One for All and All for One, a World-Changing Revolution in the Making

One for all and all for one

“A war without a battlefield, a war without an enemy, a war that is everywhere, a thousand civil wars, a war without an end.” (Opening narration of The Fourth World War, a movie by Jacqueline Soohen and Richard Rowley)

“The present generation has been born to set right a time that is out of joint by carrying through this historic revolution in the constitution of human affairs. Your task is going to be as difficult as it is urgent. No previous generation has had this opportunity, and no later generation is likely to have it; for, if your generation is successful, the survival of mankind will have been secured, and if you fail, you may have no successor.” (adapted from Arnold Toynbee)

“It is perhaps not too much to say that, in the first decade of the new millennium, humanity has entered into a condition that is in some sense more globally united and interconnected, more sensitized to the experiences and suffering of others, in certain respects more spiritually awakened, more conscious of alternative future possibilities and ideals, more capable of collective healing and compassion, and, aided by technological advances in communication media, more able to think, feel, and respond together in a spiritually evolved manner to the world’s swiftly changing realities than has ever before been possible.” (Richard Tarnas)

“If you look at the science that describes what is happening on earth today and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t have the current data. If you meet the people in this unnamed movement and aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a heart. Both are true and I put my faith on people.” (Paul Hawken)

 

A World-Changing Revolution in the Making

Historically, social movements have arisen primarily because of injustice, inequalities, and corruption. Those woes remain legion, but a new condition exists that has no precedent: the planet has a life-threatening disease that is marked by massive ecological degradation and climate change. The resulting mess is a complexity that’s simply beyond any single mind to comprehend, let alone solve.

Offering solutions to disentangle these seemingly insoluble dilemmas, a rising tide of concerned people, all working to safeguard nature and ensure justice, is emerging. Tens of millions of ordinary and not-so-ordinary people are willing to confront ignorance, despair, greed, injustice, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.

They arise spontaneously from different economic sectors, cultures, regions, and cohorts, resulting in a global, classless, diverse, and embedded movement, spreading worldwide without exception. Virtually every tribe, culture, language, and religion is part of it, from Mongolians to Uzbeks to Tamils. It is comprised of families in India, students in Australia, farmers in France, the landless in Brazil, the bananeras of Honduras, the ‘poors’ of Durban, villagers in Irian Jaya, indigenous tribes of Bolivia, and housewives in Japan. These are people who are attempting to take into account the needs and dreams of 6.3 billion people of all nation and their unborn children. Its leaders are farmers, zoologists, shoemakers, and poets. It is the largest coming together of citizens in history.

The themes of their struggle include the need for radical social change, population reduction towards an optimum point, the curbing of rampant consumerism, the reinvention of market-based economies, the need for localized economic control, the democratization of democracy, changes in governmental structure and citizen dialogue, the demand for radical transparency in politics and decision making, calls for autonomy, defending the life and culture of indigenous people, ecological activism on all levels, the drive to prevent drastic climate change, the greening of the city, cleaning our dirty technologies, giving science a heart, the retrieval of agricultural sustainability, the empowerment of women, the rights of the child, the concept of the commons, the creation of food webs, the reinstatement of cultural primacy over corporate hegemony, the spread of multiculturalism, interfaith dialogue and understanding, the concern for refugee populations, the building of a culture of peace, the creation of mass movements, and the push for human rights.

All coalescing towards birthing fundamental social, economic, political and environmental changes needed to remedy the intertwined crises of social injustice and ecological degradation.

The struggle takes many shapes. There are research institutes, community development agencies, village- and citizen-based organizations, corporations, networks, faith-based groups, trusts, and foundations. And even though the origins and purposes of the various groups comprising the movement are diverse, their principles, mission statements, or values, do not conflict. Its members share a basic set of fundamental understandings about the earth, how it functions, and the necessity of fairness and equity for all people dependent on the planet’s life-giving systems.

They’re leading us to a period, in ecological terms, called perturbation, in which, a rapid rate of evolution occurs. It’s exciting, dynamic and hair-raising. It’s an amazing threshold beyond which all of our best hopes might come true. In the words of Helen Keller reacting to the atrocities of her era, “This is a time for a loud voice, open speech, and fearless thinking. I rejoice that I live in such a splendidly disturbing time!”

They’re rewriting the rules as to what counts as truth, and what constitutes value. Just as antibodies rally when the body is under threat, these people are joining together to defend life on Earth. This movement of movements may be the last, best hope for humankind, and non-humankind likewise.

