Systemic
Introduction
Egalitarian Seeds
“You can be whatever you want to be.”
“What’s in it for me (WIIFM)?”
“Money is a way to keep score.”
“Greed is good.”
“Anyone can move from rags to riches with enough hard work.”
“The poor are responsible for their poverty.”
“The rich deserve their wealth.”
“Somebody's gotta win and somebody's gotta lose.”
“Winning is everything.”
“Go along to get along.”
“Keep up with the Joneses.”
“Mom, I have to have a smartphone because everyone has one.”
“Someone must always be in charge.”
“My workplace is a dictatorship.”
“At least I can be boss in my home.”
Society implants these hyper-individualistic, materialistic beliefs deep within people’s minds, which inflames instincts to dominate and submit for personal gain.
Our social system claims to be based on merit, equality, and a level playing field, but in fact, it exalts wealth, power, and status, however gained. The elite rule, supposedly deservedly, in every arena.
Humans are torn between fear and anger on the one hand and trust and love on the other. Fully facing this tension is necessary to resolve it. Chronic denial and distraction are deadly. We must acknowledge our best and our worst instincts. Only then can we most effectively relieve suffering and promote justice.
We can pause for rest and recreation, take care of ourselves so we can better care for others, and then reengage to pursue Truth, Justice, and Beauty and organize (structure) activities that cultivate holistic reform.
Numerous advocates presented in the Systemic knowledge base on this website promote the compassionate holistic democratic reform of our top-down, selfish society. They address the whole person and the whole society, deal with complete systems, propose mutual support for self-improvement, and promote structural reforms rooted in moral transformation. These efforts don’t echo each other precisely, but they share many core principles and move in the same direction.
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Society inflames the innate desire to dominate the less powerful and submit to the more powerful for personal gain. Society indoctrinates people to climb social ladders selfishly and relentlessly and look down on, dominate, and exploit those below — and submit to those above.
This dynamic is reflected in national foreign policies. National “self-interest” is primary. Simply doing the right thing is secondary. This approach reinforces domestic selfishness.
Our society weaves together our institutions, cultures, and ourselves as individuals into a self-perpetuating social system — the Top-Down System.
No one individual or group controls this system. Everyone is a pawn in the game, and everyone perpetuates it with their daily actions. Top-level administrators are replaceable. Nevertheless, people should be held accountable for harmful actions.
Domination and submission can be justified as ways to serve the common good. An example is the acceptance of red lights. The community agrees to yield authority in the interest of public safety.
However, throughout society, wealth, power, and status are end goals, not means to a higher end. People consider life a zero-sum struggle with winners and losers and neglect positive-sum, win-win solutions.
Fundamental, comprehensive reform is needed to promote the general welfare and hold leaders accountable to those they serve.
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This website envisions a powerful grassroots movement that replaces the Top-Down System with a Bottom-Up System. In a positive upward spiral, this movement would cultivate mutually reinforcing social, personal, cultural, economic, and political reforms to make society kinder, fairer, and more egalitarian — based on the principle that all people are essentially equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities.
Unfortunately, however, interpersonal conflicts weaken activist organizations, social service providers, spiritual communities, families, schools, workplaces, and other organizations. Disrespect, arrogance, egoism, assumptions of moral superiority, elitism, dogmatism, lack of internal democracy, weak mutual support, scapegoating, demonizing, resentments, power struggles, inner turmoil, and other dilemmas are widespread. All of these issues don’t plague every group, but many afflict most groups, and they have the same solution: compassionate cooperation.
Many individuals and organizations relieve and prevent suffering, and many movements promote compassion and democracy. However, these efforts generally focus on particular issues, individuals, or communities. Moreover, political campaigns fade after they peak and their issue is resolved.
One common missing element in these efforts is an explicit commitment to enabling mutual support for undoing or controlling oppressive social conditioning, especially the desire to dominate and the willingness to submit for personal gain.
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Suppose these change agents affirm their common ground, unite, support each other to overcome their internalized oppression, and sustain a unified, diverse movement over time. In these ways, they help shift our social system from top-down to bottom-up — with methods such as those presented throughout this site’s knowledge base.
Members commit to the same mission (perhaps: serving humanity, the environment, and life itself) and use the same tools (perhaps: at least once a month, they open meetings with a moment of silence and a check-in during which members report on their efforts to unlearn or control their dominate-and-submit impulses). This mission statement and these tools are food for thought, not a blueprint.
In these ways, reformers cultivate mutual empowerment, self-improvement, and egalitarian community throughout society. This movement affirms everyone’s common humanity and equal worth and builds democratic hierarchies with representative, accountable leaders. These gains lead to a more harmonious society in every arena.
Affirming that the Top-Down System is our common primary problem unifies the movement and reduces scapegoating and blaming “enemies,” which is a divisive distraction that undermines unity.
We humanize communities, cultures, workplaces, governments, and ourselves, restructure society, and establish harmony with Mother Nature.
