Building a Virtuous Economy: A Local Living Economy Network, Chapter 6, Part 1
Building a Virtuous Economy: A Local Living Economy Network, Chapter 6, Part 1
Welcome to the Birthing the Symbiotic Age Book!
NEW here? — please visit the TABLE OF CONTENTS FIRST and catch up!
You are in Chapter 6, Part 1, Building a Virtuous Economy: A Local Living Economy Network
Chapter 6 posts:
Regional Economies – a Virtuous Free Market…“Spiritual Capital” – The Key to a Virtuous Economy
Are you trying to figure out where this is All Going? Read an overview of the Symbiotic Culture Strategy, which embodies the Transcendent through the nodes of intersection within local, grassroots-empowered community networks.
Voice-overs are now at the top of my posts for anyone who doesn’t have the time to sit and read! Also, find this chapter post and all previous posts as podcast episodes on
Spotify and Apple!
Previously from Chapter 5, Part 3
I began to see a vision take form and the way to activate a global Culture of Connection like the vision I was shown by Jesus—a spiritually based, bottom-up, network-centric global civilization, a new Commonwealth—as an alternative to the top-down economic globalization of warring nation-states we have today.
It could begin in the communities where we live and the places we inhabit, a human-based living network that reflects and emulates the Transcendent and Nature’s Web. It would not be a pie-in-the-sky fantasy, but given the expansive potential and simplicity of symbiotic networks and their nexus agency, it could be an on-the-ground real deal.
I saw this as a “fractal evolution,” beginning with individuals embodying the Transcendent Virtues in their daily lives, spreading outward through circles of trust and newly created nodes of intersection within local, grassroots-empowered community networks—a living and breathing “real-life” Culture of Connection!
I began to realize a practical approach that anyone, anywhere, universally could, starting with themselves, consciously and LITERALLY bringing Heaven to Earth in ever-widening circles of Love, whose combined networks would UNDERGROW rather than overthrow the global oligarchy of the current world system.
Chapter 6, Part 1: Building a Virtuous Economy
Introduction
Having reached my fortieth birthday and given my experience in nonprofit service and government bureaucracies, I realized that the “public sector” and “civil society,” with their siloed structure focused on “problem-solving,” was too much of a “problem-perpetuating” system to come up with lasting, emergent solutions.
What I now see as a Culture of Separation, institutionalized as the Everything Industrial Complex, could not transform the current “taker” economy into one based on deeper Virtues — a Culture of Connection that would allow those mired in poverty, along with the rest of us, to arise and thrive.
I didn’t know it at the time, but what I was seeking—and calling forth—is in the title of this chapter: a “Virtuous Economy.” Meanwhile, in the two decades since I first faced this dilemma, new solutions for a “New Economy” have proliferated.
I share this list of self-identified names of the various New Economy movements to let you know the breadth of work already being done:
Next Economy
Regenerative Economy
Bioregional Economy
Ecological Economy
Post-Capitalist Economy
Wellbeing Economy
Decolonized Economy
Post-growth Economy,
Re-localized Economy
Caring Economy
Sharing Economy
Collaborative Economy
Resilient Economy
Cosmo-Local Economy
Commons-based Economy
Sufficiency Economy
Circular Economy
Doughnut Economy
Mindful Economy
Gift Economy
Blue Economy
Green Economy
Sustainable Economy
Cooperative Economy
Solidarity Economy
— all seeking to create a more just and balanced system.
I brought these up so that by the end of this chapter, you will know exactly how a Virtuous Economy fits into this mix of well-intentioned approaches and how Virtues are foundational.
As I tell the story of our Reno community-based experiments, I will demonstrate that -- as worthy as these New Economy solutions are -- they are derivative, not primary.
What do I mean by that?
As I have mentioned throughout Section 1, the many challenges humanity faces cannot be addressed problem by problem because they are all interrelated. Furthermore, all of these crises that can be seen as economic, ecological, social, and political reflect one fundamental spiritual challenge:
Do we activate the Golden Rule, or do we default to “the rule of gold”?