 

What Makes this Movement of Movements Ticks

The movement with roots and soul

The movement has three basic, intertwining roots: the environmental and social justice movements, and indigenous cultures’ resistance to globalization. It is as much about ozone and orang utans as it is about cultural and anthropological heritage. While the first two needs little explanation, some words are needed here to tell the stories of indigenous peoples.

Object of genocides spoken like the words of a quiet technician and executed in the name of progress, they died along with hundreds of years, even thousands of years, of acquired wisdom about how to live with others and within nature. Their medium of knowledge, languages, like species, are disappearing. Half the world’s languages have disappeared, and more than 3,000 are dying, a rate of decline more precipitous than that of species loss. And every lost language, like every lost species, sharply reduces our access to that knowledge and it’s distilled form, wisdom. It produces other unintended consequence as well. This loss of languages, along with the cultures they represent, has us drifting toward a blandly amorphous, generic world, as cultures disappear and life becomes more uniform, in which everything in the future is the same as the present and the past. Though we know that life thrives on diversity, we are reducing it day by day, culturally and biologically, consciously and unconsciously.

The plight of the Indians, of the Hawaians, of the Papuanese, of the Maasais, of the Inuits, are as strong and as crucial as the plight of the poor Asians, of the broken Africans, of the fatigued Americans, of the misleaded Europeans. Their voice empowers and strengthen this movement of movements, and grounded it to it’s history, it’s roots, it’s soul. They remind us that we were all once indigenous peoples ourselves, and that we not only have found new ways, but also lost our ways at the same time.

The movement without isms

And thus, this is the first time in history that a large social movement is not bound together by an ‘ism.’ It is not bound by ideologies. Conventional movement have followers, followers study tracts, and identify themselves with a group. They read the biography of the founder(s) or listen to them perorate on tape or in person, but this movement doesn’t work that way. There is no manifesto or doctrine, no authority to check with. And we know that every ism has indeed failed because every one of them becomes a schism, without exception.

In place of isms are processes, concerns, and compassion. The movement demonstrates a pliable, resonant, and generous side of humanity. It is nonviolent, and grassroot-ed; it has no bombs, armies, or tanks. It’s not about ideology; it’s not about beliefs. And no one asks anyone else for permission to be a part of the movement.

What binds it together are ideas, not ideologies. And this unnamed movement’s big contribution is the absence of one big idea. In its stead it offers thousands of practical and useful ideas. Ideas open up possibility, ideas liberate. And ideas are always subject to change. They’re ongoing, they’re evolving. They’re up there for people to look at, and examine, and criticize. Sometimes ideas don’t work and you try another one that works, and then you try and figure out how to make it work better. Thus, it’s an iterative, evolutionary process.

It’s tens of thousands of ideas with respect to water, buildings, cities, poverty, women, education, climate and carbon neutrality. You can’t sum them up because they appear all over the place. But they actually do all point north toward a very different world than the one we live in now.

The movement without a great leader

Describing the breadth of the movement is like trying to hold the ocean in your hand. It is that large. When a part rises above the waterline, the iceberg beneath usually remains unseen. When Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize, the wire service stories didn’t mention the network of six thousand different women’s groups in Africa planting trees. When we hear about someone stopping chemical from spilling over in a river, it is never mentioned that more than four thousand organizations in North America have adopted a river, creek, or stream. We read that organic agriculture is the fastest-growing sector of farming in America, Japan, Mexico, and Europe, but no connection is made to the more than three thousand organizations that educate farmers, customers, and legislators about sustainable agriculture.

So what you’re seeing is a movement that is very different from anything that we’ve seen before, because it’s got no centrality. Rather than an ideological or centralized movement, this coalescence is spontaneous, organic and self-organized, comprising a million or more of organizations with no center, codified beliefs, or a charismatic leader. While some of the leaders have become highly visible, it is not really directed by any ‘great’ leaders, but by the collective, emergent action of its millions of participants. There is no Marx, Alexander, or Gandhi at the forefront.

The movement dancing the dance of unity in diversity

The movement does not agree on everything nor will it ever, because that would be an ideology. The movement can’t be divided because it is atomized-small pieces loosely joined-from the very beginning. It forms, gathers, and dissipates quickly. It didn’t start in the center; it started from the outside; it started from, literally, the ground up. And thus, is changing the world, presently created by privilege-which is a top down world-to one created by community, which is a bottom up world. And that’s going to be true for everything-money, economics, design, city planning, communication, politics. Many dismiss it as powerless, but it has been known to bring down governments, companies, and leaders through witnessing, informing, and massing.

