on earth is on its way to 10 billion, modern technologies and tools like telecommunications, artificial intelligence and high-speed transportation are deployed all around the world, markets and global trade have grown exponentially and the global economy is now driven by hyperactive consumerism as well as the ever-increasing extraction of the planet’s natural resources. As many parents have said to their children, you made the mess, now clean it up.

All of these developments demonstrate the complexity of our world. Economic systems, social systems, and ecosystems are all complex in themselves but now this complexity is exacerbated by the fact that 8 billion people are all interconnected and reacting in different ways. Our traditional systems of education, politics, and most everything really, were not designed for this crisis of crises. We do not understand and we cannot manage our current global situation with the old systems. We are entwined in a complex global weave that governs all our basic systems such as finance, food, energy and even politics. When we address one issue, something else is affected in unpredictable ways. Complexity is unpredictable and much of our world operates within complexities that can be invisible to us.

Fortunately, there are many people exploring new methods as well as building the new tools we need to understand and then address complexity. Complexity theory and the systems sciences have grown quickly in parallel with all this complexity. At the vanguard of this complexity work are organizations like the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). On their website, SFI describe their work this way:

Our researchers endeavor to understand and unify the underlying, shared patterns in complex physical, biological, social, cultural, technological, and even possible astrobiological worlds. Our global research network of scholars spans borders, departments, and disciplines, unifying curious minds steeped in rigorous logical, mathematical, and computational reasoning. As we reveal the unseen mechanisms and processes that shape these evolving worlds, we seek to use this understanding to promote the well-being of humankind and of life on earth.

Cities, economies, biosystems, nations, our nervous system, the internet, and the weather are all examples of complex systems. From cells to societies, complexity is what is driving an awesome and infinitely adaptive world that displays its wonder in many ways. The Santa Fe Institute points out that we are ill-suited to grasp and comprehend the full nature of this complexity.

But the way in which complex phenomena are hidden, beyond masking by space and time, is through nonlinearity, randomness, collective dynamics, hierarchy, and emergence — a deck of attributes that have proved ill-suited to our intuitive and augmented abilities to grasp and to comprehend.

As we come to understand the causes of the many crises we face, we have to accept that our old rule-based and inflexible approaches will never address this complexity with the inventiveness needed. We will see in the next few chapters how many of our basic systems are creating chaos and fear so we are naturally trying to obsessively control things with strict rules and harsh punishments that date all the way back to the Old Testament. The irony of this is that the underlying complexity of this era requires something other than hard rules and rigidity. As the scientist and author Neil Thiese points out in his book, Notes on Complexity, we are dealing with dynamic outcomes that are unpredictable. We will discuss complexity more deeply later as we look at the solutions to the crisis of all the crises. But it helps to recognize that these crises and their complexity demand responses that are radically different from how we are consistently fighting to maintain the status quo while ignoring what this glaringly obvious complexity is demanding of us.

Part of our work is to show the powerful how they can respond more intelligently and compassionately to the widespread suffering in our society. At 3 a.m., alone in the dark, they know they are no better or worse than anyone else and this may create some fear. They can be reassured that no one wants to destroy their prosperity. It is up to us to clarify how everyone benefits in a generative society. We also need to be cautious of oversimplifying the role of wealthy people. If we blindly blame the rich, we pander to scapegoating that demands immediate results from them, as if they were each personally to blame. Simplistic explanations make for good slogans and give us a sense of moral righteousness. However, this grandiosity reproduces the aggression it seeks to overcome and it distracts us from our natural compassion for one another.

We can move beyond shame and grandiosity to realize how our society is made of systems, and systems of systems, which produce mind boggling complexity. Complex systems have intelligence and resiliency that is distributed as well as centralized. It is simply not possible to build new systems without distributing new intelligences and information throughout the old system to support the growth that will eventually replace the old. This transformation will not be easy and it will pay to reiterate the complexity we are facing together. The US has over 300 million people who generate a GDP of roughly $30 trillion and our nation interacts across a planet of 7.7 billion people who together generate a GDP of $100 trillion. In the last 50 years, the world population has more than doubled. 200 years ago, we could not fly, nothing was electronic, and it took months to get an answer to a letter you sent to England. It is no wonder that the world feels unstable and we are grasping for explanations.

The ground is shifting, and it seems natural that many of us may resist change and that the more privileged may worry that their positions of power are eroding. I can sense this discomfort too because I have benefited from the status quo. It is no surprise to hear conspiracy theories about how non-white people and women are seeking to replace white men. Such myths are espoused by demagogues to help them gain power. The acquisition of power through fear and demagogy looks like success and Americans often share a morbid attraction to this kind of gangster success. We adore the projected sense of security that such swaggering authority offers. We want to believe in someone who promises to make things easier for us. We can become magnetized by someone who provides simple rules to follow and who promises to relieve us of what feels burdensome. Justice and compassion can feel burdensome. Even when we know these cruel myths and their rationalizations are grossly delusional, we may play along. Disinformation and gaslighting feed the visceral swirl and many people have become cynical and disconnected. Only with the influence of healthy relationships and aspirational values can we heal these ruptures.

There is something deeper, wider, and richer than our current model of society and economic life. It takes courage and confidence to question our assumptions and embrace complexity. Such questioning requires a fundamental shift in perception. As a nation, we have spent a lot of time and effort treating separate symptoms of systems failure, so we are naturally struggling to find the root causes. The symptoms I’ve offered here, the 3“A”s of Anger, Anxiety and Avoidance, are the painful symptoms we must no longer ignore as a nation. They are red flags that the Crises of Belonging, Believing, and Building have something troubling in common: we are failing to make sense of our world together. This deeper crisis is what some have called the Meta-crisis. This view of a meta-crisis may help us to ask penetrating questions about the three crises I’ve named and how they intersect with our collective sensemaking. Later, we will examine how the three crises are entwined and how specific actions in our communities will generate solutions and achieve transformation. As we progress, this theme of transformation will unfold alongside an understanding of the character of the three crises. In the next few chapters, we will delve deeply into the crises of Believing, Belonging, and Building.

To help navigate the book, the table below summarizes the A-s, B-s, and C-s which are respectively the symptoms, causes and solutions we need to metabolize. There will be much more about the solutions of Confidence, Connection and Courage after we tackle the 3B-s in the next three chapters.

Symptoms: 1. Anxiety 2. Anger 3. Avoidance

Causes: 1. Believing 2. Belonging 3. Building (“The Crisis of B…”)

Solutions: 1. Confidence 2. Connection 3. Courage

So, let’s get out there and let’s fight for it. Let’s get out there and let’s vote for it. And together, let us write the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told. Thank you. God bless you. May God bless the United States of America.” - Vice President Kamala Harris, August 22, 2024

It felt as if Kamala Harris spoke directly to us tonight from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. This “us” was a group of local grassroots activists who have been working here in California to flip six key congressional districts in the hope that a Democratic controlled House would be able to stop Trump from gaining too much power, should he be elected again.

Most of us are over 50 and many are retired. Many of us watched when Barack Obama said “yes, we can.” And we said the same, “yes we can.” I was watching in 2008 when the polls closed in California and Obama was projected to be the next President of the United States. It felt as if the United States was becoming a place where equity and justice for all was highly valued.

But that optimism faded, revealing that our old "every man for himself" culture had merely gone into hiding. This serves as a reminder that progress requires constant effort. Like in physics, social order needs energy input to prevent chaos and decline.

While laziness, corruption, and greed persist, tonight we glimpsed the counterforces of "Freedom, Opportunity, Compassion, Dignity, Fairness." However, electing Harris and Walz won't solve everything. We'll always face threats from overwhelming selfishness and cruelty. Yet, if Democrats win the House, Senate, and White House, we could revisit the vision articulated by Obama, which aligns closely with the Harris/Walz ticket.

America seems to be evolving. Harris's speech resonated with me, despite its characteristic American exceptionalism. Her claims about being American as "the greatest privilege on Earth" and our story as "the most extraordinary ever told" were surprisingly bold, perhaps even outrageous. But they reflect a shifting mood in the country. Something is happening in America.

And let’s be thankful that something is happening. Since returning from New Zealand a decade ago, I've felt like I landed on a different planet. That characteristic confidence and optimism had vanished. As our confidence reappears, perhaps we'll be less arrogant and complacent about overcoming division (racism, sexism), laziness, corruption, and greed. Societal improvement spans centuries, not election cycles. We shouldn't be surprised when our nation veers off course; as Benjamin Franklin said, we have a republic "if we can keep it."

America has indeed gone off track, with our widespread disengagement and self-interest as well as how narrow materialist beliefs dominate our minds and hearts. Our multiple crises - wealth concentration, poverty, decaying democratic systems - stem from a deep malaise. Harris's reminder of our aspirations is welcome, even if tempered by the knowledge that we'll always fall short of these ideals. And that we always have to get back up and get to work.

