New Homepage and Preface

With apologies to FromWade subscribers for cross-posting.

I’ve reframed the website as a constantly updated digital book rather than an online encyclopedia. The homepage now features the book’s working title, Systemic Reform, and I’ve changed the “Resources” drop-down menu heading to “Content.” This menu now begins with “Preface” and “Introduction,” followed by the chapter titles.

The “Learn More” links under the chapter images on the homepage continue to summarize the chapters, but soon the drop-down links will lead to more extensive content with essays with links to the Knowledge Base, which will serve as endnotes. The Index will continue to link to the Knowledge Base resources.

Though many people have made valuable contributions to this project, which I appreciate, my efforts to recruit a co-editor or co-authors have failed. Likewise, my discussions with potential partner organizations have not panned out.

So I’m accepting that I’m the editor and lead content author. This approach requires more solitude, so I’m learning how better to be alone and refrain from so frequently asking for feedback.

Rather, I’ll digest the research I’ve conducted and the input I’ve received so far, present my conclusions to the best of my ability, and trust that they’re sensible, unique, and important. Perhaps someday they’ll ring more bells and garner more engagement.

In the meantime, I’ll proceed as if thousands of people read my work, my Daily Reflections and What’s New with great interest, subscribe to the monthly Mutual Empowerment newsletter and the daily Wade’s Wire, and take action to advance a systemic reform movement.

Soon, drawing on three recent generous donations, I’ll hire a part-time administrative assistant to help clean up the Knowledge Base. The latest draft of the job description is here.

My cancer doctor told me, “You beat the odds. Your cancer will not kill you.” I’ve almost recovered from the injuries I suffered from a recent fall, and soon, my apartment should be completely free of bedbugs. These difficulties have hampered my productivity, but with the excitement of a New Year, I look forward to being bug- and bruise-free and getting into a better groove.

Regardless, I appreciate your interest.

Following is the new Preface.
Wade
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Preface

For 60 years, I helped organize egalitarian communities whose members supported each other in becoming better persons and more effective activists. Now I sum up what I’ve learned.

Though my methods have changed, more than anything, I’ve wanted a global society that’s fair and kind. This site explores how to move in this direction.

Within institutions and informally, countless individuals and organizations empower the powerless, control the powerful, live in harmony with Mother Nature, promote fairness, relieve suffering, and cultivate positive cultural change.

Unfortunately, however, this compassionate humanity community is fragmented. Its members don’t see how their efforts are interconnected. They fail to unite, address root causes, and support each other.

My goal is to help unify this community and thoroughly and fundamentally reform our society into a compassionate community.

Utopia is impossible, but we can make steady progress. We can make incremental improvements while at the same time building support for deep change.

A good first step is to face and name our primary problem: the System. The roots of our fragmentation lie in the larger social system. Society encourages everyone to climb social ladders and look down on, dominate, and exploit those below — and submit to those above — for personal gain.

Our institutions, our culture, and ourselves as individuals are woven together into a hyper-meritocracy rooted in rugged individualism and winner-take-all competition. The System rewards division with financial incentives, and we reinforce the System with our daily actions. Wealth, power, and status become ends, rather than means to a higher goal.

This hyper-competitive individualism breeds bitter power struggles that undermine solidarity. We must establish new, more compassionate social structures  — and reform existing ones — as well as work within them to make incremental gains and nurture individual and collective empowerment.

The inflated quest for upward mobility afflicts almost everyone if not all. Unfortunately, however, few people who engage in compassionate action focus on overcoming these weaknesses. I know of no organization that sets aside time for its members to support each other with unlearning the desire to dominate and the willingness to submit for personal gain.

Twelve-step support groups and many other projects have demonstrated that peer support can help people reach personal goals and thrive more fully. Social service and political activists can learn from these efforts. This website explores how we might do so.

In recent decades, to explore how we activists might be more effective, I’ve conducted strategy workshops, engaged in extensive research, shared drafts of proposals, interviewed individuals, circulated online surveys, and experimented with specific methods to help bring about fundamental and comprehensive reform.

Self-development can serve a greater end. We can care for ourselves so we can better care for others. We can find a balance between being selfish and sacrificing too much. We can build strong communities and strong individuals.  We can find solutions where everyone wins. We can prevent suffering by correcting root causes.

Ego, arrogance, the desire to dominate, and the willingness to submit get in the way. Bitter power struggles divide organizations. People assume leaders are those who can get followers to do what they want, which undermines mutual empowerment.

I’ve had this problem and still do. I know it’s better to work with others to solve problems, but I’ve struggled to live up to this ideal, I’ve formed strong opinions about the right action plan and recruited people to support it. I’ve been too focused on proving myself and gaining recognition and become too vulnerable to hostility, criticism, and disappointment.  I’m not alone.