In other words, they’re all different, but they don’t contradict themselves. They are fragmented, yet whole. This movement is more complex and diverse than any prior social movements. Its strength and resiliency derives from this redundant complexity and diversity. It recognizes that at a fundamental level we are all one. It reveals the great wisdom of the unity in diversity. There is no movement on earth and in our history that had ever arisen this way.

The movement of life’s sacred gestures

This movement is relentless and unafraid. It breaks fears and creates solidarity.This can be seen in the raw courage and heart seen over and again in the people who march, speak, create, resist, and build, for those who can not, dare not or will not do so. It cannot be mollified, pacified, or suppressed. It will not rest. It is the fierceness of what it means to know that we are alive and want to survive. It is the breathing, sentient testament of the living world, of life itself.

It’s source of inspiration is not garnered from litanies of what is flawed; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. It is not burdened with a syndrome of trying to save the world; it is trying to remake the world. Its people does not require saintliness or a political party. It is not a liberal or conservative activity. It is a sacred act. It’s life’s sacred gestures.

 

A Democratic Revolution Revolutionizing Democracy

What makes this revolution ticks paints a picture of an ‘emergent’ democracy that in many ways contrasts the conventional representative democracy many of us live in. In it:

  • participation occurs continuously through a variety of web-enabled initiatives, in the stead of rare exercises of voting.
  • deliberation is done by each individual-making sense of events, communicating with others, and deciding whether and how to join in community actions, in the stead of deliberation done primarily by a few elected or appointed officials.
  • democratic processes is alive with touching and being touched by others as the community works to create wisdom and to take action, where in conventional representative democracy, they feel remote to most citizens, and erect walls of prejudice and ideological divisions amongst citizens.
  • individuals plays the vital role. The shared, collective mind of the emerging democracy is made up of many individual human minds-your mind and my mind. In the emergent democracy each of our minds matters a lot. Where in traditional democracy what matters are the minds of those with power of position, and the minds of those that staff and lobby them.
  • where more and more of the world’s people are well educated and informed, are seeking as much data-raw facts, direct experience-as they can, and then make up their own minds, a fertile ground for a bottom-up collective sense-making is being readied for a new kind of democracy to emerge. Where as in traditional democracy, sense-making moves from top to bottom, where the leaders must know more than they are saying, more than their listeners. But this form of democracy was established in the 18th century, when education and information were both scarce resources.

And thus, we have a democratic revolution rather than a violent revolution. We have a democratic revolution that is revolutionizing democracy, which is doing so with a tool which no movements before has ever had at their disposal.

 

The Great Equalizer, the Connective Tissue of the Revolution, the Internet

Traditional media and the internet

Although democracy is on the rise, and the media is exerting ever wider influence on the public debate, the public itself is less able to govern themselves. In the press-government relationship, the government or the press is the authority. In the press-people relationship, the press is the authority. And in the government-people relationship, the government is the authority. In none of these three relationships are the people considered as the authority fit to govern themselves.

However, today, while the traditional mass media will not lose its role and importance, with the Internet, it is possible to go beyond them in expanding democracy and ending much of the alienation, voicelessness and powerlessness felt by the world’s populations. A range of political processes, such as political learning, formation of opinions, deliberation, agenda setting, organisation and mobilisation, debates and political campaigns, and most importantly, collective decision making, will increasingly take place on the Internet.

It is providing a means for instantaneous citizen dialogue and communication across the globe. Through it, the global membership of the revolution, in Asia, South America, Africa and India, while much lower in percentage of the total population, is growing quickly and consolidating swiftly to take back what is rightfully theirs: the right, the authority and the capability to govern themselves.

The swiss-army knife of democracy

The internet, however, offers more than just connectivity. Coding languages, technological platforms or tools, and websites can all be considered or designed as test cases for better understanding our ongoing experiment in building more collaborative, and thus more resilient, socio-economic systems. The collective power of texting, blogging, instant messaging, and email across millions of actors cannot be underestimated. Like a mind constituted of millions of inter-networked neurons, the social movement is capable of a kind of near-instantaneous, and sometimes subtle, consciousness raising, thus enabling mass improvisation of actions.

