2: Vision

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

FREE TOGETHER

We see the possibility of a society that expects and actively cultivates new ideas, opportunity, and leadership and creates an architecture for a way of living in a good way with each other and the earth where we are and feel free.

We must begin with a new mindset that is not predicated on humanity existing outside the bounds of nature but as a sacred member of the community of life, never lonely, always necessary.  We have been trying to live outside its bounds since the days of the agricultural revolution and slowly failing as a species.  We are sicker, hungrier, angrier, sadder than we've ever been.  We are more lonely and bereft of meaning than any people since humans became humans two hundred thousand years ago.  And we work harder to survive than any culture has ever worked.  Living outside the community of life seems like freedom, like the power of self-determination, that with nature as ours to exploit, we can control our destinies, but it is actually alienating, isolating, ensures conflict -- and it is not working for us.

We need to engage a broader conversation about the economics of effort and value over the narrower ideas of work and wage that establishes a clear and explicit foundation human meaning and value that transcends economic wealth. Painting economics in broader civic context (mutual aid, caretaking, parenting, and civic volunteerism) rather than narrow consumerist terms allows us to better account for the value of our contributions to community as valid sources of esteem and respect and social standing and to value our productivity in terms not accounted for by gdp. It also encourages us to expand our notion of work to efforts well-beyond market consumerism and allows us to see social and civic contributions on par with other forms of wage work rather than merely as activities to engage with only in our personal time once the market is done consuming us as inputs of labor to consumer goods and seeing our contributions as producers of both things AND civic/social services with equal weight in terms of community and social value, respect, esteem.