Peer2Politics

In-depth conversation about the role of love in the engaged life, a conversation with David Kim for the Manhattan Neighborhood Network. Watch the video here:

About a year ago a group of people close to Edgeryders and to me dreamed up something called the unMonastery. The dream snowballed into the prototype of a radical, uncompromising project: more or less, build an institution to embed global expert knowledge aimed at the common good into a local community, and do it so that it lasts a couple of centuries at least. Don’t try to build sustainability via a business models (business models are flimsy, they just don’t last over that time scale), build it through a kind of symbiosis between the unMonastery and the host city. Against all odds, this idea has come true, and you can apply to be an unMonasterian right now.

The following book review describes the shift from traditional tribal societies, which was based on the trust of knowing each other personally in small communities, to the shift towards big centralized empires, which required a common fear of God to create trust amongst strangers. Contining with such a evolutonary perspectve we could posit the phase …

* Essay: Par Cum Pari. Notes on the Horizontality of Peer to Peer Relationships in the Context of the Verticality of a Hierarchy of Values. Michel Bauwens. In: Pursuing the Common Good: How Solidarity and Subsidiarity Can Work Together. Fourteenth Plenary Session, 1-6 May 2008. Acta 14, eds Margaret S. Archer and Pierpaolo Donati. Vatican …

The spirit of society as a collective Buddha will require more than just the self-organizing tendency toward increasing complexity between the parts of a technologically distributed system of actors and institutions. It will require real human beings to make the inter-subjective bonds of soulful compassion and mutual understanding through empathy. Realizing the power and wealth of the Buddha among and between us will require a deep connection to one another, an unbreakable bond of love and trust that now only our closest relationships can give us within the competitive system of capitalism.