Building community to invent tomorrow
Only small groups of free humans can experiment with love and kindness as forces for renewing our societies
This article is the author’s own translation of the original French version.
It’s becoming clear that our Western societies are reaching a breaking point as crises multiply—social, political, economic, environmental, migratory, and more. But above all, it’s a profound crisis of meaning that people face today, as all the reference points that had previously guided the world’s evolution seem to be losing their strength, and the very foundations of human identity are being disrupted.
Restoring hope
Whether it’s political systems or religions, economic models or scientific advances, nothing can any longer stop the ever-faster increase in glaring inequalities between the ultra-wealthy and the destitute, nothing seems able to stop corruption at all levels or ensure that social justice and human rights are truly respected. This state of affairs is resulting in an alarming rise in resentment, born from the widespread suffering it creates among populations.
It’s becoming essential to offer credible alternatives, to restore hope to all those convinced that our world’s collapse is inevitable, but even more so to try to transform the powerful energy of anger simmering everywhere into a force for civilizational creation and invention. This would lay the groundwork for a new world and prevent the buildup of frustrations from erupting into extreme violence, which would lead to chaos or bring about the lasting establishment of dictatorships of a new kind.
Solutions must be invented together
Solutions will no longer come from yet another variation of policies, regardless of their social or liberal orientation, because existing governance systems have become so rigid and complex that they’re both extremely fragile and totally ineffective at addressing in depth the problems we face. The temptation to make them even more authoritarian and invasive in our lives, under the guise of finally making them efficient, is running through leadership circles, and that’s why respect for our individual freedoms and privacy has been declining increasingly fast in recent years.
Solutions to open the path toward a more just and humane world tomorrow can now only come from voluntary collective experimentation with new ways of relating and organizing how we live together, based on freedom and kindness, on self-management and dialogue, on complementary talents and their pooling.
This requires forming groups that remain human-sized, where each person can know all the others, so that debate and collective decision-making can truly gather the broadest participation.
Only small groups voluntarily gathered in complete freedom, without a leader imposing their rule, can indeed enable the gradual learning of putting love into real action in human relationships—not love in the romantic sense, though it’s not excluded that it could also develop as a form of collective friendship, but first and foremost love in the sense of the will to seek harmony and sharing with others.
A space for mutual support and collective experimentation
Bringing subscribers together around my Dialogues for the New World can be an opportunity to spark the coming together of such a group of people, which could become, through the exchanges enabled by comments and chat, a space for support and mutual aid. This would foster the growth and fulfillment of each participant and could inspire the desire for real-world meetups.
And this publication would then naturally grow, through a kind of organic development of shared aspirations and talents, to open up to co-authors who would contribute on subjects familiar to them and encourage the development of joint projects beyond this platform itself.
By moving forward together in our spiritual development and gradually embodying, in our commitments and presence in the world, the fruits of awakening our noblest potentials, we could become proof that it’s possible to envision a future where we can once again trust in human genius.
If you think it’s time to take back control of our collective destiny, that to change the world for the better we must first change ourselves to be the best version of ourselves, or, as Gandhi said, that we must be the change we want to see in the world, then join me!
Together we can build our ark of new consciousness to weather the flood of our civilization’s collapse and reach tomorrow’s new shores where the New World is being invented !
Don’t hesitate to contact me by email at jeromenathanael@substack.com.
© 2024 - Dialogues of the New World by Jérôme Nathanaël
Translated from French to English by the author.