This massive, grassroots, multi-national movement cultivates national communities with a coordinated networks of autonomous local teams. These teams model an egalitarian society grounded in mutual aid and respect for everyone’s fundamental equality.
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If a strong, diverse organizing committee composed of community leaders convenes a conference to launch this movement, members could modify the committee’s proposed strategies as they get involved, within the framework of a commitment to holistic reform.
In so doing, they could connect the dots, broaden deep understanding, and nurture a commitment to holistic change. People could see their actions as a step in the right direction, a never-ending movement that gains steady progress without claiming it will achieve perfection.
Underneath our multiple identities, we’re all members of the human family. We’re interdependent, which requires us to aid each other. This perspective avoids both selfishness and self-sacrifice.
If enough people commit to a vision like this, we could build a Bottom-up System rooted in egalitarian mutual empowerment while retaining the Top-Down System’s positive qualities. Society could become new in some ways — and remain the same in others.
Gains could ripple through society with solutions that benefit everyone, as envisioned in the poem, “Evolutionary Revolution,” a phrase used by Mahatma Gandhi.
GENERAL ISSUES
The Systemic Knowledge Base includes these resources.
Advocates/Services
Othering and Belonging Institute
Othering is the problem of our time. Belonging is the solution. The Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley advances groundbreaking approaches to transforming structural marginalization and inequality.
Promoting “a transition from a world of domination and extraction to a world of regeneration, resilience, and interdependence… cultivating a practice of taking care of each other…. A movement that can transform the world and each one of us in it…. … Changing ourselves individually and collectively will change the world….
Center for Partnership Studies
The mission of the Center for Partnership Systems is to catalyze movement towards partnership systems on all levels of society through research, education, grassroots empowerment, and policy initiatives. … connecting the dots between the personal and political to address root causes…
Books
Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, Brian Klaas.
Instead of imagining that we can have this top-down control, I think we have to have a little bit less hubris and also accept the limits of what humans can and cannot control.
On Violence, Hannah Arendt.
This generation, trained like its predecessors in hardly anything but the various brands of the my-share-of-the-pie social and political theories, has taught us a lesson about manipulation… They discovered what we call today the Establishment and what earlier was called the System…. It goes against the very nature of self-interest to be enlightened... Self-interest, when asked to yield to “true” interest — that is, the interest of the world as distinguished from that of the self — will always reply, Near is my shirt, but nearer is my skin.
Mahatma Gandhi: his message for mankind, Haridas Chaudhuri; Leonard Roy Frank.
“The purpose of this small volume is to spotlight the unique significance of Gandhi in the history of human evolution..."
A New Republic of the Heart: An Ethos for Revolutionaries, By Terry Patten.
“A guide to inner work for holistic change.”
The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Arlie Russell Hochschild.
Jobs that call for emotional labor…allow the employer to exercise a degree of control over the emotional activities of employees.… It is a subtle and pervasive way of dominating.…”
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, adrienne maree brown.
“Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for…. We have transformed ourselves in a way that makes our work much more relevant as a living resistance to the dysfunctional social system in which we live…. Having community to live with is actually really crucial for human development..”
The Spiritual Activist: Practices to Transform Your Life, Your Work, and Your World, Claudia Horwitz.
“Burnout is a risk for social workers, teachers, non-profit administrators, volunteers, trainers, artists, and anyone who is trying to make a difference in their world. Claudia Horwitz believes that faith and spiritual practice play a vital role in the ongoing struggle for change. The Spiritual Activist is a practical guide to individual and social transformation through spirituality and faith. “
The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness, Rhonda Magee.
“It is only by healing from injustices and dissolving our personal barriers to connection that we develop the ability to view others with compassion and to live in community with people of vastly different backgrounds and viewpoints…. The Inner Work of Racial Justice offers a road map to a more peaceful world.”
Trump and a Post-Truth World, By Ken Wilber.
“In this provocative work, philosopher Ken Wilber applies his Integral approach to explain how we arrived where we are and why there is cause for hope. He lays much of the blame on a failure at the progressive, leading edge of society. This leading edge is characterized by the desire to be as just and inclusive as possible, and to it we owe the thrust toward women’s rights, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and the concern for oppression in all its forms. This is all evolutionarily healthy. But what is unhealthy is a creeping postmodernism that is elitist, “politically correct,” insistent on an egalitarianism that is itself paradoxically hierarchical, and that looks down on ‘deplorables.”’ Combine this with the techno-economic demise of many traditional ways of making a living, and you get an explosive mixture. It is only when members of society’s leading edge can heal themselves that a new, Integral evolutionary force can emerge to move us beyond the social and political turmoil of our current time to offer genuine leadership toward greater wholeness.”
Denis Diderot’s The Encyclopedia: Selections, Stephen J. Gendzier, ed.
