Harmony and Exchange ─ Toward a Legoic Society

This book examines two main concepts—harmony and exchange—in relation to the social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions of human life. As such, what differentiates humans from other living species are the possibility of understanding a context and the willingness to collaborate and create complex models of exchange. Specifically, emotion and intellect are established as fundamental dimensions of our being which play key roles in exchange with others and dealing with our environment.

This text provides a new perspective that examines "being and becoming" in a multidimensional exchange framework, concentrating on the analysis of a utilitarian society which reduces human beings to operators and servants of techno-scientific machinery. This approach to validity demands conformity to social and political norms which have lost touch with the intellectual and emotional expressions of the citizens of the world, resulting in an environment of alienation, violence, and subordination of humans to meaningless institutions and positivistic ideologies. The quest for true harmony and collaborative exchange in contemporary societies requires the recognition of multiple sites of subjectivity, self-certainty, and global domination of techno-scientific rationality. This book’s primary application towards a Legoic society is built on a critical pedagogy committed to dialogue and exchange, and is an environment that is accompanied by the process of development of a critical consciousness based on new systems of agency, moving toward a fundamentally non-reductionist praxis of the socio-political dimension of living together.

Nick Mehrdad Loghmani is a senior information technology adviser with over a dozen years’ experience in some of the world’s leading companies such as the Royal Bank of Canada, the Toronto Dominion Bank, CGI, and Salesforce. He is also a researcher in the fields of mathematics, computer science, and cognitive science. Some of his contributions have been published in a monograph entitled The Harmonic Theory, a theory on the emergence of intelligent systems. He is a co-founder of Solidarity with Iran, an ecumenical group that promotes inclusiveness and democratic principles, and a co-author of Charter 91, a blueprint for promoting new participatory avenues in Iran. He is a contributor to Radio Free Europe, BBC Persian, the Huffington Post, and Seminar magazine. Loghmani is also a member of the advisory board at the Mahatma Gandhi Centre for Peace Studies of the Jindal Global Law School in Delhi, India. He has been a founder or partner in a number of technology firms. He received his B.S. in mathematics from the University of Waterloo.

Ramin Jahanbegloo is Executive Director of the Mahatma Gandhi Centre for Nonviolence and Peace Studies and Vice Dean of the School of Law at Jindal Global University, Delhi, India. He received his B.A. and M.A. in philosophy, history, and political science and later his Ph.D. in philosophy from the Sorbonne University. Since 1993, he has taught and conducted research at numerous academic institutions, including the Academy of Philosophy in Tehran, the French Institute for Iranian Studies, Harvard University, University of Toronto, the Cultural Research Centre in Tehran, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, and York University in Toronto. He is also a member of the advisory board of PEN Canada. He is the winner of the Peace Prize from the United Nations Association in Spain (2009) for his extensive academic works promoting dialogue between cultures and his advocacy for non-violence, and more recently the winner of the Josep Palau i Fabre International Essay Prize.