Do we practice the Kingdom of Heaven, or do we default to the Empires of man?
The Culture of Separation that privileges materialism, consumerism, and the next pleasurable experience has so captured our legacy media, that we fall in line with “that’s the way things are”. We are told that our “material” problems require material solutions. And – given how religious tribalism has contributed more to separation than unity, it’s understandable how reluctant secular activists have been to invoke “spirituality” in any form.
That’s why the universality of the Ancient Blueprint is so important. It favors no particular religious path but instead calls forth the virtues at the root of every one of them. And … no less than the “great-grand-daddy” of the “regen” movement, E. F. Schumacher, author of the classic 1973 book Small Is Beautiful, identified the spiritual crises we face 50 years ago:
”In ethics, as in so many other fields, we have recklessly and willfully abandoned our great classical Christian heritage. We have even degraded the very words without which ethical discourse cannot carry on, words like ‘virtue’, ‘love’, and ‘temperance.’
The task of our generation, I have no doubt, is one of metaphysical reconstruction.”
According to Schumacher, our first task is to establish an unshakeable foundation in the transcendent before and during the construction of any of the worthy “fixes” listed above.
The Schumacher Center for a New Economics reinforces this view, “Schumacher taught that a just, regenerative economic system would only come about alongside a deeper moral or spiritual reorientation.”
To further “close the loop,” there was a strong connection between E.F. Schumacher and Dr. Ari. One chapter in Schumacher’s famous book, Buddhist Economics, was based in part on his friendship with Dr. Ari. They met in 1972, a year before E.F. Schumacher’s 1973 book, and in fact, Dr. Ari was given the manuscript to read before it was published.
So, “metaphysical reconstruction” and a “deeper moral or spiritual reorientation” were foundational to any New Economy initiative – and that holds even more true today, as our spiritual crisis threatens not just Western civilization but the survival of our species.
Those concerned about religious “capture” of this metaphysical reconstruction can feel comfortable with the Virtuous Economy, which broadens the context beyond Buddhism, really beyond religion or non-religion. By the time you’ve read the whole story of how we applied Sarvodaya’s principles and practices in Reno, you’ll see how these are now accessible to the pluralistic societies of the 21st century — including all religious and spiritual traditions, East, West, and Indigenous.
As the Sarvodaya movement demonstrated, human connection based on shared virtues brought out the best in impoverished communities. Without this foundation, even the most well-intentioned structures cannot prevail in the Culture of Separation.
What I did know then was that a fundamentally new problem-solving strategy was needed, involving purpose-driven, virtues-based, grassroots, network-centric solutions like Sarvodaya rather than imposed, top-down ones.
But where to start? If the nonprofit, charity, and governmental path were a dead-end for this kind of transformation, where would I go? What would I do? The answer seemed obvious. If not nonprofit, then why not for-profit?
Once I observed the limitations of the “charity mindset” that had frustrated my entrepreneurial sensibilities and talents, it became clear that my next path was launching a for-profit business!
I did have a major problem to overcome — my own prejudice and negative feelings about “the business world.” I had plenty of reasons to justify my righteous attitude. After all, didn’t our economic system fuel the “taker” economy I saw extracting money from the poor neighborhoods in San Diego?
Was it not capitalism and the desire to profit at any cost that fueled the military-industrial complex I marched against in the 1980s?
What about the destruction of nature at the altar of consumerism?
Or the “materialistic” mindset that caused many to abandon their deepest interior Virtues to “make it” in the system, feeling they needed to practice the Anti-Virtues (e.g., instead of generosity, greed) to survive?
All of these reasonable reasons presented me with a paradoxical challenge. How could I expect to have any satisfaction – let alone succeed – in a field that I had associated with “evil”?
What helped me break through was the example of Sarvodaya. Were they not “in business”? Were they not delivering goods and services that would benefit the community, if not the whole society?
Recognizing Sarvodaya as a “business entity” helped me address my own judgments and distinguish between large entities that extracted wealth from communities and mom-and-pop endeavors that re-circulated money throughout the local community.
