Accelerating Social Change: Impacting Our World While Transforming Ourselves

Social change is more than a political statement or demand; it is a moral and spiritual imperative. If this is so, then it involves the whole human being in the way he perceives and thinks, feels and relates, and acts on and impacts the world. This work gathers the threads of pioneers and visionaries in various aspects of social and cultural renewal. Paradigms of "include and transcend" offer us paths along which the personal and the global are intimately intertwined. Through established pathways and processes we can experiment with new ways of being as we impact our immediate world. Practically speaking, this book explores three avenues to change. At a first level we can start to recognize that society is built around three poles. Besides the public and private sectors, civil society has emerged to play a crucial role and alter dualistic thinking. If we think beyond capitalism and socialism and all their variations and combinations, new unthought-of frontiers and possibilities emerge. It is possible to expand our practice of democracy beyond the majority/minority dynamics to the inclusion of all stakeholders. A new art and science of civic collaboration can break the gridlocks of polarization and opposition. We can engage in a new area of honest, energetic collaboration moving beyond weak compromise, through an array of social tools that have grown in the last forty to fifty years and have now reached full maturity. Lastly, we can expand organizational and social forms in ways that completely break away from the past. We can reconcile both entrepreneurial and participatory paradigms and transcend top-down or bottom-up models in ways that our intellect alone cannot fathom. Paradigms offer generous visions but are also exacting masters. The new revolution will request as much of ourselves as we will request of the world.