The John and Abigail Center for Social Change Begins
Purpose:
This book is primarily written to provide context to all who help develop and launch the John And Abigail Center For Social Change with its subsidiary organizations introduced together for the first time in this book.
Secondly, to those who will be participating in the 3 educational organizations described in chapters 5-7 and to those often simultaneously working for Abigail’s Oven bakery.
Then for those who may have special interest in the subject matter and/or know me personally.
Eventually, it may be prepared for broad public use.
In short, the audience is primarily internal, not external and will be helping us to find and orient people who are launching J&A organizations.
—Allen
Note: the following content is in draft form, some in stream-of-conscious style. Content will be refined as we develop The Center.
Our forms and the institutions that have grown up around them provide lasting structural frameworks upon which society can pivot and adapt. Many of our institutions, both for- and non-profit, have had an undeniably positive effect. They have facilitated improved technology and communication across the globe, rebuilt communities devastated by disaster and war, created a stable platform for charitable donations and volunteer aid, and innovated toward increased comfort and quality of life across all social strata.
Yet with all this positive progress, we still see deeply troubling problems on the rise. Increases in substance abuse, divorce, pornography, sex trafficking, corruption in business and government, poor personal time management skills and domestic habits, materialism, and debt are destroying lives, families, and communities. Despite promising strides forward in freedoms for women, racial equality, and the treatment of young people and children, we still see disturbing reports of rampant misogyny, racism, and abuse.
These issues, not the forms that are failing to address them, seem to be our main societal focus. We throw money at visible issues—the symptoms of problems—funding top-down solutions that never seem to eradicate the problem. Despite our myriad freedoms, we seem trapped in a trend of increasing corruption and degeneration. A deeper, more fundamental shift in the underpinnings of our society must occur to reverse the downward spiral, regain lost ground, and create upward momentum.
The traditional freedom argument and solution will not work this time. We need to double down on freedom. Institutions will not save us, even small commercial institutions. We’ve degenerated too far and our capacity has increased too much. How do we propose twice as much freedom as the founders proposed in their day? We need every inch of it. So how can this be done?
First, I believe we need to improve our engagement density. When I say density, I mean more than just the number of particles (or people in this case) in a space. Engagement density is also the organization and harmony that defines the engagement or interaction. Despite the increasing ease of our technological connection, we are in so many ways drifting further apart. Without correct engagement density, our potential for change in society is severely limited. Sustainable progress must be situated in a better person-to-person, family-to-family, and community-to-community engagement density. The only long-term solution I can currently see is to engage in groups of four individuals, four families (16-20) and four neighborhoods (640-800). We need strong new societal forms in the space between institutions and individuals that will tap gifts, whole-person capacity, and scalable module agility.
The whole person can only be understood and supported with great customization in such small intimate groups. It is only this that will empower the people with enough confidence in their own choices to stand against one-size-fits-all expert decision making and fake news or “rumor” (a lesson from Henry IV part II). When we foster and more fully engage with meaningful personal relationships, love becomes a more powerful motivating force than self-interest.
Let a candid world pose this question: how do we correctly infuse love as the primary motivator behind good governance and in so doing, infuse love into the fundamental infrastructure of law, government, and other less prominent societal forms? What freedom has been in the past is not enough without integrated love. New structural forms, both cultural and constitutional, which allow and empower this integration to take place must emerge. As they do, the very nature and purpose of these forms of freedom will transform and shift away from force.
In this book, we propose societal forms that more easily shed the burdens of debt, dependence, victimization, and commercialism. These forms help people return to the land, better enjoying time with personal relations and labors, providing leisure with natural responsibility, recapturing a healthy way of life and maintaining peace. These and similar forms can integrate love and choice, recapturing and instilling past and new sovereignties, rolling back dependence without individualizing, so that our personal relations—the people whom we love and who matter most, who are our voluntary safety net—are strong, rich and optimally engaged.
Three primary components, or catalysts, will provide the framework for establishing new less rigid, even liquid forms:
- Personal relations, in modules of four at the base
- Experiential learning, rather than traditional techniques and expertise
- New visual media, enhancing the quantity and quality of eye-to-eye engagement.
These three forms of engagement will allow us to create a society based in love. A new mantra must be demanded, our institutions will say: “we work our way out of a job as we enable families and communities to do it better than we can.” Will this require sacrifice? Certainly, but not as much as one might think. We believe this attitude will be contagious and preferable to the current dog-eat-dog norms.
What is it that we need to do better? What is this social change in relation to us and institutions that would make a new, more desirable system work? What would it look like when we are done? How do we organize the resources to build new cities where a better society can flourish? As you read the coming chapters, please be thinking about how you can help us work through and fill in the gaps you notice.
Next up—Chapter 1: The John and Abigail Center for Social Change
Comments, questions, suggestions? Let us know in the comments.
If you’re interested in joining the mastermind group or launch team for the John and Abigail Center or any of the partner organizations, contact us.
For more rough notes from the first chapter, click here.