With forty collaborators, including writers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, and many more contributors, the 18th Century French polymath Denis Diderot served as principal editor of the Enlightenment’s remarkable The Encyclopedia..., which aimed to cover the whole range of human knowledge of the time, was on the cutting edge of a cultural revolution that emerged from the Dark Ages, when intellectuals had been prone to debate abstractions like how many angels could sit on the head of a pin.... Of particular relevance is the Encyclopedists’ affirmation of systemic thinking. In his Introduction, Stephen J. Gendzler writes: “Such [cross references] were first of all intended to clarify complex subjects and to show all the relationships between things and between words, then to illuminate the truth in all areas, to demonstrate the unity of knowledge…” (see review)
Articles/Essay/Op-eds
The Systemic Knowledge Base includes articles, essays, and op-eds on various systemic issues.
In Martin Luther King, Jr. Beloved Commuity, “racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood.”
“Vincent Harding Teach-In Explodes,” Wade Lee Hudson)
There Is Joy in Struggle, Cornel West.
“We know most of human history is a history of domination and oppression and exploitation and degradation. Most of human history is a history of hatred and contempt... As I look at myself, I can see the white supremacy in me. [read more].
Justice by Means of Democracy: A Review, Wade Lee Hudson
Danielle Allen affirms egalitarianism and proposes a “power-sharing liberalism” rooted in “difference without domination” and applies her analysis to the entire society: politics, the economy, and society. [Read More]
Holistic Democracy, Philip Woods.
“Holistic democracy is a way of working together which encourages individuals to grow and learn as whole people and facilitates co-responsibility, mutual empowerment and fair participation of all in co-creating their social and organisational environment.”
Two films in the Systemic Knowledge Base address systemic issues.
The protagonist, Jane, is a recent college grad who hopes to become a film producer. This film explores how much she’s willing to compromise her ethics to climb the ladder of success. The New York Times review, “Screaming on the Inside,” by Jeannette Catsoulis comments on how her boss makes “the slow draining of Jane’s soul almost visible... a painstaking examination of the way individual slights can coalesce into a suffocating miasma of harassment. (The movie) strikingly pairs the executive’s demeaning actions with the stifling moral vacancy of the power structure that shields him... The spoor of the workplace predator is wearyingly familiar and as ubiquitous as offices themselves.”
“Beale galvanizes the nation, persuading viewers to shout "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" from their windows…. When Beale discovers that Communications Corporation of America (CCA), the conglomerate parent of UBS, will be bought out by an even larger Saudi conglomerate, he launches an on-screen tirade against the deal and urges viewers to pressure the White House to stop it. This panics top network brass because UBS's debt load has made the merger essential for its survival. Beale meets with CCA chairman Arthur Jensen, who explicates his own "corporate cosmology" to Beale, describing the inter-relatedness of the participants in the international economy and the illusory nature of nationality distinctions.”
Podcasts
The podcasts section of the The Systemic Knowledge Base includes:
The opening pod is reported on in “Valarie Kaur with Baratunde on "How to Citizen,” which begins: “On the opening episode of this “How to Citizen” podcast, Baratunde conducts a remarkable interview with Valarie Kaur, author of See No Stranger,. Kaur clearly articulates the spirit that drivesthis site with her holistic worldview and her affirmation of mutual support for self-development.
With her Revolutionary Love Project, Kaur addresses our relationships with ourselves as well as our relationships with others. She examines internal changes we must make to our minds and hearts as well as institutional reforms. In response to whether we are experiencing the darkness of the womb or the darkness of the tomb, she replies, “It’s both” because we see the “dying of the nation we thought we were,” as well as the emergence of transformation. Large numbers of whites joining in Black Lives Matter demonstrations were particularly encouraging.
External work, such as getting to know our neighbors with an open heart, is critical. The founder of the Sikh faith affirmed “I see no enemy.”
Videos
”The Free and the Brave,” Lecture by James Baldwin, April 1963 (transcript)*
“The price for this transformation is high. White people will have to ask themselves precisely why they found it necessary to invent a nigger.”
Quotes
The quotes section includes
Put politics back in its true place, a secondary one... This world must...become the world of men and women, of fruitful work and thoughtful leisure… [Advance] the spirit of dialogue... All other efforts, however admirable, that rely on power and domination can only mutilate men and women more grievously.
—Albert CamusThese isms are going to eat us alive.
—George W. BushIf to change ourselves is to change our worlds, and the relation is reciprocal, then the project of history making is never a distant one but always right here, on the borders of our sensing, thinking, feeling, moving bodies.
--J.K. Gibson-Graham
SPECIFIC ISSUES
Domination/Partnership
The Systemic Knowledge Base includes these resources concerning domination and partnership.
Articles/Essays/Op-eds
The Willingness to Submit, By Wade Lee Hudson
Conformity comes in many shapes, and often it’s rational. Unfortunately, society fosters irrational submission that undermines personal and collective empowerment. Determining if rebellion is justified can be tricky, but these decisions are essential, and engaging in effective resistance is critical. [Read More]
Why Trump Won’t Let Go of His Dream of Domination, Thomas B. Edsall.