All of a sudden, I had a broader view beyond what many people had been pejoratively railing against — “capitalism.” Even inside the larger Culture of Separation, perhaps there was a way for me to practice virtues in the context of being in business.
Here is a paradox: to bring Sarvodaya’s practical success principles to play in our highly pluralistic, complex, top-down, dominance hierarchical society, I had to embrace and transform “capitalism,” reflecting a third pillar in changing society, the “market system.” (More later on, why is the word capitalism in quotes?)
(You’ll notice in the paragraph above that I intentionally put capitalism in quotes—when you see my next installment, you’ll understand why.)
While those who’ve done well in business have often contributed a great deal to philanthropy, materialist sensibilities seem to have distorted our perceptions and made us collectively less compassionate. In the 1980s, I met a business owner in Monterey, California. While at the store, I noticed a homeless person camped right outside. When I mentioned it, the owner said, “Yes, I know. I just called the police.”
I asked him, “As a businessman, don’t you feel any sense of compassion or responsibility for that homeless guy?”
He said, “No, my responsibility is to sell a good product and to make sure my employees have jobs and get paid. I’m not responsible for the homeless person who happens to be in front of my store.”
Given the cultural framework, this makes a lot of “sense.” The business of business is business, right? How many times have you been negatively impacted by someone else’s business decision and been told, “Hey, nothing personal … it’s just business.”
Somehow, I couldn’t imagine Dr. Ari or any Sarvodaya folks responding that way. That attitude seemed so far away from what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount about loving thy neighbor.
Still, I recognized that the upside of a market system and entrepreneurship is the freedom of the individual and innovation.
Consider how Steve Jobs, through Apple, introduced and popularized the idea of the “personal computer,” which led to the smartphone. Were it not for him, I might be writing this book on a typewriter! Or think about John Mackey, who founded Whole Foods in 1980. While he has been criticized for buying out and “absorbing” other natural food franchises, Whole Foods has been the single most important influence on expanding the natural food market, which is now $200 billion a year.
From a political standpoint, nobody “voted” on personal computers or natural food — but from the market standpoint, lots of people did. They voted with their dollars. That’s when I began to see that, unlike civil society and public sectors, where projects seem to get funded regardless of results at their best, the marketplace rewards value. At that point, I had to laugh at the absurdity of being “against” business.
Even Sarvodaya was in “business,” as it facilitated creating and exchanging value—all of it independent (within its own cultural system) but interdependent with the existing “taker” system - creating a new scaffolding, a bridge from the old to the new economy.
On Becoming a “Capitalist”
Having left the nonprofit world with no intention to return as an executive and with the pressing need to support my family, I was more open than ever to starting my own enterprise — and discovering whether I could transform my business to create not only the world I wanted for my family but to enhance the wellbeing of the world at large.
As synchronicity would have it, just a few months after I left my job at the Nevada Micro-Enterprise Initiative, I walked into a hyperbaric oxygen therapy center. Almost immediately, the owner confided, “Yesterday, I decided to sell my business.”
“Ah,” I thought, “a definite sign.”
Just a week earlier, my brother had told me about a man in Oregon who needed hyperbaric oxygen treatment but couldn’t afford the therapy. So, he took an oxygen cylinder and sat sixty feet below the surface in the water off the coast of Oregon to try to get more oxygen into his cells. Since one of the secrets of starting a successful business is to “find a need and fill it,” this got my attention.
As a trained scuba diver, I knew that hyperbaric oxygen had been used over the years to treat decompression sickness, also known as “the bends.” Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is also used to treat diabetic foot wounds, damage from previous radiation therapy, and many other conditions.
At the time, I was exploring going into business with my brother and father, and when the hyperbaric idea came up, we felt a spark of excitement. It was that very next day that I walked into that hyperbaric center, and the woman told me she wanted to sell the business. It seemed like perfect timing. My brother had some financing, my dad came to the table, and voilà! We had a family business. We opened Northern Nevada Hyperbarics, and in October 2000, we saw our first patient.