It has revolutionized what is possible for small groups and communities to accomplish, and are accordingly changing the loci of power. Some even calls the internet “the great equalizer,” because it changes the balance of power between citizens and power barons. For example, any one of us can launch an idea. Any one of us can write a blog, send out an email, create a list, etc. Though not every idea will take hold in the public consciousness-but the one that eventually catches fire, more and more likely will be started by an individual. It enables many more of us to effect change.

The internet democratizing democracy

In an age where conventional representative democracy is seen to be in decline (in the form of political apathy, voter fatigue and problems with legitimation of the representative model of democracy in societies which are increasingly losing their hierarchical structures), the internet seemed to many to be the natural approach in solving the problem. New interactive possibilities for mass communication, deliberation and participation through the internet, on a scale exceeding anything our governments or mass media have yet been able to achieve, were seen as an opportunity to revive democracy. Thus, the information superhighway has been promoted by political leaders and netheads alike as the medium by which a shift from an ‘occasional’ democracy to a ‘continuous’ one will be possible, and true democracy will be attainable.

In his day, Alexis de Tocqueville attributed the vitality of democracy to citizens’ work in building the 19th-century “commons”: free, local, public assets such as hospitals, churches, parks, seminaries, and schools. Today, the internet is a promising commons for such public work, where skills, information, social networks and access to the political process can be provided for all, including the traditionally disadvantaged citizens (e.g. young persons, people with little time or media competence, and those needing anonymity because of their vulnerability) and those who, due to their own unique circumstances, never had access to it before.

And true enough, the internet does foster egalitarian discussions of public issues. Prejudice and class play no part in the online environment. In an interactive setting such as a chat-site, a dialogue forum, or a commenting space, text is the preferred medium for information exchange, and so no identification of race, colour or sex can contaminate the free exchange of ideas. Further, users of the internet are traditionally against the censorship or control of information dissemination online. One can participate in democratic processes and practice via the information superhighway without a sense of government filtering, or commercial partiality.

By talking on-line, citizens may also acquire the motivation, knowledge, and even the wisdom they need to participate in politics. When online discussions go well, citizens encounter alternative perspectives, articulate their goals and priorities in ways that appeal to others, sharpen their sense of realistic options and necessary trade-offs, abandon support for indefensible positions, and develop mutual respect that allows them to coexist and cooperate even when they disagree. It fosters deliberation, which is an essential element of any democracy.

The internet may also be the quickest, cheapest and only truly interactive way for citizens to exchange information and opinions between themselves as well as with their elected representatives, thus facilitating communication between the state and the public, and can accordingly assist the formation of political opinion and the responsiveness of the institutions of representative democracy to the demands and expectations of society. It can bypass the need for complex and time-consuming bureaucracy.

Thus, though in the electronic republic we cannot converse with the level of intimacy or effectiveness as the face-to-face discussions and showing of hands in the ancient Athenians’ open-air assemblies, with the internet playing the central role of mass communication, it may be possible for our political system to return to the roots of democracy as it was practiced in the city-states of ancient Greece, when the people deliberate on issues affecting their lives, when people can truly govern themselves. It is likely to extend government decision making from the few in the center of power to the many on the outside who may wish to participate. It could make and is making democracy more democratic.

The internet open-sourcing democracy

More than anything else, the internet offers us a new way of understanding civilisation itself, seeing its underlying principles take forms in real life, everywhere and across time. It allow us to collectively confront the issues of our time more directly, to realize that nothing at all is too sacred to be questioned, re-interpreted and modified. Be it urban design, monetary policy, economic system, institutions of democracy, and even religious belief.

We move from simply following the law, to understanding the law, to actually feeling capable of writing the law: adhering to the map, to understanding the map, to drawing our own. And as we move towards this open-source model for participatory, bottom-up and emergent reality design, we change our relationship with laws and governance. This implementation of an open source democracy will require and enable us to dig deep into the very code of our legislative processes, and then rebirth it in the new context of our networked reality.

In doing so, we will be enabled to bring democracy through its current crisis and into its next stage of development, reinventing it within a new, participatory context, where the people are capable of engaging with government and power structures in an entirely new fashion. It offer us a ray of hope for a renewed spirit of genuine civic engagement. It would then be really up to us, as individuals, of adult roles in conceiving and stewarding the shape and direction of society, of us truly governing ourselves. And this growing willingness to engage with the underlying code of the democratic process could eventually then manifest in a widespread call for revisions to our legal, economic, political and social structures on an unprecedented scale.