Tonight, I sensed a willingness in Americans to start anew. Our task is to keep the worst of the chaos at bay and build a caring society amidst complexity and distraction. We may lose our way periodically, but if we commit to returning to higher aspirations, as Harris did tonight, we'll be okay. Right now, that seems like a good place to start.

Something has been making me uncomfortable about the way AI is unfolding. Listening to Bill Gates on the Next Big Idea podcast last week helped me clarify what that is. The podcast was called, “Bill Gates Reveals Superhuman AI Prediction” but the show was more of an intelligent discussion about the implications of AI. I enjoyed the insights shared by all the participants* and in particular, Bill Gates. However, something important was missing.

At one point in the podcast, the host (Rufus Griscom) offers an example of a powerful application of AI and notes how this AI allowed the CEO of the company to lay off half his salespeople. Gates picks up on this well-known effect of AI and makes the statement that the people affected by the labor and productivity improvements may not like these “transitions” (they lost their jobs). He then adds, “you'd never want to run the clock backwards and say, you know, thank God we were less productive.”

He also points out that we seem to lack the political capability to manage these transitions and how we lack programs to help those who are affected. These allusions were made casually. There was little sign of disappointment, compassion or even resignation that we couldn’t help ease the pain of people affected by this whirlwind of new technology. It seemed like everyone on the podcast unconsciously accepted that the harm being done is the price of progress.

This is where I get uncomfortable. Not because our world is being transformed by technology but because the people harmed by these “productivity improvements” are being ignored. It is also disappointing how industry leaders posit their inability to help those affected while they, their investors and the markets profit enormously. This is what happened with the internet and it is happening with AI.

Around 2009, the internet business effectively became an advertising and selling machine. From then on, any desire to manifest the most desirable social benefits of the internet have effectively been abandoned by all but the most idealistic people. Once the hyper-consumption-driven business model showed success, any real purpose for internet technology beyond rapid wealth generation vanished. The internet then became a noisy street market with hawkers selling their wares and hollering misinformation that drives clicks. While social media has become one big “look at me” party.

AI has moved at lightning speed in this same direction. Worse, AI is quickly becoming our witch’s mirror like the one from Snow White. (ChatGPT, who is the fairest of them all?) Even though there are many compassionate uses being built, AI is too often used to amplify our neurotic need to acquire stuff and to position ourselves as the fairest and smartest person in the room. Our world is obsessed with these vain delusions as well as by the reckless illusion of an infinitely growing economy. As if.

We have all but forgotten the power technology has to authentically connect us for our greatest common good. In 1995, there was ample desire to altruistically improve and transform our world using the powers of the internet. However with AI, too few of us are asking how AI could help to connect us and how it could lift up humanity and bring out the best in us. This time around, there is a single-minded and frenetic grab for the financial wealth that this new technology generates without wisdom or care. The implications of this collective blind spot are dire.

Superhuman. That is the word they used on the podcast to describe the next wave of AI. They talk about superhuman productivity, they list many examples of AI productivity enhancements and they essentially equate this with the value of AI to humanity. There are greater benefits of AI than productivity but this is not on the radar. All bow to the Gods of Productivity and Ever Greater Extraction. Bigger, better, faster, more. (I am seeing absurd images of cavemen running around burning everything because they just discovered fire.)

AI is humanity looking in the mirror. It uses our gestures and it mimics us. AI can tell us where we are but it cannot tell us where we are going. In order for AI to reflect the best aspects of our humanity and our evolution, it needs information and language that reflects our highest values and most evolved capabilities. AI does not yet help us to be more humane because we are uncertain what it is to be human beyond our grasping for more of everything regardless of consequences.

AI will never know our greatest common good as humans unless this “good” is made clear. Through our actions and our language, we are training our AI tools that we are beings who are only interested in becoming ever more productive, efficient, acquisitional and extractive of nature, at any price, including our own extinction. Surely, there is more to tell of our human story than this.

Gates wisely points out that AI could help us understand one another better and help us to discover what information and forces are pushing us in different directions. It could help us to bridge the different views in the world and improve the quality and depth of our knowledge about key issues. Although the podcast never really pays off on this idea, there is no doubt that AI could help citizens to collaborate and generate the reliable news and information they need.

AI could become a great leveler by assisting us to manage shared information environments without depending on experts, large media conglomerates, governments or any intermediary. This can be done within each community and across networks of communities. (Look for more on this topic in future posts.)

The most critical applications of AI at this moment are those that address our need for more trust and better connections between citizens. We need to generate information and insights about our social, economic and cultural challenges and learn how to make better decisions together to build the healthy society we want. The power of AI and the internet are already here for us to leverage. With a little innovation, we can ensure the quality and reliability of the information we consume, deepen trust and act more wisely together.

Building more generative applications of AI will also demonstrate how our political economy is evolving beyond the burdens imposed by outdated industrial and neoliberal economic values. We are in a new epoch of human history that some are calling the Anthropocene and this reality is already part of our moral imagination. We are now the most important influence on the health and prosperity of our planet as well as on the evolution or demise of humankind. This is a great responsibility and it must be integral to every decision about the uses and applications of AI.

*Rufus Griscom and Bill Gates were joined by Andy Sack and Adam Brotman, co-authors of the book “AI First.

The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt, Undelivered Address Prepared for Jefferson Day, Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/210105

Daunting Circumstances

The fellowship, stewardship and unity required to affect change in the United States today may seem out of reach. Relationships between 330+ million Americans have become strained and we feel the divisions between our social groups and even within our families. We are not sharing much certainty or clarity together and we seem to be stuck in the distortions of dichotomous thinking. This has us wondering how we move forward together as one nation. Perhaps you are asking whether moving forward together is even possible. Maybe this is a time to grasp at an imagined glorious past. Or, perhaps we should accept that our roughly 250-year run as a unique and fortunate society has ended.

The United States has helped to accomplish great progress for humanity and yet this progress has also been accompanied by some terrible injustices. The lives of many have improved and yet we know how we have caused great harm to those we looked down upon. Slavery is one obvious example and yet so many white Americans still struggle to admit how the abuses of racism have spanned across the entire history of Black people in the United States from the early days of slavery in the 1600s through Jim Crow and onto our streets today. Yes, there has been progress but the need of white people to constantly reaffirm that progress gets tiring and feels too much like a defense against seeing how racial strife still seriously impacts people of color. It is not easy to hold these truths simultaneously and that triggers a lot of reactivity and conflict.

Even with abuses and disappointments, some spark rises above our limitations and seeks to correct our injustices. That spark helps us overcome our fears of people and of ideas that are different from us and ours. Conversely, our tendency to react to differences and show contempt has led to violence and injustice. Both are true about our nation and we will explore both of these tendencies because it is only by looking holistically at our past that we can see our path ahead.

This nation and its people have proven our resilience and capability. These core strengths of ours have not changed. What is different is the breadth and depth of the complexity we face. There are nearly 8 billion souls on earth and many are communicating like digital bees in a hive. Seventy-five years ago, at the end of WWII, things were clearer. After defeating a great evil, we were determined to build the world in the image of our Republic using the undiluted power and pride of the American Dream. What audacity we had and how our victories seemed certain, and mostly they were. Our victory at war had made us the most powerful nation on earth. We were without a match. Today, we are in league with many nations operating within an interdependent global economy that knows no borders. Our nation has become diverse beyond the imaginations of the founding families and far beyond our old cultural melting-pot stories. Conditions have changed and our society must likewise change. It is fortunate that we have such an uncanny ability to overcome daunting circumstances.

There are many voices warning that dissolution, violence, and upheaval are inevitable. Many claim the divisions are too deep and no bridges are possible. If you are feeling any of this, then I hope you will consider another vision for our future together. This vision is pointing far afield from the common visions expressed by our leaders. We are building a new path for society beyond our selfish day-to-day pursuits. This future calling us sometimes seems as ephemeral as the pursuit of happiness but something new wants to be born and we must pay attention.

If you haven't noticed the staggering impacts of the many disruptions we’ve had to face, it may be that you’ve been protected, somehow. You may not be a one percenter but you may be fortunate enough to feel sheltered from the storms of our times. In the book, Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good, by Chuck Collins, he points to the great privileges of wealth and how subtle this can be. Collins tells a poignant story about how he cashed in his trust account when he was in his late 20s. He was idealistic and thought that if he gave up his inheritance, he could live like other people and understand our nation more intimately, as normal people do. He learned that simply by the right of his birth into a wealthy powerful family, he had opportunities and connections woven through most every aspect of his life and there was no escaping that. This was a sobering realization for Collins. He saw that being privileged was not his to lose but it was his responsibility to do something wise with his privilege.