Now, suddenly, I was a businessman, and I had to learn everything about running a business. I had to find customers, which meant outreach to physicians, hospitals, and other care centers that would refer patients. Since the former owner hadn’t built a successful local referral network, I had a lot of work to do.
I applied what I’d learned about symbiotic networking over the last two decades, spending the first few years doing educational meetings, luncheons, and coffees — all to build a new network referral system and customer base.
This was back when hyperbaric centers were relatively new, so I had to blaze several trails — contracts, billing, and insurance. I needed an expert on hand, so I hired a physician as our medical director. I also found a woman with eight years of experience running a wound care and hyperbaric center in Florida and moved her and her family to Reno.
We had a proper staff now, and I provided oversight and continued to build the business. I flew to Birmingham, Alabama, and took a 40-hour course in hyperbaric medicine. After a few years, my brother moved down from Oregon, but I was pretty much running the business myself.
With the business steadily growing over the next two-and-a-half years, I began to consider my other deeper purpose: creating a symbiotic network in alignment with the Transcendent Order, the Logos I discovered that could hopefully transform economic and social relationships in Northern Nevada.
Having immersed myself in business, I could see even more clearly the contrast between the civic and public sectors and the market sectors.
The nonprofits could have meetings and discussions, hold events, manage projects and fundraisers, and offer charitable approaches within silos that would show results but not address the problem at its core. For-profit and cooperative businesses need to provide tangible value — something customers pay for — or else they go out of business.
Being in business opened up a greater sense of perspective and empathy for me. Inside the non-profit domain and even in business co-ops, there can be a sense of self-righteousness about “profit.” This is understandable when so much of what is termed “profit” nowadays is the fruit of speculation.
However, in a service business like Hyperbarics, the profit is related to the value given and the service rendered. I could see the mutual benefit in every client who walked out happier and healthier.
Seeing things from the “business” perspective helped me be more compassionate to my social activist colleagues who, having little or no experience in the business domain, tended to exclude business from their “perfect world.” I would soon discover the importance of being “radically inclusive” in seeking to transform my new community, Reno, Nevada.
As with my first symbiotic network in San Diego, triggered by a “liminal” crisis in public safety, this new opportunity — one that would change my life and impact all of Northern Nevada — was sparked by a global political crisis. It turns out there was another crisis, an economic one, right under the surface — we’ll get to that in a little bit.
From Anti-War to Pro-Local
It was the spring of 2003, when the second Persian Gulf War was imminent, and American society was suffering increasing political polarization. I was part of a 10-week class on nonviolence based on the Catholic tradition, inspired by Saint Francis of Assisi, and many of the participants had expressed concern about the division and disunity in Reno and in America.
There were about twenty of us who met weekly at the Friends (Quakers) Meeting House, and I remembered Mother Teresa's classic quote: “I will never attend an anti-war rally. If you have a demonstration of peace, please invite me.”
In the spirit of that quote, after the class finished, the group began looking for a way to lift our community off the battlefield of “tribal” conflict, beyond being pro-war or anti-war, and onto a new playing field of mutually beneficial collaboration and cooperation based on what I now call Cosmic Love and the Symbiotic Kinship flowing from that.
From my community work in San Diego and my understanding of Sarvodaya — and from seeing the shortcomings of the nonprofit approach — three principles emerged:
First, find a compelling, shared purpose,
Second, ASK the community (rather than experts) what their needs and concerns are, and
Third, bring leaders, in a small group first, together by connecting across silos.
So, I asked the obvious question:
What common needs do we share that can bring together left-wing, right-wing, independent, liberal, and conservative, all faiths or none, and secular civic activists and others across the divides that now exist in our community?
Beyond all the differences, everyone agreed they wanted to help locally owned “mom and pop” Main Street businesses survive and thrive. This was at a time when the increase in Northern Nevada's population made the region a bulls-eye target for large corporate chain stores to set up shop.
In other words, most business owners wanted to make sure that Wall Street didn’t swallow up Main Street!
