Privilege
Privilege is often invisible to those who posses it because it represents the absence of obstacle. A collective of unearned advantages, social buffers and systemic benefits that pave an easier path through life.
What Do You Stand For
Congress shall make no law respecting ...or the right of the people peaceably to assemble...while powerful, we must move from being against to standing for!
The right to protest has been part of American culture from the founding of the country. The First Amendment guarantees the right of public assembly. We have all seen it, maybe even been a part of it. Maybe you remember the photograph that launched a thousand protests, showing a man standing alone in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square. Nobody knows his name. Nobody knows what happened to him. What we know is that the image traveled around the world in hours and became a symbol of resistance at that time.
And yet with all that exposure, the Chinese government is still standing.
It is just one example of protest culture. This is not an argument against courage. The man in the photograph was extraordinary. What he did in that moment required something most of us may never be asked to do. The question it raises; How effective is protest culture? Yes it may create awareness, it often evokes outrage, it rarely if ever creates change!
We are living through the most protested era in modern recorded history. More people have taken to more streets in more countries over more issues in the last two decades than at any prior time in human civilization. The Arab Spring. Black Lives Matter. #MeToo. Climate strikes on six continents. The Women’s March. Anti-austerity movements across Europe. Pro-democracy uprisings from Hong Kong to Minsk to Tehran. Millions of people, often at personal cost, standing in public to say: this is wrong, we will not accept it, something must change.
And yet the systems being protested continue; an extractive economy, a captured political order, a healthcare apparatus that treats illness as a revenue stream, and through it all, media structures that profit from our outrage. The system, untouched, unchanged at the core, structurally intact, even stronger having learned to absorb the outrage and wait it out.
So what is missing? Not courage, moral clarity or numbers. What’s missing is harder to name and uncomfortable to face, it requires us to step out of our righteousness about what we’re against and ask the harder question.
What We Sacrifice
There are times in life we have to make sacrifices, choices to support our kids, parents or a dear friend. Maybe there are 2 events happening at the same time and there is only 1 of me! What we don't often see is the sacrifices we make automatically because we don't know we have other options.
The Nature Of Work
The current narrative around how AI is going to change the nature of work is really just exposing an illusion we have yet to name. Those who are being paid the most are doing the least valuable work and those being paid the least are not valuable because they are easily replaceable. The system is inside-out!
* * * – – – * * * S. O. S.
Ironically, we sit in the silence of our aloneness, not realizing that the answer is obvious... we need others to achieve anything great in the world. It's time we notice what's needed, ask what we can do, and most importantly, find those who can help us.
The Real Cost
Supply and demand, marketplaces or advertising specials...how do prices get set? More important what does something really cost? In our current system there are many hidden and deferred costs. Yet amongst them all, there is a cost that we except as natural without ever questioning it...that cost DEBT.
How Would You Like To Pay For That?
In our current world our economic system siphons money out of local communities and into a financial system that's primary purpose is to generate more money. It doesn't create any value! What if it's possible to build a system that works feeds the local community first.
One Money To Rule Them All…
Our current monetary system is organized around debt-based fiat currencies. What if the failures we see in society are based on this design.
The Last Pod Caste
We seek content and information from a variety of on-line social media influencers and podcasters. What if this is just a way of avoiding the hard work of claiming our agency and actually having an impact in the world?
GURU – Gee, You Are You
We are living through a quiet collapse of trust. The old authorities still speak with confidence; governments, experts, institutions, systems; but more and more people can feel the fracture between what is said and what is lived. Where do you look for trust?
Becoming Hopetopian
We are living in a time that could be a pivotal moment in human evolution. Will our technology, in particular Artificial Intelligence, lead to a utopian or dystopian future? There is a different choice.
The Conversations We Need To STOP Having
Our current world is self-organized into opposing groups who engage in a dialog where no agreement is possible...the result, nothing changes.
Rules Always Fail
We live in a world that wants certainty, where there is a fear of uncertainty. Unfortunately one of he core tenants of physics is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Our human response to this, is putting in rules, and in that bureaucracies are born!
The Art of Failure
We live in a world that separates arts and science, the creative and the reductive. Its time to shift from an either/or to a both/and perspective.
Leaders Eat Last
In our current hierarchical world our power dynamic is top down, command and control...more simple power over and power without. In a new world we shift to a network model of power within and power with.
WWW – World Wide Why
Our hyper-masculine world is characterized by jumping straight into solving a problem, the what and how...never asking the why! And underneath this what and how, seeing individual needs, without identifying the greater need, the needs of the system.
Mirror, Mirror On The Bridge
In our current paradigm, money is power, the ability to channel capital is the ultimate power. Even when channeled to social impact it is often akin to putting lipstick on a pig...the underlying system doesn't change.
Walking Across The Bardo
We are staring out across a chasm, seeing the storms of multiple disasters approaching in the rear-view mirror...we need to build a bridge!
The Things We Don’t See Coming
We think we know, so therefore we do. And in that knowing we limit possibilities, miss what is right in front of us. This is where we miss the need. By taking a step into the not knowing, magic happens!
Good Problems To Have
We are living in what Buddhist philosophy calls the Bardo, the place between death and birth. During this time it's important how we navigate it, solving problems, the right problems at the right time. We must build a bridge from where we are to a future we must believe is possible.