Power, wealth and privilege are all good. The difficulty arises when we fail to see how it isolates and creates the delusion of being separate from the majority who do not share those privileges. We see the flamboyant self-indulgence of well-known figures who don’t seem connected with others and seem to feel little responsibility for anything except their own power and pleasure. Great privileges can drive most of us to neurotically seek new experiences, over-value non-conformity and break all the rules. I’ve worked closely with some of these people and it seems that these erratic behaviors can show up unconsciously. We are all human and the wealthy are often quite isolated and ironically powerless. Even with their billions, I have seen the frustrations when all the money in the world cannot give them what they want.

The least privileged, and even the most privileged, Americans are now all affected by the vagaries of an interdependent global economy. The number of humans on the earth may reach 10 billion within the next 50 years, according to the United Nations. While the US represents roughly 5% of the global population, we hold a place of disproportionate importance in consumption and economic power. Because our power is so dependent on other nations, it is not surprising that we feel the turbulence of rapid environmental changes, the violence within and between nations, and the tensions these pressures create within our country. We continue to strive to ensure “the domestic tranquility” as we learn to navigate the complex global forces confronting all nation-states. So much complexity can feel overwhelming but we already have what we need to meet these new challenges.

We can renew our Republic and sustain the thriving of our nation for centuries to come if we can pivot and be flexible enough to adapt to the new global reality. Our founders sought to preserve the peace within society so that many could live without the fears and burdens of ongoing social strife. This domestic tranquility means that the many should mostly enjoy peace in our homes, and on the streets. It also means we should be free of chronic fear for our basic survival. Many of our founders saw all people as deserving of such favorable conditions and they insisted governments exist to achieve this goal. Essentially, our ancestors agreed we were worth it. They insisted that everyone (well, mostly everyone who looked like them), high and low, big and small, is worth the bother and that society must support a rewarding life for everyone. It is important to again recall that this idea of "everyone" often excluded many of us and our blind spots have caused harm to many people, particularly non-whites and women.

Even with their many failures and hypocrisies, it was a radical vision in 1776 and it has continued to evolve for over 250 years. The vision that established our nation was based upon an observation about what it means to be a human being: that every person innately has tremendous value and fundamental dignity by simply being alive. They declared this view with the clarity of a rising sun and without hesitancy. By being human, we are valuable and each life has an inherently deserved set of basic rights and privileges. This is a momentous statement of confidence about our existence and it indicates how we should organize our affairs. We created this Republic understanding that humans have rights for no other reason than we are alive and that these rights are inalienable. There is tremendous dignity in this view; especially when held with deep faith and defended with tenacity.

Yet, we are a long way from 1776. There are too many privileged silos of people with narrow interests who are powerful, highly self-protective and often immune to learning and growth. When power is so concentrated, we cannot create new laws and policies fast enough to keep up with the rate of change. It has become almost impossible to protect the rights of all citizens when small powerful groups can so effectively protect their positions. To address this, we must stretch ourselves and project our inalienable rights into a 22nd century context.

Little Miracles

When we press the button at the crosswalk, we reasonably expect that the cars will stop and we will cross the road with little risk. That is an everyday miracle that is easy to ignore. When my daughter was barely a teenager, I had some fun with her while making a point about the simple miracle of traffic lights and pedestrian crosswalks. We were out walking and stopped together at a road crossing that was wide and busy. As I approached that remarkable little metal push button at the pedestrian crossing, I said, “Watch this!” Then I reached out and pressed the button. As I did, I waxed lyrical about the miracle taking place. The traffic lights would turn red, the cars would stop, the crosswalk lights would turn green at the right time, and we could safely cross that busy road. Like any teenager would, my daughter groaned and said I was crazy. I explained how we drift through life without seeing the miracles we accord one another in society. We overlook the complex causes and conditions that support us to navigate our lives together.

If we don’t appreciate how society works and how every person shares in the strength of society, our lives degrade just as the roads erode and the bridges collapse. We may forget the almost magical powers that flow from a well-running society. Society is the tide that raises all boats and politics exists to help us make decisions together about how we organize and manage society. More simply, politics is about building society together. Through politics, we negotiate and make decisions concerning the way power and resources will be used. These decisions may help all of us to thrive, or not. Just like the social agreement to stop at red lights helps protect us, society depends upon many collaborations to make our lives better. The countless agreements and commitments we make together can be the bonds that connect us and nurture us, or they can become tyranny as they did for the early Americans who eventually rejected English rule.

While we are individuals, it is also true that living together in society affords us remarkable benefits. So we are not only morally motivated to accommodate one another but it is also a matter of common sense and wise self-interest. One reason English is taught at school is because we realize that regardless of how multilingual we have become, we do need one common language, at least. We also teach other languages because we respect and appreciate the many cultures and languages of this melting-pot nation, and the world. We also have strict building codes so that if one house catches fire, an entire city does not burn to the ground. These agreements and rules are not radical political statements, they are just simple accommodations that help things work better for everyone. The basic values and objectives of society are simple and they are the foundation of citizenship. The society we build together helps us care for each other because we know today what they knew over 250 years ago: we each have an inalienable right to pursue happiness and that we do so together within society. Even with our failings, blind spots, and sometimes ugly biases, we have never given up on the spirit and intent of our core principles and aspirations.

There are many who believe that the United States is so fundamentally flawed that it needs to be dismantled completely. This spirit of revolution is a great metaphor for the kind of inexorable energy we need to transform our society today. However, we must not mistake this metaphor for the methods. Our world is woven together with an interdependence and complexity that exceeds even the abilities of our best AIs to plan and protect. Even when confronted by this complexity, many people are still hanging onto old left and right wing models of change that have not been updated. This is an important point that I want to emphasize. We must undercut the ongoing influence of outdated 18th and 19th century political philosophies (-isms) that fail to address the nature of complexity and how complex systems can be transformed. There has been a march of wisdom and knowledge that continues now and which we can join. As our political philosophies are evolving, we are learning to include aesthetic principles such as beauty, love, and justice.

The rise of purely materialist and hyper-rationalist views of society probably had its roots in the The Enlightenment starting in the 1600s. But these materialist views of human endeavor really took off with the advent of industrial society. These materialist social and economic theories deny the spirit of compassion and deep wisdom that also lives in our souls and influences our wisdom. Materialist philosophical theories have replaced the spirit of humanity with ideological mechanisms and “motor forces of history” which are reflections of that period where we learned to see the world as machines rather than as living organic organisms of much greater complexity than our limited mechanistic theories. There is no doubt that the mechanistic and rigidly scientific tools of the last few hundred years have transformed the world and led to this era of great progress. My point is that these limited philosophical views must now evolve because their simplifications ignore the fundamental life force and “spirit” that makes us human. It is time to recall all that our humanity demands more than materialistic self-satisfaction.

We can see the roots of our spirited march of wisdom from as early as 1215. At that time, some rebellious wealthy barons wrote the Magna Carta and it was signed by King John under heavy pressure from those barons. It marked a moment when the rights of a small and privileged group of people stood up definitely to the will of the absolute monarch. There is no doubt that the desire for wealth and power are real forces now as they were then. However, something else is also going on above this and it is too simplistic to reduce the roots of representative government to materialist concerns alone. We have continued to build upon our wiser pluralistic impulses to generate more health and success for as many humans as possible because that is in our hearts. Such values and virtues are more than ideology and formulaic models, they are the foundation of a natural ethics and morality.

We can meet each moment with dignity, wisdom, and action, even when it seems dangerous or even if we are called to face the shame of our forebears. Our history is exceptional, but too many of our dark pages are still too shameful to be read out loud together. If we ignore or deny our mistakes, we are stunted and don’t develop. We are not saints and even saints made mistakes. It is an honest assessment of our strengths and terrible mistakes that will help to lead us through complexity and uncertainty and help us to show up everyday and do the work necessary to honor our considerable inheritance.

Showing Up

Our present situation demands that we develop our capability for self-reflection and honesty. As humans, and particularly as over-optimistic Americans, we are often too clever at crafting stories to cover up the cracks in our motivations. In the next chapter, we will look more closely at the forces that interfere with self-examination, but let me start now with a personal example.

Once, in a professional context, an official of a government suggested I should change my findings in an important technology assessment report I had written. It seemed there would be little harm to others if I altered my findings and I had to consider the benefits I would gain if I compromised my view of the facts. Slowing down and finding my center, I found a way out. I graciously refused and accepted that eventually I would pay the price. Within a year I had been frozen out of the inner circles and it was time to move on. There are always times when acting contrary to my values could benefit me. It is challenging to find a way out of these spots and I have not always followed my wisdom. The worst outcomes have always grown from my ignorance, where I did not stop and listen to my inner wisdom and where I allowed the momentum of the situation to overwhelm me. It is difficult to detect the subtle desire to benefit from actions I know are incongruent with my wisdom. Common sense and self-honesty are hard earned and they can flit away when we are not paying close attention to our hearts and minds. It is common to rationalize raw self-interest and compromise our highest values in exchange for protecting our egos and securing creature comforts, or to serve our sense of entitlement.