I was reminded of a pattern — how the larger San Diego County economy dominated the subordinate low-income Logan Heights economy, reinforcing a structure of poverty. On a larger scale, the American national economy (Wall Street) had a similar dominance over local community-based economies.
Expanded further, the global economy, made up of national and transnational economies, has become increasingly more dominant over every nation and every single local region on the planet!
It’s a straightforward observation of economic facts — follow the money.
Just seeing how cash was flowing out of the subordinate Logan Heights community into the dominant San Diego economy, I began to see the same principle, with cash flow and the sucking sound of money leaving regional economies like Northern Nevada to be extracted into the national and global economies, sucked upward — to generate what we commonly call the top down, interlocking, unified pyramid of global political and economic power – the Global Oligarchy we discussed in the last chapter.
I thought of the famous historical parallel, how the world’s first transnational corporation, the East Indian Trading Company, with a charter from the British Government, financially dominated the American Colonies’ tea market. That wasn’t a “free market.” One spark that propelled the American Revolution was the Boston Tea Party, a movement, in part, spearheaded by local businessmen — something I could relate to.
On the proactive and regenerative side, I knew that money spent inside the community continues to circulate and provide prosperity for all, a phenomenon called the economic Multiplier Effect. It’s well documented that independent, locally-owned businesses recirculate a significantly greater percentage of their revenue locally compared to "absentee-owned" companies.
By spending locally together, residents and business owners create greater community wealth and jobs.
In other words, a “buy local” or a “local living economy” campaign could have a huge tangible benefit for our Truckee Meadows “micro” bioregion (village, town, city, or county). The next question, of course, was, “How?” How do we bring together businesses and the community at large around this common purpose? What’s the approach?
Remember that our proposition has always been about Symbiotic Kinship — consciously expanding our circle of affiliation, which we typically limit to those like us, within our own tribes and silos, to those we intentionally work with for mutual benefit. In this case, the mutual benefit is to strengthen the local economy.
Symbiotic Kinship reflects the pattern of the Ancient Blueprint of Love God and Loving Others — here, it is applied to the harmonious coming together of organizations at the grassroots level, driven by a functional purpose of growing the local economy rather than privileging any narrow, separatist ideology.
Here is the way one local business owner thought about it:
“We are not against businesses or community elements that are not rooted locally. Instead, we actively promote and support those that have the most to gain from local focus and strength, relying on the proven dollar multiplier and the good intentions, vested interest, and our neighbors to drive a cooperative, conscious, improved community … we are a place where local nonprofits, local businesses, local government, and local consumers can meet to do ‘good.’”
It turns out that if you don’t overthink things and are open to opportunities for collaboration, such opportunities often present themselves. We decided to ask the participants from the nonviolence class described earlier to “crowdsource” a local ecosystem map of locally owned companies.
Anyone can engage in this process—you don’t have to wait for the government, a community, economic, or network development professional, or a university researcher to start!
We taped some butcher paper on the wall and asked for categories of businesses they wanted to support—for example, restaurants, clothing stores, and grocery stores. We ended up with a bunch of categories at the top of the butcher paper, and then everyone got up together and, in an unchoreographed dance, walked over to the paper and wrote down under each category the businesses with which they already had a personal relationship. In addition to shop owners, they added farmers and ranchers.
By the time this “dance” ended, we had about 150 businesses listed — each one “connected” in some way to someone in the room.
While “buying local” is now an established concept, with many independent business networks around the world, until that moment, I hadn’t really considered the impact it would have in multiplying wealth in our local community. For example, a 2002 Austin, Texas study indicated that if each household shifted $100 in holiday spending from chain stores to local merchants, it would have a $10 million positive impact on the local economy.
A subsequent study in San Francisco concluded that just a 10 percent shift in retail spending from large chains to local stores resulted in nearly $192 million in increased economic input, $72 million in new income for workers, and more than $15 million in new retail activity.
As a business owner and a consumer, I could sense how buying local would benefit me personally and the community in which I spent my money. I also felt heartened by how many personal connections there were as the first signs of a symbiotic network began to emerge.