Means to an end

However, we must never forget that the internet is no more than a technology, a tool, a means to and end, and in itself can’t just fix things up. It cannot solve the problems of democracy, but it can be used by societal actors to solve these problems. We need people who see the world in a different way and then put it together in new ways. We need people whose belief and behaviour are consistent and progressive in its truest sense. Only then can it make our designs on reality real.

Thus, the internet must be actively internalised socially and culturally in order to develop its potential. There needs to be time for careful reflection, nurtured by opinions and counter-opinions bringing together mediators who say what they think in the public arena, both off-line and on-line, to change people’s perceptions and way of thinking, to change their behaviour and actions. And we must not forget that building inter-personal and inter-community social and emotional connections remains more important than advancing the means for it. One thing for sure, the internet is a means that could potentially carry us much further towards this end that we all strife for.

 

WISER, the would-be cyber headquarter of the revolution

When it comes to online connection building and collaboration for a better world, a new kind of virtual space, worthy of our attention and involvement, is being constructed. It’s called WISER, an acronym for World Index for Social and Environmental Responsibility. It is an ambitious project of the Natural Capital Institute, a team of researchers, business people, activists and writers headed by Paul Hawken, which focused their activity on protecting the environment. It aims to catalog the breadth and depth of this movement of movements, to give it visibility, and to better enable groups and individuals to find each other and work together online and offline. It aims to serve the people who are transforming the world.

It is a collaboratively written, free content, open source networking platform that links NGOs, funders, business, government, social entrepreneurs, students, organizers, academics, activists, scientists, and citizens. It is a platform that is designed to fit our changing world. A world that is moving away from being one shaped by privilege to a community created world. It is a new system of awareness, support, communication, and collaboration.

It creates the space for civil society, the private sector, and government to collaboratively define, address, and solve social and environmental problems. It aims to empower the more than one million organizations and the tens of million individuals working for a better world. In short, WISER attempts to increase their effectiveness to prevent harm and institute positive change which has been undermined by the lack of a collective awareness, duplicative efforts, and poor connectivity.

WISER consists of the following main components:

  • WiserEarth. It is a community-editable international directory and networking forum that maps, links and empowers the largest movement in the world - the hundreds of thousands of organizations and the millions of individuals within civil society that address social justice, poverty, and the environment. It provides a platform and tools to help these organizations and individuals find each other, collaborate, share resources and build alliances. It contains the first detailed taxonomy of social justice and environmental organizations, a curriculum of the 21st century. It is the first open-source network for community change in the world, the first and only that can be created, modified and amended by the community it serves. It would allow this vast unnamed movement to see itself for the first time. (WiserEarth is now in public beta phase)
  • WiserBusiness. It is an open source knowledge base upon which a global standard for responsible business behavior can be founded and cared for by the wider community. The website includes an area where business people can learn about corporate social responsibility and share experiences and sources with one another. It is also aimed at linking customers’ social and environmental priorities directly to companies via consumer feedback and company evaluation mechanisms, and supply companies with the latest solutions. Finally, it will provide government officials with accurate information so they can create policy for the business sector that serves society and the environment. (WiserBusiness is still in construction phase as of this writing)
  • WiserGovernment. It is aimed to provide information necessary to local, state, and national governments and staffs to formulate and enact policies, laws and regulations in favor of society and the environment. It is created because, the challenges of running a city or being on a school board are different than running a business or NGO. (WiserGovernment is scheduled to commence in 2008)
  • All the Wiser sites will have regional and personal hubs in which the three Wisers (earth, business and government) converge as they do in real society.

Though still in its primacy, WISER is, I believe, one tool we need to keep an eye on, and build upon.

 

The Future of the Revolution

Overall, what can be said for the prospect of this movement of movements ?

With its mind enhanced by the internet’s connective tissue, and international law, shaky as it may seem, as a venue to work with others for progressive action, it is starting to demonstrate its potential. But there is much to do. How do we assure that it continues to gain in strength? And at least as important, how do we continue to develop it’s collective mind, so that it maximizes wisdom and goodwill?

First, we need to become conscious of the “mental processes”, in which we are involved in, and explore how to make our individual sense-making and collective action more and more effective. This of course means challenging and improving the mass media, and supporting more interactive and less biased alternatives, such as WISER. But more ambitiously, we will need to develop a kind of meta-discipline, an organizational psychology of our community, to explore the nature of our web-enabled, person-centered, global governance and communication processes, and continue to improve them. We must not stop learning and understanding.