The good news is there are many paths toward greater self-awareness and clarity of our deepest human values. Some of the wisest people who have ever lived on earth have greatly increased our awareness and developed our capability for living fully in challenging times. While there are many powerful teachings and practices available to us, I will call out some of my favorites. The renowned Buddist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, has a wonderful saying, The Way Out, Is In. This concise teaching reinforces the point that the way out of our difficulty arises from our inner disposition. This uplifting teaching is only one of his many teachings that can help us to slow down and cultivate our awareness of what is happening at this moment. It is a simple practice of peacemaking.

Other examples are found in the Christian traditions where wise teachers like Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating, Brother Lawrence, and Julian of Norwich have pointed out these same truths. In the mystical traditions of most faiths, you will find similar contemplative practices. For instance, both Kabbalah and Sufism have their own powerful meditative practices. In most philosophical and spiritual traditions, we find contemplative practice as a path toward greater wisdom and self-discipline. All of these practices confirm an understanding that we must know our own hearts and minds intimately in order to cultivate and follow our highest wisdom. One of the foremost researchers in this field, Richie Davidson, put it this way in his co-authored 2016 paper, Varieties of Contemplative Practice,

Contemplative practices have figured prominently in religious, philosophical, and humanistic traditions since antiquity. The boundary that defines what falls within the category of contemplative practices is somewhat hazy, but from a general perspective, we can say that this form of training emphasizes self-awareness, self-regulation, and/or self-inquiry to enact a process of psychological transformation. These practices thus involve some form of mental training, even when they also involve physical movement or dialogue-based exercises. Although contextualized differently among the traditions that use them, contemplative practices are typically viewed as practical methods to bring about a state of enduring well-being or inner flourishing.

—Varieties of Contemplative Practice Richard J. Davidson, PhD; Cortland J. Dahl, PhD

Rob Bell had a book and speaking tour in 2016 called Everything is Spiritual that can help to further expand our understanding of contemplative practice. The video is two hours long, but it is worth it because of its content but also because Rob Bell is a great speaker. He offers some fine insights and delivers the kind of panoramic view that can lift us up. Bell positions humans as being the apex in the development of life on earth. He explains that as humans, while we are aware of being alive there is also something new about us in an evolutionary sense. What stands out is that this awareness of ours is aware of itself. Awareness of awareness is what is called meta-awareness. This self-reflexive awareness has apparently never appeared before humans and it empowers us to share stories about ourselves and our world. This ability to weave a good yarn turns out to be a huge evolutionary advantage and part of why we now find ourselves in this era of the Anthropocene - the era where humankind is the most important influence on the ecosphere of this planet. Awareness of awareness is also the basis of all contemplative practices as will be covered later when we dive into the nature of connectedness.

Everything is Spiritual is the big story of how complexity, depth, and unity have always been growing together and how our unique species has come to be aware of itself. Atoms make molecules and then tissues and organs appear from all those molecules. Lower order components combine to generate richer and more powerful things, which again have more depth and range. Everything is interdependent with the elements that created them. Nothing stands alone. Trees need leaves, water, clouds, rain, soil, sun and other plants and trees too. This interdependency and constant progress is alive and expresses itself without fail if we are listening. This evolution and progress seems to be the soul of the universe. Many belief systems and religions speak of an expanding reality of the divine and how this more expansive understanding of reality is ours to experience right here and now.

Such wisdom points to something outside our normal conceptions of time and space. We can observe that our compounded creations have more capability and reveal more possibilities than the elements that created them — this is the nature of complexity. Many ancient mystical traditions have used words like the “unborn and indestructible” to describe this fundamental nature of things as being primordial and outside the constructs of time and space as we normally understand them. Science chimes in here with the principles of entropy, quantum theory and complexity theory which show how change and apparent disorder give rise to beauty and order. Our own experience supports this too. I understand how my worst experiences in life have helped to form the best aspects of me. Even disorder and pain can help things to grow more intricate and beautiful. As Kahlil Gilbran said in The Prophet, “Your pain is the cracking of the shell of your understanding.” No pain no gain.

The Japanese have an art form called Kintsugi. They use gold to put broken pieces of pottery back together into a whole. This reconstruction actually highlights the scars so that the healed cracks become part of the design. In repairing something, we may create something more beautiful and stronger. The steady growth of human rights is similar. When major changes arrive, it can seem impossible to accommodate human rights. Industries and governments may throw out the rule book and simply ignore the harm they do. Then, the rest of us must make repairs and learn that something stronger emerges from the repairs. We are always working toward greater wholeness and authenticity, not perfection, because perfection is unachievable. This truth is said beautifully in Ethics of the Fathers (from the Jewish tradition); "You are not required to finish the work, yet neither are you permitted to desist from it.”

Growing Up

In the 21st century, it may seem unrealistic to honor the higher aspirations of our founding because there are now so many new restraints. When the Great Plains were wide open, we claimed everything by divine right, and by violence. When it seemed as if resources were limitless, American settlers were free to take whatever they wanted without regard to the future or to the native peoples who were already part of the land. We face global climate changes, population growth, and unceasing demand to consume more and more often. In one sense, humanity and our nation have been too successful. As such privileged people, most Americans are accustomed to many comforts and entitlements that we protect, sometimes ferociously. It is increasingly difficult to address our current threats in the face of this entrenched resistance. But people will continue to demand the right to thrive and enjoy liberty, so there will be more turmoil. With nearly 8 billion people on this planet, we all long for a time less complicated, but we cannot build our society on nostalgia. Life is rich, the planet is diverse beyond imagination, so our attempts to oversimplify things will only create more pain.

We must also stop reducing everything to orthodox political concepts that have passed their use-by dates. What must prevail instead are the fundamental truths we know in our hearts. The truths that were self-evident at our founding are now true for more people and in more ways than could have been imagined in 1776. If we access and follow these deeper truths, we will not accept the extreme views put out by overzealous leaders, cynical power-seekers, or the well-meaning proponents of rigid orthodoxy. We know the unwholesome conditions we are facing and we know we are not addressing these problems as a nation. Race relations in the US today are just one of the constant reminders that we are ignoring the obvious. Many people are deaf to the echoing words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. before his murder in 1968. Fewer people can hear the words of Bobby Kennedy, echoing King’s warnings, in his 1968 speech in Indianapolis.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.

Even while we argue about many social issues such as abortion, or even unisex restrooms, we are ignoring massively corrosive structural issues which threaten the core of our Republic like poverty, authoritarianism and war. King and Kennedy spoke out for human rights and against war, violence, institutionalized poverty, financial disparity, and corruption. There is no sane defense today for the continuance of these massive gaps and injustices. Worse, whenever the massive gaps and injustices are pointed out, we hear silly platitudes about how impossible it is for everyone to be equal. It often seems we have abandoned our aspirations of bettering ourselves and creating more equity in society. Equity is not the same as equality. Equity is the fair and impartial access to our rights and our basic human needs. Equity reveals a generosity and an urgency that citizens have fair and reasonable opportunity to thrive. If a young black man is 15 times more likely to die violently, we cannot define that as equity, regardless of your political perspectives. It is objectively just what it is. We must look at that and stop using rhetoric as a tool of avoidance. This is not about ideology but it is about reality and the urgent need to embody our desire to help relieve the suffering of others, to feel our compassion.

We create frightening stories that help us ignore these realities because the issues seem too difficult. For instance, in the United States, over 70% of people imprisoned will  be arrested once again within five years. This level of recidivism is remarkable, but it is rarely part of any political campaign or even simple discussions within our communities. Perhaps we imagine that criminals cannot be helped. It is easy to blindly blame others rather than consider deeper causes. Simplistic stories are the easiest to fabricate, so they spread quickly and too often become our truths. Yet, in some countries, recidivism is as low as 30 percent, but that fact is often dismissed quickly too. It is hard to imagine that the United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other country in the world. In 2020, two million people were in prison in the United States. Imprisonment quadrupled from 1980 through 2020. These are staggering numbers which are also incompatible with the claim of inalienable rights for all.

At the extreme edge, I have heard people advocate "civil war." However, I rarely hear anyone retell the painfully violent story of our Civil War. Essentially, some people believe that violence can resolve our differences, but let’s look at how that works in reality. Roughly 750,000 died in the Civil War, but in 1860 the population of the U.S. was only about 30 million. With a population today of over 330 million, and with this highly interdependent economy, a civil war now would cause the deaths of tens of millions of our citizens. Millions of orphans, an economy ruined, and like the Civil War, the issues would remain unresolved. It is hard to fathom how people are willing to kill millions of "others" because they disagree with them. Some people are effectively advocating something like genocide. This dark rhetoric only demonstrates the interior state of those who are espousing it. They are literally out of their bodies, emotions, and minds.