From my prior neighborhood experience in San Diego and developing social enterprise, I recognized the value of “catalytic connectors,” who did “network weaving” in a community — those who were well-regarded and were connected to one or more larger networks.
In bringing businesses to the table, cold calls now became “warm calls” through the magic of “third-party trusted connections.” Think about how amazing this is: invisibly and generously, worldwide, in tens of thousands of communities, there are hundreds of millions of ongoing, trust-building connections that people make with each other every day.
When one person makes a simple introduction to another to their own personal, trusted connection, they are transferring trust. This could be the single most significant determining factor of community building, yet it is invisible — that’s because these simple, unselfish actions have been endemic to humanity since the beginning.
As Mahatma Gandhi said, and it deserves to be repeated, without the endless number of kind actions happening in local communities, humanity would have destroyed itself long ago.
This principle of one-to-one connections also works in establishing network-centric organizations. You can leverage the natural desire of human beings to connect in this way. Instead of only one-to-one connections, you can make network-to-network connections by accessing “network clusters.”
When you start recognizing “super-connectors,” those who are well-connected in multiple networks, it becomes a matter of strategically making connections between the connectors. In Section 3, the final section of the book, you will learn how you can do this yourself in your own community and networks.
Catalyzing a Local Living Economy Network
So, it was community members — not activists or experts but “catalytic connectors” — who launched, populated, and energized this new endeavor. Most of these first networkers were not business owners themselves. However, as conscious, “connected consumers,” they helped us create a basic ecosystem “map” of their personal business connections throughout the region. By looking at these connections and by listening to “the word on the street,” we began to recognize which business owners were connectors themselves and who were the super-connectors.
The steps to building this local business ecosystem network were systematic, both tactically and strategically. After mapping the business categories and owners, I met with a handful of business owners, one-on-one first, whom I identified as connectors or super-connectors, and I asked them, “Would you like to help create a ‘local living economy’ network where we support each other and get the whole community behind shopping locally?”
Their answer was an emphatic YES! They could see that helping the community could benefit their own business. Enlightened self-interest is part of the reason leaders get involved, which is a great start. They were also excited about promoting the Common Good and Goodness itself!
Once we got five to ten super-connector business owners behind the idea, we scheduled the first small group meeting with eight owners (including some nonprofit executive directors) and myself.
When you convene a people-based network, one of the things you must deal with is people. Even with something as universal and overarching as a network to support local businesses that benefits everyone in the room, people show up with all kinds of motives, agendas, perceptions, expectations, and priorities.
As the self-selection process unfolds, people filter themselves in or out, depending on how closely they align with the project and mission. That’s why I learned how to communicate that a symbiotic network is all about shared, unifying Virtues, sharing information, resources, coordination, and looking for ways to do business together.
It’s not about “power over,” creating a new formal organization, or anyone’s pet political or religious beliefs. It’s surprisingly easy to keep it straightforward.
In retrospect, I see how this approach reflected the Ancient Blueprint. In contrast to the Culture of Separation, where people feel compelled to get what they want by dominance or force — what some Christians call the “kingdom or empires of man” — our network sought to bring heaven to earth through loving service to others.
That must have been why I was getting such a positive response; people and leaders sensed I was coming from a place of authentic love in action — holding space for the Transcendent within me and radiating outward, in turn, holding space for the total community.
In that first small group meeting, eight leaders met for about an hour and then scheduled another meeting, a breakfast meeting at a local restaurant, where each of these eight owners was to invite five other business or community leaders. To summarize, our process involved the following sequential key steps:
First, we mapped our organizational ecosystem.
Next, we met with key business and nonprofit leaders individually and one-on-one, looking for personal alignment of “spiritual” Virtues, intention, purpose, and capacity to collaborate.
With that alignment as a foundation, we brought these leaders together for a small group meeting.
With the group in alignment, we did a smaller “soft launch” to test the concept.
Finally, we were ready for a public launch.
This proven, successful methodology has since become what we call forming a symbiotic network.