Dan P. McAdams: Trump’s unique personality profile — the high extraversion and low agreeableness, the narcissistic motivations, the “warrior” life story — seems perfectly suited to assume the authoritarian mantle at a time in American history when many Americans crave the security and exult in the excitement that such a mantle seems to confer. [read more]
What Happens When a Woman Chooses Career Dominance Over Her Relationship, Jessica Grose
...For women who didn’t want to take a step back, there were two additional barriers to success. One was “the pressure to give up what they saw as their relational style in favor of the hard-charging ‘masculine’ style the firm venerated in client interactions.” The second was that the mothers who did make it to partner were “routinely” belittled by colleagues as bad mothers and bad role models. [read more]
The Shame Industrial Complex Is Booming. Who’s Cashing In?, (behind paywall), Alissa Bennett, The New York Times.
The basic “us” versus “you” dichotomy that foregrounds even the most benign of shaming always stands in the shadow of the hierarchical tower. [read more]
The Desire to Dominate and the Willingness to Submit, Wade Lee Hudson.
"Exploitative domination and submission produce fear; justified domination produces trust. Learning to control or overcome the desire to dominate or submit for personal gain nurtures compassionate action. The more you’re driven by the desire to serve rather than by ego, the more you can support others individually and help establish democratic-equality structures throughout society..." [read more]
The Gender Gap Is Taking Us to Unexpected Places, Thomas B. Edsall.
“Women are just as competitive as men, Haidt wrote, ‘but they do it differently.’… Benenson writes: “The result of these two somewhat conflicting motives is that girls and women seek high status but disguise this quest by avoiding direct contests.” [read more]
Apotheosis Now, Fara Dabhoiwala.
“What does it mean when men are worshiped, willingly or not, as gods? …It also serves to mask the extent to which Western attitudes depend on their own forms of magical thinking. Our culture, for example, fetishizes goods, money, and material consumption, holding them up as indices of personal and social well-being. Moreover, as Subin points out, none of us can truly escape this fixation:
Though we may demystify other people’s gods and deface their idols, our critical capacity to demystify the commodity fetish still cannot break the spell it wields over us, for its power is rooted in deep structures of social practice rather than simple belief. While fetishes made by African priests were denigrated as irrational, the fetish of the capitalist marketplace has long been viewed as the epitome of rationalism.
…We all make our own gods, for our own reasons, all the time.
Why Everyone Is Always Giving Unsolicited Advice, Tressie McMillan Cottom.
“Even though we resist being judged, we enjoy being the judge. Advice is a method by which we manipulate status to negotiate interpersonal interactions. By giving advice, we enact tiny theaters of social dominance to signal or procure our social status over others…” (read more)
Cultural Transformation Theory — “
Cultural transformation theory (CTT) was introduced to a general readership in Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade (1987). It has since been the framework for many other works…, CTT contradicts the conventional notion of a linear progression from “barbarism” to “civilization.” Based on archeological and mythical data, it proposes that the earliest cradles of civilization oriented more to the partnership system until, during a period of chaos, there was a shift in a dominator direction. It further proposes that today it is more urgent than ever before that we reverse that shift — and work together to accelerate the move from domination to partnership.”
The Desire to Dominate and The Willingness to Submit —
“Changing laws and structures can help cultivate compassionate community. Controlling or overcoming the desire to dominate and the willingness to submit is also important. So long as humans are driven by these emotions, legal and structural reforms will be limited in their effectiveness. Advancing holistic and systemic transformation requires understanding why humans are prone to dominate and submit.”
“Individual liberty is valuable. Self-determination enables co-equal partnerships, nurtures cooperation, and helps build strong communities, which benefit individuals in a virtuous circle. Limits to individual freedom are essential, however. The classic example is a child running into traffic. How to define and enforce justified domination is not easy. Doing so can provide massive loopholes that undermine efforts to dissolve exploitative domination…”
The Human Crisis, Albert Camus (1946 lecture) — “
The SS and the German Officer no longer represented man or mankind, but rather...the triumph of a doctrine…
Inside every nation, and the world at large, mistrust, resentment, greed, and the race for power are manufacturing a dark, desperate universe... [with men] captive to abstract powers, starved and confused by harried living, and estranged from nature's truth, from sensible leisure, and simple happiness... They are no longer protected by mutual respects… We know perfectly well that the venom is not gone, that each of us carries it in our own hearts...
... Put politics back in its true place, a secondary one... This world must...become the world of men and women, of fruitful work and thoughtful leisure… [Advance] the spirit of dialogue... All other efforts, however admirable, that rely on power and domination can only mutilate men and women more grievously... [read more]
What Makes a Cult a Cult? Zoë Heller.