Some advocates of civil war claim that the United States must be saved from “socialism." At the end of 2021, the U.S. stock markets had a value of $53 trillion and these stock exchanges are part of a world market valued at over $100 trillion. This market value is the force of our economics at work. Our global systems depend on capitalism and any thought that we are fast becoming socialist is the worst kind of political hyperbole. Those who advocate for socialism in the United States need to update their knowledge and those folks on the other side who see “Marxists” everywhere are espousing pure political silliness. It is ludicrous to be swept up in discussions based on thinking from the Paris Commune of 1871. There are almost 8 billion people on this planet. We are dealing with a reality that is so much more complex and remarkable than any “-ism.”

The news industry amplifies extreme positions because controversy generates viewership and makes money. The news industry often drives profits regardless of the impacts on society. In early 2016, Leslie Moonves, the CBS executive chairman and CEO, said of the presidential race that “It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS.” He said the campaign for president was a “circus” full of “bomb throwing,” and that he hoped it continued. The media and politicians are trading in the currency of fear and their stories of division and scarcity keep us from our highest purposes.

This manufactured reactivity throughout society obscures reality and robs us of the great truths and the depth of unity we share as Americans. We hold some well-known truths to be self-evident, so let’s recall our heritage and broaden our views. We could be building upon our inheritance and recalling how our forebears shared a mutual regard and how they worked courageously toward a greatest common good (even though they did not include everyone). It took an unshakable belief in the natural rights of human beings for this nation to be formed. This clarity of purpose is available to us even while a perfect storm of forces are trying to distract us.

Next Chapter

Previous Chapter

In our local philosophy group meeting today here in Sacramento, we discussed “overshoot” which is an ecological concept that measures how fast we are using up the earth’s resources. The current measure is 1.7 meaning that we are eating up 1.7 earths - yet there is only one earth. It seems obvious where this level of consumption will lead but it is difficult to imagine how we can turn this around.

Near the end of that group conversation, I pointed out that 25% of the world’s population is consuming 75% of its resources. If the 25% somehow changed their behavior, could our culture of excessive consumption shift to allow a new economy to emerge? This is a particularly vexing question here in the United States because we are only 5% of the world’s population while we consume one-quarter of the world’s resources. We could argue these numbers for days, but we won’t be going down this rabbit hole now - because I am trying to get to wisdom and love.

What would motivate 25% of the world’s population to change their consumption behaviors? I don’t mean to put us on the spot here but this “they” I refer to includes me and probably everyone who is reading anything on Substack. So, this is a good question given that our consumption of 1.7 earths seems to be generating threats to our existence. For instance, the forecast here in Sacramento, CA is for very high temperatures for the next 14 days with temperatures over 100 degrees F (38 degree C) and a high of 111 degree F (44 degree C). These are extreme temperatures that will give us pause. Rome does seem to be burning.

The people of this planet, we Homo sapiens, need the 25% to demonstrate new ways to consume. We will do this because of both our wisdom and our love.  "Homo sapiens" means "wise human" and now we need to become "Homo amor" or "loving human." This was nicely summed up by my friend Claudia Dommaschk today in her Substack. As Claudia points out, this is about “imagining a universal love story to bridge from an uncertain today to a sustainable tomorrow.”

We are considering much more than recycling and solar panels. Our culture of extractive behaviors runs too deep to imagine any transformation without a major shift in how we value things. Exploring and agreeing on some basic values, the values of Homo Amor, is how transformation begins. These are intrinsic values we already share that will generate a culture rooted in wisdom and love.

Showing the way forward will require some great hearts and minds to collaborate and demonstrate alternatives so that our ossified political and corporate systems begin to move.  Sure, we consumers can each live more simply but that goes nowhere when our powerful marketing culture drives consumers to excessive consumption. Our business and government superstructures must begin to transition and learn how to abandon these outdated extractive models.

Consumption is one way to secure status as well as to find some superficial meaning and purpose. These delusional social and cultural behaviors blind us to the predicament we are in, so we must update our worldview and behaviors so we may evolve and thrive well beyond the twenty-second century.

I've often been able to make lateral connections across many disciplines and see things systemically. That is how I have discovered this profound opportunity we have to help our American society evolve beyond our current impasses. The path I am recommending is a blend of politics, belief and belonging. It was born from my great love for our country and from my despair with the direction we are headed. However, this new path is more than a reaction to circumstances. In many ways, life has been preparing me all along for this next step. I know how naive such a grand personal narrative can be, so it pays to be cautious and skeptical. However, it is clear that some threads have been weaving within me and leading me in this direction for many years.

Standardized aptitude tests were required for university admissions at the time I was applying. One of these many test registration forms explicitly asked me to list my career goals. My stated goals were to become either, (1) A Nuclear Physicist, or (2) A Child Psychologist. This seemed reasonable at the time because my curiosity was endless, and I was longing to understand everything. Physics promised to reveal the arcane secrets of the universe and psychology promised to reveal myself and the mysteries of other people to me. Eventually, physics led me to computers and the Internet. My passion for psychology led me inward, and then outward toward the challenges of generating healthy interpersonal connections in the new digital world.

When the digital connectivity and interconnectedness of the Internet took off, I was fascinated with how society would change. I was fortunate to be part of a cohort of early digital media innovators who were curious and excited to see how science, media, and psychology could join forces to help us invent new ways to communicate and entertain. But that was before the mis- and dis- information sanctioned by the big digital networks. My disappointment with where we are now with our science and our politics is part of what has motivated me to write this book.

As the Internet was exploding, there was another revolution happening in the study of our minds and hearts. The explosion of “mindfulness” practice and the birth of contemplative science has helped millions of people to explore their inner life in new ways. Contemplative science is effectively a blend of physics and psychology that shows how we can generate greater attention, mindfulness, and inner awareness. With this inner knowing, we can see more clearly how our mind, emotions, body and presence interact with others and our environment. We can also better observe our inner states with more kindness for ourselves. This relatively new science seeks to understand and refine the subjective experiences of being and becoming that are shared by all human beings and which have been expressed throughout human history in countless ways.

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Because I’ve studied contemplative philosophy and practiced meditation for over 30 years, the growth of contemplative science is just as exciting for me as was the arrival of the Internet in the 1990s. I have also studied and practiced Buddhism, Yoga and Contemplative Christianity since I was a young man, but I have avoided taking on the labels of any one tradition. Philosophically, Buddhism has always resonated strongly with me and with the scientific methods I learned in physics. While I use some Buddhist metaphors in this book, and make references to “something greater than ourselves,” you don’t need to understand or identify with any spiritual or religious tradition to make full use of this book.

I am wary of the rigid orthodoxy found in many religions because I fear my own human frailty of becoming zealous and intolerant. While most religious people are fairly tolerant of others, history is filled with enough examples of religious extremism to advise caution. Fortunately, the pioneering field of contemplative science reveals how hearts and minds operate and these insights require no particular belief system. It is simply observational. The good news is that modern science has reverified the benefits that the yoga, meditation and contemplative masters understood thousands of years ago. It is my experience that an exploration of our inner life and of our interconnectedness generates curiosity about the source of our life and of our shared sense of a common human “spirit,” as well as a deep sense that there is something ineffable that is much greater than us. My fascination with the source of life, with my innate sense of being alive and breathing in this body may be part of why physics and psychology were my first loves. I've always been a political junkie too, so I was excited when I discovered a way to combine politics with physics and psychology in the emerging field of contemplative science. It was like hitting the trifecta.

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The first step on this kind of journey is to become intimate with yourself. That can be a stretch for me and I imagine for most of us. Before I discovered the depth of my inner resources, I spent years searching outside myself for satisfaction. As my own inner journey has deepened, I have learned to listen to my instincts more and trust what is emerging in me. This is always a liminal space in which something is passing away and something new wants to be born. Many orthodox values that were once important to me became obsolete and I have struggled to articulate another way to live. It has taken me 15 years to deconstruct a lifetime of conventional beliefs and find more congruence between my inner and outer experiences. Even after learning these lessons well, it’s challenging to stay connected to my inner awareness in the face of stress and chaos. For many of us, our inner lives are scary places where we may fear to go and therefore we may have limited options when things get chaotic in the world. To stay strong, we may consciously create a strong inner life grounded in awareness and self-knowledge. I am not advocating any heart-wrenching reanimation of all our childhood pain. Everyone finds their own path inward, but there are some common tools and practices that I will recommend as the first steps on the path toward healing ourselves and our nation.

The next step also sounds simple: connect with other people. Connection with others requires that I am intimate with the life force within me and directly experience this as my mind, emotions, and sensations. This is where we have the embodied experience of our natural connection with others. From this place of inner strength and clarity, we can access powerful wisdom and deep compassion. In Chapter 8, when we explore interconnectedness, there will be many examples as well as practices for connecting with others. In fact, a great deal of this book is about connecting with others because relating and collaborating is the key to effective action.