The Girl Who Couldn’t Say NO
Sofia learned to survive by disappearing…until her boss tries to pull her back into a familiar trap. This time, she doesn’t freeze. She burns.
What You Heal, We Inherit
We’ve mistaken policy for medicine and spreadsheets for soul, but systems don’t heal unless people do. The violence of our economy, the brittleness of our institutions, the loneliness in our neighborhoods — these aren’t glitches; they’re the outer shape of inner wounds we’ve left unnamed. This piece makes a simple, demanding claim: what you heal, we all inherit. If we want a livable future, the work begins in our nervous systems and ripples into how we design, decide, and care for our shared home.
The Week The Lights Didn’t Go Out
Imagine a neighborhood anywhere in the world...winter has set in and all that comes with it. Something happens and in that moment contributionism comes to life...
The Flawed Economy
We’ve mistaken money for the economy and built our lives around a profit-centric world...like insisting the Earth sits at the center of the cosmos while the stars and planets refuse to align. What happens if we challenge that assumption, separate needs from desires, and redesign “the management of our home” around people and planet first?
Winter is Here
We have to face the reality of our current situation. Framed from the cycles of The Fourth Turning and redesigned through Living System Design and Contributionism.
After Times
With the crisis in our current social, political and economic systems accelerating, it is important to envision what comes next.
What are we actually for?
In his book Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change, Greg Satell studied movements that actually changed things, as well as the ones that didn’t. He describes a framework extracted from the ones that rewired systems and lasted. What he found is both simple and sobering. Transformational change doesn’t spread through the force of the most righteous argument. It spreads because people can see something new working. A visible, repeatable, socially livable alternative. An example, not a demand, proof in place of a critique.
In simple terms, a protest says: the old way is intolerable, a living alternative shows: the new way is already here, and you can be a part of it. Human beings are deeply social, pattern-following, oriented by what the people around them are doing. Taking a stand for something invites others to take action beyond the act of protesting!
Taking this further, there is something beneath the outrage. It goes beyond anger, beyond grief, it’s a longing, a quiet, persistent ache for something that feels more true than our current world offers. In Longing: A Pilgrimage to Your Quiet Power Within, Christopher Sansone makes a claim that our culture consistently undervalues: that ache. It is not a sign that something is wrong with us or that we are insufficiently tough on the realities of the world. It’s a signal from our deepest intelligence, trying to get our attention.
Protests are often a signal that something essential is being violated; dignity, fairness, a basic expectation on how a society should function. Further, it carries information about what matters, what is missing, and what kind of world would actually constitute the arrival of a system that meets human needs. It requires us to turn our energy inward and ask:
What is this longing actually pointing toward?
Not what am I leaving?
What am I trying to reach?
These are difficult questions, they may point to something that has never existed. They require curiosity, dialogue, collaboration, and creativity. Sometimes the new thing exists in a small way that has been ignored or silenced by the existing system. It might require us to try something new, be willing to be wrong, to take feedback and have the courage to try again.
Riane Eisler and Douglas Fry offer us a compass in Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape our Brains, Lives and Future. They spent decades mapping the difference between cultures organized around domination and cultures organized around partnership. Their discovery, it is structural, not moral: domination doesn’t persist because bad people keep winning. It persists because it reproduces itself through the everyday conditions that teach people what power is, what they’re worth, and what’s possible.
The truth, a protest model consistently underestimates: opposition, even righteous opposition inadvertently reproduces domination’s logic. It positions power as the thing to be seized or stopped. It divides the world into those who have it and those who don’t. It runs on fear, urgency, and the shared identity of the aggrieved, it is fueled by OUR outrage.
In contrast, partnership doesn’t spread through force or opposition. It spreads through invitation, demonstrated trust, visible shared need, and the lived experience of something working. It engages people not by threatening or shaming them but by inviting them to participate. It is a different theory of how change actually travels through human systems.
Returning to, What do we stand for?
How about an economy that meets the needs of people and the planet? Does anything like this already exist? What conversations do we need to have? How would people contribute? How do I participate?
Creating a political culture which honors sovereignty and is rooted in consent. It redefines the government’s role? Asking how do individuals participate in civic life?
Maybe a healthcare system that focuses on health and care, one that invests in health. What is a life-serving alternative? What is actually causing disease? How do we correct it?
Notice the difference? These are the generative questions, the ones that create movements that endure.
The man in front of the tank was not wrong to stand there. His courage was real and his moment mattered. But the world changes most durably not when a lone figure or group stands against something at enormous personal risk, but when enough people start living differently, and that alternative becomes obvious.
As Buckminster Fuller says:
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
So here is the invitation, don’t abandon moral clarity or make peace with what is intolerable. It’s time to carry that moral clarity somewhere more demanding. Past the protest and into the question on the other side of it. Join a movement which is part of building something new. Find or start something small, concrete and completable, demonstrate an alternative rather than argue for it.
Let the ache you feel when you look at the world become your compass. Follow it past the outrage, the opposition or an identity built on what you reject. Follow it all the way to the question that is harder, and more alive, and more generative than any protest sign ever made:
What do you stand for?
And more importantly; Where are you building it?