“The line between delusion and what the rest of us believe may be blurrier than we think... The problem with any psychiatric or sociological explanation of belief is that it tends to have a slightly patronizing ring. People understandably grow irritated when told that their most deeply held convictions are their “opium.”... The analytical mind may be quietened by cult-think, but it is rarely deadened altogether.” (read more)
Books
The Holy Thursday Revolution, Beatrice Bruteau.
“The domination/submission paradigm lies at the basis of many of our contemporary ills…. In our culture we have tended to award to the functionally dominant persons and institutions a total value of superiority, privilege, and power that has often led to injustice, damage, and suffering.”
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson.
“The human impulse to create hierarchies runs across societies and cultures, predates the idea of race, and thus is farther reaching, deeper, and older than raw racism and the comparatively new division of humans by skin color.
In a world without caste, instead of a false swagger over our own tribe... we would look upon all of humanity with wonderment… Being male or female, light or dark, immigrant or native-born, would have no bearing on what anyone was perceived as being capable of… We would all be invested in the well-being of others in our species if only for our own survival, and recognize that we are in need of one another more than we have been led to believe. We would join forces with indigenous people around the world raising the alarm as fires rage and glaciers melt. We would see that, when others suffer, the collective human body is set back from the progression of our species.
A world without caste would set everyone free. [read more]
The Shaming-Industrial Complex, Becca Rothfeld.
,,,the book ends by recommending that we “detoxify our relations.” It’s self-improvement that’s paramount. We should stop feeling shame, and we should stop inflicting it.[But] we almost certainly cannot alter our feelings without altering the institutional arrangements that support them. … we will still have to change a culture in order to change the emotions that it generates…. when the gears of the shame machine go on grinding?
Videos
“Women Are On Fire,” Alicia Garza —
"A woman said I don't control the channel changer in my house.... I've got to change conditions in my house, I've got to change conditions in my neighborhood, I've got to change conditions where I work."
Holistic Democracy
Articles/Essays/Op-eds
Holistic Democracy: What is It?, Philip A. Woods.
“Holistic democracy is a way of working together which encourages individuals to grow and learn as whole people and facilitates co-responsibility, mutual empowerment and fair participation of all in co-creating their social and organisational environment. Four dimensions of practice are at its core: holistic meaning… power sharing… transforming dialogue… holistic well-being.
Researching Holistic Democracy in Schools, Philip A. Woods.
“The aspiration to translate democratic principles into practice is ambitious. Democracy...seeks to enable people to be co-creators of their social environment and, through this, make the most of their innate capacity to learn and to develop their highest capabilities and ethical sensibilities. It is perpetually under pressure because it challenges assumptions about the...dominance of economistic priorities. It is vulnerable to opposition from those who have greater legitimacy, authority, and influence through less democratic ways of governance...
I have found it helpful to draw upon… the work of T. H. Green, which influenced Dewey and includes among its sources ideas forged in the revolutionary times of the 17th century… The first is the individual or subjective root of democracy... The second is the intersubjective aspect. The freeing of human potential is not solely a matter of individual effort. Personal growth involves interacting, connecting, and empathizing with fellow beings and the world around them, and learning with and from other people. The third concerns governance and how social living is regulated.”
Philip Woods and Holistic Democracy, Wade Lee Hudson.
“With his systemic analysis, Woods embraces the need for a peaceful 'social order.’ [He writes:] ‘Intersubjective interaction is an important corrective to focusing solely on individual awareness and change... ‘The evolution of values and ideas with enduring validity that transcend narrow interests...also involves co-creation through transforming dialogue and holistic learning’ in a process that is intersubjective and collaborative.
‘There are interests and groups who are marginalised and systematically disadvantaged... Rich democracy addresses systematic social injustices. The full power of democracy, however, is not only as a vehicle for championing the weaker interests and aspiring to inclusive participation. [It counters] a performative and neo-liberal ideology that appears so dominant in many countries…’
Examination of the New Tech Model as a Holistic Democracy, Jill Bradley-Levine and Gina Mosier.
Using the Degrees of Democracy Framework (Woods & Woods, 2012), we examined eight New Tech (NT) high schools to determine the extent to which they demonstrated characteristics of holistic democracy. We collected qualitative data, including observations and interviews during the fourth year of implementation. Findings indicated that the eight NT schools demonstrated many features of holistic democracy with a few exceptions. This study has implications for researchers and school communities interested in measuring holistic democracy in other schools and within school models.
Reflections on Elizabeth Anderson.
“Anderson’s primary concern is social equality — equality not just in politics and economics but also equality in social relations throughout society — how to treat each other as equals, without trying to dominate, or being willing to submit. She calls this democratic equality.”
What is the Point of Equality?, Elizabeth S. Anderson.
“to create a community in which people stand in relations of equality to others…. People, not nature, are responsible for turning the natural diversity of human beings into oppressive hierarchies…. Egalitarians can take other features of society besides the distribution of goods, such as social norms, as subject to critical scrutiny.”
The Paradox of the Beatitudes, Paul Tillich.