Without the trauma of my early life, I would never have had these insights. Many dark nights of the soul have followed many exalted experiences. I’ve climbed volcanoes, loved passionately, hung out with well-meaning billionaires, crashed and burned, and started over many times. More recently, I’ve been able to integrate the range of my experiences and find some peace. There has always been too much to figure out and too much to experience. My nervous system has driven me to keep moving and I am learning that I am not my nervous system and how I can shape and transform my reactivity and habitual patterns. Writing this book was not meant to help me figure these things out, but it has. Over many years of dedicated inquiry about love, compassion, and peace, I see how a confidence beyond words is always available to us. This confidence arises from a connectedness that emanates from within, mingles with the world, and returns to its source within us and around us. It is primordial and out of time. Not now, not before, not after, not eternal, but wholly outside of time. Hence, no words.

My curiosity about this confidence, and how it connects us, has been insatiable. I recall my intense curiosity reading Passions of the Mind by Irving Stone about the life of Sigmund Freud. At 14 years old, I really wanted to be Freud. This desire and its searching has taken me many places. I’ve scoured through science, religion, ancient wisdom, mysticism, and political theories trying to find something that made sense of all the suffering I saw, and I am still seeing, in the world. The most important part of my healing was always just out of my reach. No matter how hard I stretched, it seemed I could never fathom relationships with other people. I could solve partial-differential equations and contemplate the implications of the Mandelbrot Set, but living in harmony with other people was simply too much. It seemed as if I did not have the wiring. As I look around me now, I realize that I am not alone. So many of us feel this disconnection from one another and from society.

This is where the personal becomes political. Uncertainty, a lack of trustworthy information and a loss of control characterize the world that the majority of us live in today. For me, it feels like my family of origin has come back on steroids. I deeply feel the old trauma in my body as it resonates with the traumas of violence and contempt I have witnessed recently. Although I understand how my nervous system has been affected by my early trauma, my understanding is not enough. Without a healthy community of wise friends, it is tough to stay focused and generative when everything seems to be relentlessly in flux and in conflict. Most everyone I know does some dissociating from things just to cope and I am moved to articulate here what is to be done about this. The pain of our vulnerable and sometimes dysfunctional selves is simply to be grieved and accepted. We are not meant to be perfect. This is our human heritage and legacy. What matters now is how well we do these complex and often unpredictable human things together.

This confidence and connectedness is always available even when we may have lost, or never had, the early wiring for connection. There have never been more resources available for us to address the situation we find ourselves in. Our society enjoys a tremendous depth of understanding about what makes for healthy minds and bodies. For instance, I know that regular meditation makes a difference in my life, but I often forget to do it. I also know that too many pints of chocolate fudge brownie ice cream are going to show up as a heart attack or a stroke one day. Yet, every time I pass the frozen foods section in the supermarket, I must make a choice again. I know it is getting hotter and colder, and more wet, and more dry, everywhere. I know that people of color are still facing mind-boggling violence and bias. I know that too many white guys like me are afraid that they are losing their legacy entitlements (they are not). I know that there is poverty that is inexcusable and wealth that is obscene.

Even if we don’t see the same solutions, we can all feel into the emotional depth of this multi-crisis reality. As I grapple with some of the solutions for our current set of global crises, it becomes clearer that underneath it all, there is a common ground to all of our crises. Some people have called this common ground, the “Meta-crisis” and I will borrow this hyphenated word as shorthand to replace the cumbersome construct of “a crisis of crises.” The common ground, or Meta-crisis, is our failure to make sense of the world together based on something more complex than our individual wants and desires. In addition to the dis- and mis- information, we’ve also misplaced our sense that there is something greater than ourselves and we must find some kind of North Star that generates our inner confidence and guides us toward greater wisdom and contemplative action. Our human race is one big thing, one whole, and we must learn how to be one and yet one of many. I know that love and justice is something we do together to address these crises. It can be a frightening thing to lose the illusion of separateness, to see that we are one human family, and yet to be standing here on our own two feet knowing how alienated we often seem to be from one another.

The world can make us crazy. Mental health in the U.S. has never seemed more tentative than it does now. I witnessed it first in my family over 60 years ago. Like so many poor barely-working families, my family of origin inherited the worst aspects of life and we were expected to accept a dog-eat-dog view of life while being naively encouraged to rise up and make something of ourselves; to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Of course, without mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health, rising up is hard to do. Our early experiences form an important part of the filters through which we meet the world. This clarity and a deepening sense of justice are welling up in me as I try to stay aware of the violence and injustice in our communities. After many trips to the top of the heap and back down to ground zero, I know the odds for today’s children are much worse and it makes perfect sense that so many young people feel despondent about their future. This is where something in me proclaims that I cannot be still in the face of these injustices and distortions. This is the time to act-up and recall what great spirits like the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi have taught us about change.

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The words of the Dr. King about injustice in the United States still rings true even though we can point to progress. We must not disguise our chronic failures with claims of partial “progress” when true justice and equity continues to elude us. The perseverance and fierce vulnerability demonstrated by people of color in this country shows great courage and kindness given the long history of injustice they have faced. In particular, Black Americans are reshaping the discussion about race in this country and there are increasing numbers of white people responding independently and in unity. I am listening to the echoing voices of Black leaders and I am slowly finding the voice and courage to stand up against racism and injustice from a place of wisdom and compassion rather than anger and aggression. As I listen, I am learning the importance of “Black Love” and “Beloved Community.” That these higher aspirations survive among Black Americans is surprising given the history of slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the ongoing battles that black people face in the U.S. today. We can all be inspired by this deep love of our nation and our diverse heritages of courage and kindness.

Beloved Community often seems like some far off goal. Dr. King knew that accomplishing his vision of a compassionate community requires the transformation of our social systems including our economic, political, educational, criminal justice, and healthcare systems. We have the means today to achieve that vision within the lifetimes of our young people. At the grassroots community level, we are already bringing together new tools for systems change and building the democratized hyper-agency needed to set this new course. We have the science and the socio-political means to generate and support healthy communities that are steeped in wise and strong interpersonal relationships. Building new ways to run our society demands social and political transformation as well as the collective efforts of many people across every sector of society. However, the payoff is our liberation from the ravages of unabating hatred, poverty and war. No one is excluded. Everyone is included. That is the powerful vision of the Beloved Community. We must promote progress toward the great renewal envisioned by Dr. King where we each act as stewards of society and support the healing efforts that bridge the divides.

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Some of us working on the Enlightened Worldview project (https://enlightenedworldview.com/) have been kicking around a model for building community organizations. The model was put forth in the book, Nordic Ideology, by Hanzi Freinacht. As well, Layman Pascal has done a fine job laying out Hanzi Freinacht’s “Montesquieu 2.0” framework for Metamodern society in his article Montesquieu 2.0, in What is Emerging, on January 13, 2024. It was Brandon Norgaard who first proposed we use Hanzi’s six types of politics as a guide to our work and this has been a good approach for us so far. In his article, Layman Pascal offered a consolidation of these six types of politics by weaving them into three types. I greatly appreciate Layman’s work and would like to continue the dialogue.

As we’ve been building community hubs and networks, we needed a less unwieldy approach than Hanzi’s separation of the six political concerns while also preserving the benefits in Hanzi’s model of six kinds of politics (Existential, Gemeinschaft, Empirical, Theory, Democratization, and Emancipation). I’d like to build upon Layman’s article but I will not reproduce his concise explanations of Hanzi’s politics and ask that you please read his work and see this as a beaded conversation.

When I first started working with the Hanzi model, I imagined that we might organize our work using all six types of concerns. In practice, it was harder to do than I’d imagined, so I stepped back and tried to find another way to approach these models that was simpler and potentially easier to explain to people who don’t read Hanzi. Also, through my process of exploring the underlying causes of the Meta-crisis over these last three years, I have developed a construct which is also a simplification of the Hanzi model. The book I’ve been writing is structured around this simpler model which identifies three crises and their solutions.

These three crises are called the crises of Belonging, Believing, and Building. I won’t take you through the definitions and examples of these three crises. Instead, I will jump impertinently to the solutions to these three crises, which are: Connection, Confidence, and Courage. We need a framework that is approachable to many audiences. My approach does this and it also offers an entry into the deeper analysis of Hanzi’s six politics.

The first part of my “solution” is Connection. Connection weaves Gemeinschaft and Existential politics together. What resonates here are the feelings of safety and security we may find when things just feel right for us in community. This combines Layman’s description of the “spiritual core of metamodern society” (Existential politics) and his “common efforts and satisfying forms of social play” (Gemeinschaft politics). We would like our deepest spiritual connections to be reflected and nurtured in the warm gemütlichkeit of a healthy community. So that is what I define as Connection and contend that it assuages the Crisis of Belonging.