Usually, even with the best intentions, calling large groups of people together without first building smaller cells of trust is a recipe for division and conflict. It is better to take your time and organically build trust, first one-on-one, then in small groups, then in larger groups.
As the alignment with the “fractal” of Cosmic Love emerges (both Virtues and network structure), you will know when it’s ready to grow. It is more an art than a science.
In fact, it works best to let your intuitive faculties lead you, following the Transcendent itself, with your “rational” mind as a servant. Not the other way around.
At the first public meeting, “soft launch,” about twenty-five business owners met for two hours to get to know each other, build trust, and decide whether and how they wanted to move ahead. Eventually, in November 2003, at our “public launch,” 150 owners and executive directors got together in a larger meeting hall and began hashing out what would become the Truckee Meadows Conscious Community and Business Network.
Okay, that's a very long name!
We convened several months of meetings, with breakout groups used at each meeting. We had to define the vision, mission, and values, design our logo, message, and marketing, and devise a “network-centric” decision-making process. It was an exciting time of creativity, but not without some conflict about direction and focus.
While many who lead community processes are more comfortable acting only as facilitators and leaving it up to whatever happens, I have found that symbiotic networks require more care than that. So, I had a dual role—that of facilitator AND leader-initiator. Pretty soon, I was able to identify a small group capable of shared leadership.
This was new for many people, particularly those who reflexively are anti-leadership or people who reflexively are against “hierarchies,” not knowing the difference between traditional top-down dominance hierarchies that proliferate the Culture of Separation within business, political, educational, civic, or religious life and what we were developing — a growth hierarchy more in alignment with the Luminous and Nature’s Web.
From Dominance to Growth Hierarchy
As you may remember, in Section 1, we discussed the difference between dominance and growth hierarchies. In my decades of experience with community building, I have seen firsthand how having an anti-hierarchy bias can lead to chaos.
Being against hierarchy, in general, makes no sense, as we have discovered how nature’s web is a growth hierarchy, up and down a great chain of being from the smallest visible parts (subatomic particles, to life, to us, to galaxy-wide) to the largest!
Symbiotic networks are growth hierarchies whose purpose is to build functional networks — what I later would call a Network Commons — to connect the Common Good across silos to strengthen a local living economy. A growth hierarchy means that no force, coercion, or manipulation is used to achieve results. It’s a loving association, and it’s purely voluntary. There is no need for top-down bosses or a single leader telling people what to do. Ambitious individuals seeking a political stepping stone or those seeking glory or control need not apply.
In a growth hierarchy, it’s actual service to humanity and the network that “earns” a place of leadership.
As you may remember, Jesus said, “The greatest among you will be the servants of all.” Without being totally aware at the time, I was on my way to translating the Ancient Blueprint revealed by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount into an actionable, coherent, and reproducible counter-cultural community network.
These networks have a distributed, horizontal, hub-based leadership where Love in Action—really Love in Service—is the underlying orientation. In practical reality, in our Reno experiment, the true “leaders” were those most generously sharing their Rolodex!
If we want to “invert” the pyramid of financial and political power on the planet, the
growth hierarchy holds the key.
The wisdom from the Ancient Blueprint, from Jesus to Gandhi, and today with Dr. Ari is the same — bringing heaven to earth means “Undergrowing” rather than overthrowing all “dominator” systems through a radical reformulation of the nature of power itself.
The Culture of Separation is characterized by force and bullying, by applying leverage and power (even amongst well-meaning social change efforts) over each other and other groups. Heaven comes to Earth as a Culture of Connection, another way — through the “all-conquering” power of self-giving Love.
There is a different way we can live — organizing our lives, community, and society.
Our Reno experience points us towards an updated and radically inclusive “occupy” movement, where we occupy ourselves with Transcendent Energies, really “re-inhabiting” ourselves with the highest Virtues and the greatest Good and spreading them locally through new network nodes of intersection.
Find out in the NEXT POST — Chapter 6, Part 2: Symbiotic Kinship – the Secret Sauce…Building a Culture of Connection – A Model for Local Economy…Adam Smith and the Spiritual Wealth of Nations
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