Suppose instead you had talked exclusively about the nature and essence of communication without ever even mentioning technology per se. Could the outcome have been different?

Peace

I have been deeply moved by the historical perspective, systemic view and pure wisdom of Sacred Economy. Yet when reading it, I was missing a couple of key aspects. And maybe that little voice inside of you feels the same. Maybe it realizes that your concepts and roadmap still lack a few key components to be able to offer real guidance to activists like me on how to most effectively support the coming systemic shifts. Yes, your book helps us envision what a new world may look like – and that is a wonderful gift for which I am deeply grateful. Yet for me at least and probably other social activists as well, it doesn’t provide enough concrete direction on how to make the shift happen.

Taxing for use of commons and environmental costs, negative-interest currencies and social dividends are changes which under our present systems the government would have to initiate – and the existing power structure will do everything to resist such changes. So what can we, as social activists, do? And what role does “local community” play in creating the change?

You write about the importance of community, but you don’t describe what it takes to rebuild community, and to rebuild it in such a way that economic and political decision making power move back to the community level. You write about the spiritual principle of having centers within centers but don’t describe how that might apply to community. I have been working with villages in Northern Pakistan for the past 5 years, and in the absence of effective government, we are trying to help them implement a multi-level participatory self-governance system where both political decisions and economic activity take place as locally as possible and as centrally as necessary. And we’re now trying to apply the learning from there to a major city in Germany (which is a complete new challenge of its own…)

I believe that one core aspect of trying to create our “new world” is to build such “centers within centers” from the bottom up – centers where economic, ecological, social and spiritual/cultural aspects are integrated. One thing that I have learned from my work with communities is that this takes the active cooperation of all social and ecological changemakers on each level of community. Building such an alliance is an art in itself, an art mastered by few.

Where I see that art of “alliance building” especially lacking is on your level, the level of the thought leader. I know many brilliant thought leaders with partial solutions who focus on “spreading their gospel” instead of working together with other thought leaders to integrate their respective knowledge and wisdom. But you’ll be the first one to admit that the world is too complex for anyone to have the complete solution. Only if thought leaders start cooperating actively with each other, only when they put all their puzzle pieces together, will a comprehensive picture emerge…

Personally, I ask myself the following question, and I would love your input on this: As we succeed in building stronger participatory local community structures, is there a way that we can apply the concepts of taxing for use of commons or social dividends at the local community level? Is it a viable solution to make the taxes voluntary and use the proceeds to provide a social dividend only to those in need? If we make public who within the community pays the taxes and who does not, will that induce increasing numbers to take part in the system? Is social pressure an acceptable means of inducing change?

In rural areas in Tibet, the villagers who volunteer their time as social mobilizers get a special flag by their house – a sign of honor. What can we do to shift our values within our local communities so that those who give the most are valued the most rather than those who own the most (this is, by the way, still the value system in rural Pakistan)?

By the way, I absolutely love you. I’ve read your book “Sacred Economics”, and I think you are brilliant