Confidence combines Empirical politics and Theory (or Narrative) politics. This is where my simplification overlaps with Layman’s. Layman puts it so well, “Sensemaking politics subdivides into safeguarding facts (empirical) and communicating a narrativized framing (politics of theory).” This politics of sensemaking gives us confidence. I see this as the natural relationship between sense and source. Empirical gives us the credible basic information we need to know things on a mundane level (sense) while Theory (narrative) allows us to generate grand narratives that encompass everything — all the way back to our source. This yields the Confidence that repairs the Crisis of Believing.

Courage takes Democratization as the foundation of Emancipation. Courage arises from our new confidence and we are empowered to take collective and wise action in the world. Courage prompts us to evolve our democracy and to ensure that we stay continually free from the oppressions that hinder our emancipation. It takes Courage to overcome the Crisis of Building and band together to build the new world we envision.

As I have worked with this model, I’ve gained a more embodied understanding and know that there is some wisdom here. While my approach may be a simplification that may even violate other theories and models, I have found this model has helped my analysis of the world around me and it has allowed me to sensibly structure my work. I’ve been using this model for the last year while writing and doing related community work and it seems to fit. This is anecdotal and far from theoretical proof, but I am okay with that. I welcome input and refinement as well as any further simplifications you may have regarding the practical use of the Hanzi politics model.

There are many other influences that have led me to this approach, but there are two key influences that need some recognition. There are some purposeful allusions to Bildung in my use of the word “Building” so I must nod to Lene Andersen. As well, the kinds of “knowing” alluded to in my construct of Confidence beckon the wisdom and insight of John Vervaeke’s 4P/3R formulations. There is no scope to dig deeper into these allusions here, but they may become my inspiration for some future work.

The dynamics of money and power in our nation are complex, and our systems are naturally interwoven to provide self-protection and guard against any viruses of change. This makes progress difficult, but the need for transformation has become urgent. There are complex forces at work and the strength of our principles is being tested on all fronts. The chasm between our social groups shows up as intense polarizations and even as hatred. There is a loss of confidence in our leaders and our systems. It seems life has become harder for most Americans and sometimes it feels like our dreams are finished.

We have filled our American story with growth and success that has few precedents. Yet somehow, we are suddenly unsure how to live peacefully together and how to get back in touch with the unity and grace that sparked the independence and optimism that birthed our nation. Our leaders, as our servants, once had a generosity towards their constituencies. Service and generosity stimulated the flexibility and innovation that were once hallmarks of our success. By contrast, our leaders today are leading us in endless culture wars that are going nowhere. These culture wars determine the character of politics, media, and even what products we consume. The true purpose of these conflicts is not to win, but to protect the structure of society and bolster the power of elites. It feels too much like George Orwell’s “perpetual war” in 1984 where the state of war has no solution or conclusion. As Orwell pointed out, perpetual war “eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs.” My desire is that the views, insights and resources presented here will help provide concerned hearts, community workers and activists with useful tools to address the pernicious resistance of our systems.

According to George Washington, “It is the peculiar boast of our country that her happiness is alone dependent on the collective wisdom and virtue of her citizens and rests not on the exertions of any individual.” The words “collective wisdom” and “virtue" seem antiquated even when referencing our beloved first president. Our modern civilization focuses instead upon tightly defined measurements and on the material substance of things. In the harsh light of short-term gains and monthly performance goals, the higher human values of The Good, The True and the Beautiful may seem out of place. Our Republic has mostly surrendered wisdom and virtue in favor of perpetually striving for convenience, security, and increasing consumption. As a nation, we have exchanged honor for comfort.  In contrast, civil society requires that we respect the rights and dignity of others. When we do so, we are honoring others as well as ourselves simply because we have great intrinsic value as human beings. As we seem to be losing our grip on civil society, we must recall and elevate this mutual value.

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The protection of the failing status quo and the rise of authoritarianism, raise the question of whether we can still ensure our rights and realize our responsibilities to one another as a free society. Traditionally, we invest a lot of energy in mainstream politics where limited reform may still be possible. These efforts are important and must continue. What is being proposed here is something different. The innovation and disruption I am proposing will replace old ways of doing things. What I am advocating for is to change the way we change society by adding a conscious layer of innovation and disruption outside existing structures to create and demonstrate viable alternatives to the way our current systems work (or fail to work). Pioneering efforts are needed across all silos of our society and new solutions must be nurtured in local communities across the nation. As these distributed efforts grow and connect, networks of these pioneers will spark growth.

This approach is based on a claim that the deep transformations required cannot be achieved through mainstream political processes as they exist today. There is simply too much resistance to change. We must accept that political and social innovation is quickly compromised and converted into mainstream behavior. In other words, our current systems of society are stuck. Innovation must come from outside the systems and then progress must be protected and allowed to come to fruition so that conventional systems can be confidently replaced by the pioneering efforts.

To get started, many local centers of this new thinking will be incubated across the nation and then these local centers will be networked into communities of leading innovators. Another key aspect of this networked model is that the local centers all share a conscious basis for their unity. The basis of unity must run deep because there will be protracted resistance and it is easy to be pulled off course. The methods and approaches to local action that I recommend nearer to the end of this book are based on my years of experience in spiritual communities and secular community organizations as well as within corporations and small businesses. More recently, a few of my friends and I have been exploring new models where networks of separate groups, all with their own focus and concerns, are working with one another to develop new ways to generate authentically relational communities. Later, we will look at some particular methods emerging from these recent experiments in community building.

This book is about the path to come together with clarity and confidence to face the multi-system crises that have arisen all over the world but particularly what we can do here in the USA to turn around the rising chaos. We’ve lost our natural instincts for community and connection while we’ve created a society built on convenience and consumption. These ruptures will not magically repair themselves and we must find the courage to act together in new ways. There are deep bonds and an unshakable belonging between us that can be rediscovered. To be clear, the world is not coming to an end and neither is the Republic. The real crisis is that too many people are needlessly suffering and that many, many more will suffer needlessly unless we find a way back to our natural connectedness and the sanity we were born with.

My version of this way back to sanity is what I lay out in the chapters ahead. You can read this book from beginning to end and that is what I recommend. The first few chapters will provide a context for how we got here and then a more granular view of what it feels like to be here. I want to provide this big picture first because that is the most powerful way we make sense of the world together. In Chapter 3, the emotions that affect and too often guide us are exposed. This leads to understanding how there are multiple crises at work with an accompanying wildfire of disorienting emotions.

Chapters 3 through 6 may feel like a rough ride. Looking soberly at our emotions and the collective roots of these crises may be challenging. Too much empathy can overwhelm us. When that happens to me, I try to remember my desire to help ease the suffering I see. Even if I don’t know what to do, it is beneficial to understand how the desire to help is the heart of compassion. It may be that you are predisposed toward my proposition that we are faced with three underlying crises which I’ve called the crises of Believing, Belonging and Building. It is important that you can entertain the causes of each crisis because it is senseless to talk about solutions without an analysis of the causes. It will help to be familiar with these crises for the solutions that follow in chapters 7 through 10 to make sense. If you are an impatient reader, you may be tempted to skip ahead but be forewarned that you will be missing some important principles about worldview and how we make sense of the world which are foundational to the solution of these multiple crises. It will also be helpful to appreciate my breakdown of materialism into its three forms and the importance of Philosophical Materialism as the most powerful yet unspoken force that molds our modern society. As well, the crucial role of trauma is essential to understanding the solutions I am proposing.

Chapter 7 is an overview of the solution as well as a pointer toward the path ahead. I’ve broken the solution down into the three antidotes for each of the three crises of Believing, Belonging and Building. The solution can be summarized as Connection, Confidence and Courage. Connection is how we find Belonging. Confidence is how we start Believing again. Courage is what we need to start Building the nation we deserve. The first of the “three Cs” is the most critical - Connection. In Chapter 8, we will look at how to grow our inner capabilities and become better acquainted with the emotional forces moving within us. It is almost impossible to grow and learn when there is too much aggression and fear, so we need to co-regulate, collaborate, and use disagreement as strength. Through inner development, we can develop an outstanding capability to maintain focus on higher virtues as well as to think rationally and listen better. These capabilities are critical to our relationships while the absence of these capabilities leads to disconnection and a lack of belonging. Chapters 9 and 10 deal with inter- and intra- connectedness and the further growth of intentionally relational capabilities.

Chapter 11 is about gaining Confidence to address the Crisis of Believing. Chapter 12 is where we look at the Courage we need to create effective action and this is where I extract some learning from the history of key U.S. political movements. Finally, we bring it all together in Chapter 13 where we consider how we can build community-based organizations together to practice all the elements of the solution.

