The hope of this website is to be part of a discussion about where humanity is at — and what it will take to gain control over where we are going.
I was born into a politically active, left-wing family that participated in many of the tumultuous events that shaped the post-WWII world. The greater part of that epoch was defined by the Cold War — a competition between capitalist and socialist nations that resonated throughout every sphere of life
I have been privileged to have lived long enough to see that struggle play
out. I have seen a country that inspired a vast global left with its vision of a
collective, egalitarian and rationally-ordered society morph into its very
opposite. From a flawed communist utopia, Russia descended into a
corrupt, authoritarian state in which half its people live on less than $500 a
month, while at the same time, it has spawned one of the world’s leading
concentrations of billionaires.
There is nothing that can make you humble like seeing ideas of which you
were certain crumble before realities you had not understood. And then,
more bad news. Just as the Cold War was coming to a close, humanity
awoke to the fact that we were in another conflict: our out-of-control growth
process is undermining the ecological and chemical interdependencies that
sustain life on our planet. Capitalism’s ability to out-produce communism
counts for little in dealing with this problem.
We need new thinking. The Cold War polarized two dimensions of social
life that need to be brought together — individual liberty and collective
purpose. There is no ready-made formula to solve this conundrum; it’s
something that humanity is going to have to figure out. But to figure it out,
we are going to have to understand things about ourselves we do not
presently understand.