Promoting the Compassionate Humanity Community
By Wade Lee Hudson and Larry Walker
Rooted in humanity’s ethical traditions, the time-honored effort to relieve and prevent suffering is alive and well. In countless ways, ethical individuals and organizations spread compassion and promote justice as alternatives to society’s selfishness. These manifestations of a global compassionate humanity community tap into deep, innate, positive instincts, strengthen love and trust, counter hate and fear, and channel anger into positive action. These efforts use democratic partnerships to counter unjustified domination and blind submission.
Throughout society, peer-to-peer affinity groups cultivate democratic equality. Support for “effective altruism” increases. People learn to respect each other as equals more deeply and collaborate as caring partners more effectively.
The global compassionate humanity community advances a transition from a focus on the self-centered pursuit of personal power and status to an other-centered commitment to serve humanity, the environment, and life itself. We members of the compassionate humanity community form mutually supportive small teams, cultivate collaborative leadership, engage in compassionate action, nurture holistic and systemic transformation, and take care of ourselves so we can better care for others.
Based on this worldview, to the best of our ability, we learn what’s true and do what’s right. We rejoice in the pursuit of Truth, Justice, and Beauty and nurture spiritual growth. We move toward an ideal we’ll never fully experience, yet we feel it in the present.
As Paul Tillich wrote, this ideal “is coming here and now in every act of love, in every manifestation of truth, in every moment of joy, in every experience of the holy.” We are becoming the change we seek. In every arena, we build models for the future. We love a world we’ll never see and act on our convictions.
Our foundation is a global network of small teams whose members affirm the community’s core values. These teams are learning communities that facilitate peer learning, self-reform, collaborative teamwork and decision-making, political action, and mutual support. Members become better listeners, speak more honestly, and help each other become more effective collaborators.
We’re pragmatic idealists, committed to moving forward step-by-step focused on achievable goals. We avoid ego-driven competition that aggravates social fragmentation. We build the unity that’s needed to sustain lasting, deep change. Inspired by history’s many calls for compassion and justice, we learn, grow, and become better and more effective human beings.
A cultural revolution blooms. Compassionate individuals and communities push for positive change everywhere. We democratize and humanize social institutions. We establish structural changes that nurture personal and spiritual growth. Young college-educated workers collaborate with diverse populations and organize unions. Anti-racists call in and heal hurt. Gen Z workers challenge arbitrary hierarchies and vote and engage in community service more than earlier generations.
Compassionate humanity communities challenge oppressive top-down domination. Rather than assume leaders are those who can mobilize followers to do what leaders want, we cultivate collaborative leadership and democratic teamwork. Anyone can have an impact at any time.
We oppose injustice and work to assure that everyone can meet their basic needs. We challenge discrimination based on religious, ethnic, or sexual identity and promote equality, equity, dignity, and deep respect.
We face reality to transform it. Our social system — the System — integrates systemic racism, sexism, corruption, greed, and other forms of systemic oppression into one self-perpetuating social system. This System includes our major institutions, our dominant culture, our communities, and ourselves as individuals who reinforce it with our daily actions. This deeply inculcated widespread worldview encourages people to climb ladders of success and look down on and dominate and exploit those below — and submit to those above.
The System teaches. “When you win, others lose.” Compassionate humanity community members declare, “We can all win.” The more others benefit, the more we benefit.
Remembering our primary problem is the System, we don’t scapegoat or demonize individuals. We strengthen our higher angels and steadily unlearn society’s hyper-individualistic, hyper-competitive conditioning. We engage in self-examination, divisive social conditioning that inflames the desire to dominate and the willingness to submit and acknowledge mistakes and resolve not to repeat them. These changes enable us to build stronger organizations.
A vision of profound unity is on the horizon. Ever more activists who see the System as a common problem unify as never before to build a powerful popular movement — perhaps called the “compassionate humanity movement” — that’s even more potent than the union, civil rights, and women’s movements were.
While continuing to work on their own issues, some two percent or more of each nation’s population on occasion engages in simultaneous coordinated nonviolent actions to back winnable demands. These actions at times include nationwide work stoppages and consumer boycotts to support positions backed by supermajorities. This grassroots power achieves victories that inspire ever more participation.
Simultaneous changes in every arena reinforce each other synergistically. Structural changes improve how society organizes its activities. We build democratic bottom-up hierarchies whose members shape their organizations. We change the world and ourselves at the same time.
Activists on the inside and activists on the outside push institutions to live up to their highest ideals. Movement members regularly engage in political action because “power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic,” as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared.
Reconciliation takes place among individuals, communities, corporations, and nations, and with how countries interact with each other. Societies begin to look, become, and feel new — transformed — as we recover more of the egalitarian, compassionate potential that was first reflected in hunter-gatherer tribes almost two million years ago and became embedded in our DNA.
Aware no victory or defeat is final, based on our goals, the global compassionate humanity community works to achieve this vision. It cultivates compassionate and just communities and advances holistic and systemic transformation throughout society.