Most of us want to be happy, have an easy life, have some fun and relaxation, enjoy our friends and family, and feel secure and safe. If you are reading this book in the hope that a return to American sanity will yield results quickly and easily, I am going to disappoint you. Many Americans will probably continue to enjoy the privileges of their lives as conditions worsen and life becomes more challenging for the majority of us. In some ways, this book is about the less fortunate who are likely to be tragically affected by what is coming. Perhaps this book is only for those of us who will bear the brunt of these many crises. Even if you feel immune, if you want to care about the 50% of Americans who may suffer the most, this book is for you too.

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As we journey through this book, I want to honor the remarkable progress we have made, and I also ask that you recall where we have fallen short. This is not a Pollyanna trip we will make together. There are hard truths to consider, but those truths must always be held in a broader context of how we move forward together as a nation and the vital truth of how far we’ve come as well as the many inheritances that evoke both hope and gratitude. We will discover a new way to be political together. It starts with understanding how politics must be discovered as simply the way we can make better decisions together. So, let’s take it as given that the realm of politics is the art of making better decisions together. This will be our working definition of politics. This is a critical definition and it engenders many vital questions about the connectedness needed to practice wise politics.

For a community of people to create political power they must be aware of one another and share a natural desire to help others. From there, they may make decisions to be of service and take action. Contemplative practitioners have a powerful worldview of compassionate action that can act as a steady and generative center for transformation. Often, activists don’t share their inner life and those who focus on their inner life often do not take action to create change. We must explicitly recognize one another and build the foundations of a new movement of wisdom, compassion and action. Our ancestors gave us a vision of how life can be — we can ensure domestic tranquility. We can side with the inherent dignity of beings and prosper as a nation. The wisdom of our interdependence is clear and this is what makes us strong. I am pointing at our fundamental strengths as humans and asking that we leverage our true nature to create better lives for everyone and not just for our family and social group. Humans do wondrous things together that no other living organisms can. We are remarkable and I want to celebrate that truth. And, I want to explore how we are becoming more remarkable, even majestic, as human beings.

As I began writing this book, I searched for a word to describe what I knew to be true about us: we are always connected to one another although we are often unaware of this truth. Much of how I make sense of the world stems from my experience that people are capable of great kindness and wisdom and that we are all interwoven with an undeniable shared warmth and intelligence. This fundamental nature of ours is what I call Majesty and it enables us to see society, politics, and one another from a much higher vantage point. That may sound too far out in left field, but I invite you to stay curious about the personal journey, and the evidence, I will share in this book.

The majestic power of our human connections is the rocket fuel of a new approach to political action. This new political awareness embraces our interconnectedness and calls out our inner wisdom. It also asks us to realize something seemingly bizarre: that in the most fundamental ways we are not separate from one another, or from anything else. As we increasingly experience this deeper sense of belonging within ourselves and with the people in our neighborhoods, things will shift quickly. We may then work together in our local communities to build something new that is nascent and emerging — it wants to be born. 

Given how far we are from 1776, it is time to redefine citizenship for the 21st century. Immediate progress is possible by connecting with one another locally in fresh new ways. We can alleviate suffering by discovering together how to be socially and politically engaged with mindfulness and compassionate action. Let’s discover a shared language and common practices that make our collective action practical and effective. We will realize the fruits of our wise decisions if we prepare together for the challenges ahead. Our confidence must be unwavering to honor our heritage and guide our Republic. Such confidence produces honor, dignity, and decency which are just the fundamental virtues our founders understood as the basis of human happiness. This truth has not changed.

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My experience of the spiritual comes and it goes. I remember and I forget. At this time of year here in North America, the sun is low on the southern horizon, so everything glows with hero light and the shadows are acute. Dark and light, remembering and forgetting. This contrast of the light and dark is embedded deeply within us and celebrated in many festivals and practices. Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains have Diwali, Christians have the birth of Jesus Christ, Judaism has the lights of Hanukkah, Yule is important to Paganism, and many Buddhists have Bodhi Day. In Scandinavia, St. Lucia celebrations bring light. As Victor Hugo wrote in Les Misérables, "Even the darkest of night will end and the sun will rise."

There is also something here that connects the religious with the secular. There is rich unconscious material and emotional energy in this intersection of contrasting views. There is no solid thing here, just a sense of something that is highly evocative of our human essence. Perhaps it is here in this creative space that we will discover a lasting peace where the secularists and the religious directly experience something we all understand and which we no longer need to explain or argue about. As Jonathan Rowson points out1, we can take our fundamental spiritual concerns into public spaces and share them appropriately.

What we need is a purposive vision of individual and collective spiritual growth and renewal that emerges in response to the world as we find it, and evolves in response to the world we seek to create. Questions about the nature, value, meaning and purpose of life as such are matters of fundamental concern and should be aired publicly, which means those who value spiritual sensibility need to find their voice, and their power.

What Jonathan Rowson has called a "spiritual sensibility,” furthers our discussion, so I will borrow his term and break it down in my own way while begging his pardon as I wrestle with all of this. First, there is the idea of sensibility which I will define as an aesthetic clarity that includes information from the emotions and the body as well as information and insights that come from reason. Spirit is an animating principle that also has awareness of itself and the world. With that I define the spiritual as anything related to the consciousness and animation of human beings rather than our concerns with inert material things and non-human living beings. This means spiritual concerns are necessarily human-centered for the purposes of this discussion.

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This yields a meaning for a spiritual sensibility as: the direct and transformational experience of our animating principle which includes an awareness of itself and the entire cosmos. This awareness has an aesthetic clarity that integrates information from rational knowledge, the emotions, the body and the mind. This is a whole body-and-mind experience that welcomes back embodiment from the banishment inflicted by narrow rationalism. This understanding helps us to elevate our discussion of spiritual matters out of the secular shadows and to engage in robust discussions that build bridges. There are many existential questions we face today and it will be beneficial to develop a much deeper understanding of how spiritual matters inform society. In the endnotes of Spiritualise, Rowson offers a comment that nails it for me:

We should use spiritual when we need to say something that we cannot say otherwise, usually about how we perceive and experience reality as a whole through its myriad forms. Having spiritual sensibility is therefore a bit like having a sense of humour; it is not self-evident when or why it manifests, but everyone should value it and few would want to say they don’t have it at all.

This leads me to another proposal: the spiritual may be understood as a “bisociation” of the secular and the religious mindsets. Bisociation is a word coined by Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian-born British novelist, journalist, and critic, who was best known for his novel Darkness at Noon. Bisociation was a concept he introduced in his discussion of how humor works. Koestler’s use of bisociation represents an impressive contribution to the theory of creativity from his book titled The Act of Creation.2 Bisociation is the simultaneous mental association of an idea with two domains seen as opposed (in this case the secular and the religious) which then generates a creative response. The spiritual then is the domain where the secular and the religious intersect and spark our creativity.  Imagine two planes intersecting in a line, so that the line represents “the spiritual” as depicted in this graphic.

Koestler also used his general notion of bisociation to explain an example of humor, the pun. A pun is a simple form of bisociation. Puns are rhetorical devices that use the double meaning of a word to create a subjective human response; such as “A boiled egg every morning is hard to beat.” In our case, there may be some humor and an apparent paradox when I claim that the secular and the religious are both spiritual. Using Koestler’s words and formulations then yields an added dimension for this spiritual sensibility as “a transitory state of unstable equilibrium where the balance of both emotion and thought is disturbed.” Within this disturbance, one can “define the character of the emotive charge and make a guess regarding the unconscious elements that it may contain.”

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A description of a spiritual sensibility as an unstable equilibrium is provocative as it beckons us toward complexity theory and how complexity plays at the edge of order and disorder. There is a creative balance and tension that emerges and is difficult to sustain, particularly if  we are limited to strictly rational means.  A spiritual sensibility is always an act of creativity. It arrives as a fresh start that pops up at this moment; the ever-present origin that brings us back to ourselves.

This uplifting experience is the energy and intelligence within each of us that empowers higher states of awareness where we experience ourselves with clarity and congruence. Whatever words you may choose to describe these experiences, this is where all citizens may meet and celebrate the meaningfulness we share. Meaningfulness is the light in which meaning is discovered and expressed. We each have specific ways of illuminating the transcendent and spiritual functions of life and our unity will grow as we celebrate our bright intentions and sensibilities rather than any limiting ideologies.

Sociologists often speak of social capital but here we are considering more than that. There is a vital spark that represents a common experience and which brings us together with even greater unity. This represents a kind of social capital that might be called “spiritual capital.” Our resilience in the years ahead must be based on more than what we normally think of as social capital. We must develop an unshakable sense of the strength of our collective heart, mind and spirit that arises through our interconnectedness. This will spark a sense of community and fellowship that is rooted in a shared worldview that naturally encourages the formation of common goals. This meta-worldview is founded in various forms of contemplative practice, collective deliberations and common visions that generate a better future. This spiritual sensibility is the impulse to embody higher principles and deepen our connections so we may live in more loving, compassionate and wise ways.

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