“There is no distinction made in the Beatitudes between spiritual and material want, and there is no distinction made between spiritual and material fulfillment... The Beatitudes praise those who will be fulfilled in their whole being... Perhaps we are right to consider the catastrophe of our present world as a fulfillment of the Woes which Jesus directed against a rich, abundant, laughing, self-congratulating social order.” [NOTE: This link goes to a collection of sermons. Click on The Paradox of the Beatitudes to see this resource.]
America’s Racial Karma, Interview with Larry Ward by Julie Flynn Badal.
“Karma is a theory of action and consequence that describes how good deeds generate good results and more good deeds in a positive feedback loop, while bad deeds do the opposite... It’s just a cycle of action, a pattern that lives inside of us. It’s wired into us neurologically, but also economically, politically, and culturally.
We’re all traumatized by the karma of racism...and the structures that shape our present day,... We’re built for the sublime. But we’ve organized our lives up to this point as fools... The colonial model deprives empathy...
The issues we have in the world today are about hearts and minds trapped in patterns that are no longer adequate. Our systems come out of these patterns. So we have to do the inner work at the same time as outer work. Otherwise, we’re just rearranging furniture on the deck of the Titanic.”
Optimizing Globalization Will Become Possible with a New Paradigm, Hector E Garcia.
“Most societies adapted, in varying degrees, to the management of the economy and technology within globalization, because these sectors are tangible and susceptible to measurement and consensus. Yet, interconnectedness of only the concrete will produce limited synergies and lead to zero-sum games, which mainly allow for either/or, win/lose options of binary logic instead of win/win potentialities…
Humanity has a great capacity to unleash physical forces of global impact, but we have put the cart of progress before the horse of idealism and human agency. Now we need to see reality and ourselves from a broader perspective and think more maturely in order to learn how to harness and direct reality more effectively towards those ideals. The paradoxes and crises of globalization are calling for a shift from the stagnant paradigm of either/or reductionism to a synergistic paradigm of Cultural Complementarity”
Lessons in Constructive Solitude from Thoreau, Holland Cotter.
“…...The education further entailed a total immersion in Nature — in plants, in seasons, in stars, in all creatures four-legged, winged and scaled. For Thoreau, Nature was a communicating consciousness, and he wanted to make himself available to it, antennas raised. Full receptivity required removal from ego-driven clamor, which was how, in his most stressed moments, he viewed human discourse...
Finally, he used his set-aside time at Walden to clarify his political thinking. For Thoreau, revolution began at home, one person at a time. ‘We must first succeed alone,’ he wrote, ‘that we may enjoy our success together.’ In his view, purposeful solitude and justice-minded community were codependent, the source of long-term social health. He knew what his view was up against: among other things, America’s antsy addiction to distraction and its led-by-the-nose, corporation-fed faith in utopian technology.”
Books
Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson.
“The human impulse to create hierarchies runs across societies and cultures, predates the idea of race, and thus is farther reaching, deeper, and older than raw racism and the comparatively new division of humans by skin color.
In a world without caste, instead of a false swagger over our own tribe... we would look upon all of humanity with wonderment… Being male or female, light or dark, immigrant or native-born, would have no bearing on what anyone was perceived as being capable of… We would all be invested in the well-being of others in our species if only for our own survival, and recognize that we are in need of one another more than we have been led to believe. We would join forces with indigenous people around the world raising the alarm as fires rage and glaciers melt. We would see that, when others suffer, the collective human body is set back from the progression of our species.
A world without caste would set everyone free. [read more]
Creating a World That Works for All, Sharif Abdullah.
“The Mender Pledge: I believe in inclusivity. I believe that our lives are inextricably linked one to another. We cannot wage war against anyone without waging war against ourselves. Therefore, I will practice inclusivity with myself, my family, my community, the natural world, and all others. I will actively work toward the goal of an inclusive society, a world that works for all. I know that we are One. Therefore, I will give to you what I want for me. I know there is enough for all. I want everyone to win. Therefore, I will work to resolve all conflicts to every party’s satisfaction. I want acceptance, Therefore, I will accept myself for who and what I am. I will accept you for who and what you are, and I will accept all others for who and what they are. Even if I resist your behavior, I will accept you as a Child of God, a part of the Divine. I want no harm. Therefore, I will not harm myself or you or any others, by thought, word, or deed. I want forgiveness. Therefore, I will forgive myself, I will forgive you, and I will forgive all others. I want to be free. Therefore, I will not let others dominate, control, or manipulate me. And I will not dominate, control, or manipulate you or others. I want peace. Therefore, I will be peaceful with myself, with you, and with others. I want love. Therefore, I will love myself, I will love you and I will love all others. [See Donald Trump: The Triumph of Frustration, The Failure Of Vision, Shariff M. Abdullah.]
The Spiritual Activist: Practices to Transform Your Life, Your Work, and Your World (2002), Claudia Horwitz.