Second, and ironically, the future of the movement depends to a great extent on traditional social freedoms-freedom of the press, of assembly, of speech-that have enabled the movement to take root and grow. We need to guard them as our collective survival depends on them. Moreover, the internet, which is founded on those traditional freedoms, is itself regulated by governments, and the government could theoretically still step in to restrict its freedoms. So we need to pay close attention to freedom in society, and especially to freedom of the internet. There are many moves afoot to censor the web, to close down access, and to restrict privacy and free assembly in cyberspace. While we generally associate web censorship with countries like China or Saudi Arabia, tighter control of the web is also being explored in the United States and Europe, recently in the name of terrorism prevention. We need to insist on an open web, an open cyberspace, around the globe, because that is the essential medium in which the movement lives. We must also increase the quality of internet access (e.g. high-bandwidth infrastructure, robust architecture, etc) for a richer (multimedia) and smoother internet experience. But most importantly, we need to broaden people’s access to the cyber space and increase their ability to make good use of it, in other words, to bridge the digital divide. This can be done for example, by increasing the number of public libraries and along with it, the number of free-of-charge publicly-accessible internet-connected computers. We must guard liberty zealously.

Third, we must carefully consider how best to support international institutions, so that they collectively form a setting in which our power can be exercised. Perhaps too often we attack institutions like the World Bank, or even the UN, that might, under the right conditions, actually become partners with and venues of the movement. International institutions must become deeply more transparent, accessible to the public, and less amenable to special interests, while remaining strong enough to provide a secure context in which our views can be expressed, formulated into policies and acted upon. Penetration by the movement to the institutions processes, thinking and staffing is essential to this end. We must not lose hope on them. Or when we do, we must prepare to build better ones.

Fourth, we must work on ourselves and our community. We must continue to educate ourselves and those closest to us. We should foster dialogue with our neighbors, knowing that the collective wisdom of the movement is grounded in the individual wisdom within each of us. We must remind ourselves that daily we make personal choices about the world we create for ourselves and our descendants. Our every thought, word and deed, matters.

And finally, the triumph of this revolution will be defined by how rapidly it becomes a part of all other sectors of society. If it remains isolated, it will fail. If it is absorbed and integrated into religion, education, business, economy, politics, government, and all other institutions, it will be able to change a sufficient number of people so as to begin the reversal of centuries of frenzied self-destruction. We’ve cast time against ourselves, we must move swiftly.

In the same sense as the ants, the continual distributed action of the members of this democratic revolution can be expected to eventually prevail. Distributed mass behavior, expressed in rallying, in voting, in self-education, in picketing, in exposing corruption, in purchase-boycotting from particular companies, in changing lifestyles, in culture building, in participating in the government, in establishing environmentally and socially responsible business practicess, in lending a hand to those in need, in putting smiles on the face of the oppressed and the broken, all have a profound effect on the nature of future society.

Every beak-full of water poured into the burning forest by every bird, counts.

 

Final Words, a Call to Move

Paul Hawken in his recent book, Blessed Unrest , which narrates the beginning, the journey, and the prospect of this movement, tells a story we need to contemplate upon.

He once run a workshop at a chemical company where he challenged the leaders and engineers to design a long-term spaceship that would allow humans to survive. However, no one among those doing the project included a single one of the company’s products for the spaceship. Why? The products are too toxic for a small environment. As a result, a number of the people later left their jobs to find other ones more in tune with their new understanding of the world. Here, we are reminded to a principle that Thoreau said, “If just one man withdraws his support from an unjust ordeal, it is the beginning of a cycle that will grow.”

Thus, my move and your move could be a “one-for-all and all-for-one” kind of move. Take great care of what your next ones will be. Hopefully, they will be ones embracing this movement of movements that’s changing the world and making history.

 

This article is a reassembly and modification of parts, a kind of unlicensed open-sourcing of codes, taken from the following sources:

  1. Illustration in the article is a modification of ceruleansanctum.com/images/unified_hands.jpg
  2. “To Remake the World, something earth-changing is afoot among civil society” by Paul Hawken, published in the May/June 2007 issue of Orion magazine
  14. “Internet and Democracy”, summary of TAB working report No. 100
  17. “Open Source Democracy” by Douglas Rushkoff of Demos, January 2004, at Project Gutenberg

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Published::
8.5.07 / 12am
Category:
Appropriate Science and Technology, Change in Change, Democratic Democracy, Ecosocionomics, Global Governance, Learning for Life, Life's Necessities, Man, Means, Paths, Ends, Spirituality, Unity in Diversity
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