Citing the pervasiveness of burnout in such trades as social work, teaching, non-profit administration, volunteerism, and art, a guide for readers seeking to make a difference in the world cites the importance of faith and spiritual practice in social activism and offers advice on slowing down, reinforcing relationships, and balancing work and a personal life.
Clash or Complement of Cultures? Peace and Productivity in the New Global Reality, Hector E, Garcia.
“This book recommends a balance between cooperation and competition in intercultural/international relations, with more emphasis on the former. To make this possible, it describes a paradigm shift and demonstrates why it is logical and how it can be attained — thus going beyond traditional legal and moral compliance. Compliance has been insufficient because morality has been significantly dismissed as a “soft value,” and civil rights laws have been circumvented and frequently ineffective.
The book proposes that revolutionary changes caused by globalization require an equivalent paradigm. Interdependence inherent to globalization will not function if winning-is-the-only-thing mindset continues to prevail in the U.S. and the West.
Cultural Complementarity is validated through respected principles and practices in quantum physics, education, business, and economics. End chapters focus on national and international applications of the paradigm. Appendices have data and suggested programs to test and implement the theory.”
New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World—and How to Make It Work for You, Jeremy Heiman & Henry Timms.
They make a strong case for dynamics that are “open, participatory, and peer driven.” Yet they also write: ”As we see with ISIS and the growing hordes of white supremacists,... the tools that bring us closer together can also drive us further apart.” Heimans and Timms argue we can avoid this danger by creating “a world in which all major social and economic institutions are designed so that [all] people can more meaningfully shape every aspect of their lives.” (see review)
History
Numerous scholars have reported on how humans, prior to the advent of centralized agriculture, lived for some 2-300,000 years in egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies. This potential is deeply embedded in our DNA and shapes our innate human nature. The history section of the knowledge base includes links to articles about these resources.
Articles/Essays/Op-eds
World-Historical Theory of Race and Caste, Sunil Khilnani.
“By comparing white supremacy in the U.S. to the caste system in India, her new book at once illuminates and collapses a complex history.” Wilkerson argues that underlying and predating racism is a hidden system of social domination: a structure that ranks people based on neutral human differences, as with Nazi Germany, Indian castism, and American racism,
Digging for Utopia, Kwame Anthony Appiah.
“In The Dawn of Everything David Graeber and David Wengrow search for historical examples of nonhierarchical societies to justify their anarchist vision of human freedom... And cities [they say] could function perfectly well without bosses and administrators... In their view we should give up both and reject the inevitability of states... [But] when the dust, or the darts, have settled, we find that Graeber and Wengrow have no major quarrel with the “standard historical meta-narrative,” at least in its more cautious iterations... They don’t dispute that forager societies—with fascinating exceptions—tend to have less capital accumulation and inequality than sedentary farming ones... Human beings are riven with both royalist and regicidal impulses; we’re prone to erect hierarchies and prone to topple them. We can be deeply cruel and deeply caring... It’s just that Graeber and Wengrow aren’t content to make those points: they want to establish the existence of large, dense, city-like settlements free of rulers or rules; and, when the fumes of conjecture drift away, we are left without a single unambiguous example.” [read more]
A Finnish Scholar Wants to Change How We See American History, Jennifer Schuessler.
“Indigenous Continent,” (by Pekka Hamalainen) published on Tuesday by Liveright, aims to do nothing less than recast the story of Native American — and American — history, portraying Indigenous people not as victims but as powerful actors who profoundly shaped the course of events.
Hamalainen, a professor at the University of Oxford who has written acclaimed histories of the Comanche and the Lakota, is hardly the first scholar to argue against the trope of the “doomed” Indian, who inevitably falls victim to the onslaught of guns, germs and capitalism. But he takes the argument further.
The confrontation between European settlers and Indigenous America, he writes, “was a four-centuries-long war,” in which “Indians won as often as not.”...
Back then, Hamalainen was part of a cohort of scholars who were building on the so-called New Indian History. And the field has only continued to explode.
[read more — behind paywall]
Grand Illusions, Pankaj Mishra. “It’s time to abandon the intellectual narcissism of cold war Western liberalism.”
The Ancient Patterns of Migration, Deborah Barsky.
Today’s hot-button issue is actually as old as the human race…. Since then, peoples of shared inheritance have established strict protocols for assuring their sense of membership in one or another national context.
Cultural Transformation Theory, wikipedia
proposes that societies used to follow a “partnership model” of civilization but over time, it gave way to today's current “dominator model” of civilization. This theory was first proposed by Riane Eisler, a cultural scholar, in her book The Chalice and the Blade. Eisler affirms that societies exist on a partnership-domination continuum but we as a species have moved away from our former partnership orientation to a more domination orientation by uplifting masculine ideals over feminine ideals. She insists that people do not have to live in a society based on the rule of one gender class over the other. There is historical evidence that another type of society, where all individuals are equal, is possible.” [read more]
In an interview with James Suzman, Ezra Klein discusses Suzman’s reports on one of the oldest enduring hunter-gatherer societies, the Bushmen of southern Africa. Suzman argues that how we work today is driven by what we want, not by what we need.
On Human Nature, Wade Lee Hudson
“Assumptions about human nature shape beliefs about the potential for change. Reflections on human history and child development indicate that compassion and the desire to cooperate are more primal, stronger, and deeper than hate and the desire to dominate. Which instinct prevails depends on many factors, including training, social conditions, and personal decisions. As Sitting Bull said, “Inside of me there are two dogs. One is mean and evil and the other is good and they fight each other all the time. When asked which one wins I answer, the one I feed the most.”
When people feel secure, they’re more likely to be loving and cooperative. But when they’re insecure, they’re more likely to be hateful and domineering — and willing to submit. Insecurity hardens the tendency to form ingroups and outgroups. Healthy competition becomes vicious. The hope to improve your material condition becomes all-consuming.
Society can encourage one pole or the other — domination or cooperation — or it can nurture a balance…” (read more)
In “The Case Against Civilization,” John Lanchester wrote, “[James C.] Scott’s work has focussed on a skeptical, peasant’s-eye view of state formation.… (Scott offers) a blistering critique of central planning and ‘high modernism,’ the idea that officials at the center of a state know better than the people they are governing.”
No Return to the ‘Old Dispensation’, Roger Cohen.
“The monster of modernity must be slowed.... Perhaps rebalancing is a useful word because attempts at wholesale reinvention, like those utopias, tend to end badly. From consumption to contemplation, from global to local, from outward to inward, from aggression to compassion, from stranger to guest, from frenzy to stillness, from carbon to green…. But a lot of people, in this quieted world, have experienced some transforming miracle…. They have heard Rilke’s admonition in the last line of “Archaic Torso of Apollo: ”You must change your life.” (read more)
Why a Paradigm Shift is Necessary, Hector E. Garcia.
“1) Knowing and using knowledge of root causes are essential to effectively and sustainably reduce and eliminate problems, especially those of a chronic and intractable nature. 2)Reactive tactical measures will typically lag behind the manifestations of this type of problems.”[read more]
Podcasts
Nicholas Christakis: How We’re Wired for Goodness, On Being with Krista Tippett (transcript)
Books
The history section also includes these books.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson.
Wilkerson argues that underlying and predating racism is a hidden system of social domination: a structure that ranks people based on neutral human differences, as inNazi Germany, Indian castism, and American racism,
The Chalice and the Blade, Riane Eisler.
Eisler argues that we as a species have moved away from our former partnership orientation to a more domination orientation.
Sustainability and Well-Being: The Middle Path to Environment, Society, and the Economy,
“An integrated analysis of the twin challenges of environmental sustainability and human well-being by investigating them as interconnected phenomena requiring a paradigmatic psychosocial transformation. She presents an incisive social science analysis and an alternative philosophical perspective on the needed transition from a worldview of domination to one of partnership.” (see review)
Humankind A Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman.
“The Dutch historian’s overview of debate around humanity’s core instincts has blind spots, but its optimism is invigorating…. [Are humans] selfish, untrustworthy and dangerous man [or] was [man] born free and it was civilisation – with its coercive powers, social classes and restrictive laws – that put him in chains.”
Justice by Means of Democracy, Danielle Allen.
Allen advocates a “power-sharing liberalism” rooted in “difference without domination” and applies her analysis to politics, the economy, and the rest of society. She affirms the development of “citizens’ ability to adopt habits of non-domination in their ordinary interactions with one another.… This would permit us to establish a virtuous cycle linking political, social, and economic domains in support of the kind of human flourishing that rests on autonomy, both private and public.”
The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area, Malcolm Margolin.
This land of “inexpressible fertility,” as one early explorer described it, supported one of the densest Indian populations in all of North America. The Ohlone Way describes the culture of the Indian people who inhabited Bay Area prior to the arrival of Europeans and lived peaceful, egalitarian lives.
Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen, James Suzman.
“A hunting-and-gathering people who made a good living by working only as much as needed to exist in harmony with their hostile desert environment,… Suzman vividly brings to life a proud and private people,… the oldest hunting and gathering society on earth.”
Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, James C. Scott.
“The first agrarian states…were born of accumulations of domestications: first fire, then plants, livestock, subjects of the state, captives, and finally women in the patriarchal family — all of which can be viewed as a way of gaining control over reproduction…. All early states are based on millets and cereal grains and unfree labor.”
The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, Murray Bookchin.
“‘The very notion of the domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human.’… (Bookchin’s) inspired synthesis of ecology, anthropology, and political theory traces our conflicting legacies of hierarchy and freedom, from the first emergence of human culture to today's globalized capitalism, constantly pointing the way to a sane, sustainable ecological future.
admonition in the last line of “Archaic Torso of Apollo: ”You must change your life.”
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