This website promotes holistic and systemic change. It’s holistic because it involves the whole person and the whole society. It’s systemic because it proposes that we adopt a new primary purpose for our society and establish new ways of organizing our activities (structures) to serve that purpose — while preserving healthy traditions.

The proposals presented here aren’t a blueprint. The focus is on articulating a worldview that might serve as a foundation for lasting unity. Specific policy proposals that flow from this worldview are presented for the sake of discussion to clarify possibilities. Many people have helped with this project, but I assume responsibility for the final edits.

I know my current audience is small. These big questions are hard and I may be wrong on major points. Nevertheless, the response I’ve received so far has been largely supportive and I still believe that what I’m saying is unique and important.

So I hope that someday, thousands will be engaged with this project and I work AS IF they were. Regardless, many people are on similar wavelengths, and eventually, we may grow in number and come together to change the world.

I invite you, dear reader, to share your thoughts, experiences, and suggested resources to help improve this effort.

—Wade Lee Hudson
1/23/24

Train Yourself to Always Show Up

We desperately need a spiritual rewiring in our time. Imagine a society in which we learn to see one another in our pain, to ask one another, “What happened to you?” Imagine that we hear one another’s stories, say amen to one another’s pain, and even pray for one another’s healing. I call this the amen effect: sincere, tender encounters that help us forge new spiritual and neural pathways by reminding us that our lives and our destinies are entwined. Because, ultimately, it is only by finding our way to one another that we will begin to heal.
Sharon Brous

Baton Charge: “Tar”

January 18

An orchestra, as Lydia points out, is “not a democracy,” but, nonetheless, might it be helpful if classical musicians took the word “maestro” and slung it out of circulation? Does the aura that enfolds it not lie at the rotten root of the story of Lydia Tár? If you worship a maestro, after all, don’t be surprised if you wind up as a slave to the rhythm.
Anthony Lane

The Deification of Donald Trump

The former president posted a video called “God Made Trump” on Truth Social. It begins:

On June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump.” God had to have someone willing to go into the den of vipers. Call out the fake news for their tongues as sharp as a serpent’s. The poison of vipers is on their lips. So God made Trump. …God said, “I will need someone who will be strong and courageous. Who will not be afraid or terrified of wolves when they attack. A man who cares for the flock. A shepherd to mankind who won’t ever leave or forsake them. I need the most diligent worker to follow the path and remain strong in faith. And know the belief in God and country.”
The Deification of Donald Trump Poses Some Interesting Questions

Immigration: ChatGPT

January 15

Immigration: ChatGPT

Dear ChatGPT: Assuming widespread agreement, in 800 words or less, how can the U.S. best fix its immigration problem?

ChatGPT

Addressing the U.S. immigration system requires a multifaceted approach, balancing the need for security, economic growth, humanitarian responsibilities, and the preservation of America’s core values as a nation of immigrants. Here’s a comprehensive plan, within 800 words, to address the issue:

Read More

How Politics Got So Polarized

The Robbers Cave experiment suggests another way out. After having nudged the Eagles and the Rattlers toward conflict, the researchers wanted to see if they could be nudged back. They brought the boys together for a variety of peaceable activities. One day, for example, they arranged for the two groups to meet up in the mess hall for lunch. The result was a food fight. Since “contact situations” weren’t working, the researchers moved on to what they called “superordinate goals.” They staged a series of crises—a water shortage, a supply-truck breakdown—that could be resolved only if the boys coöperated. Dealing with these manufactured emergencies made the groups a lot friendlier toward each another, to the point where, on the trip back to Oklahoma City, the Rattlers used five dollars they’d won from the bean-collecting contest to treat the Eagles to malteds.

Could “superordinate goals” help depolarize America? There would seem to be no shortage of crises for the two parties to work together on. The hitch, of course, is that they’d first need to agree on what these are.

Hands of Peace

Hands of Peace empowers American, Israeli, and Palestinian youth to become agents of change.
Our Mission

At Hands of Peace, we share these common values:

  • We believe the future depends on the leadership, education and actions of the next generation.
  • We believe global connections are learning connections.
  • We believe the way to create impactful and lasting change in society is through cultivating young leaders who are committed to serving their communities.
  • We believe in positive peace that goes beyond the absence of violence and builds constructive attitudes and systems that foster equality, freedom and justice.
  • We believe all people deserve self-determination and basic human rights.
  • We believe in the same freedoms for all, including freedom of expression, freedom from discrimination, freedom of movement, freedom from fear and violence, and freedom from oppression.
  • We believe the existing conditions among Israelis and Palestinians are unacceptable and there must be an urgent, non-violent end to occupation that leads to safety and security for all.

[read more]

A ‘National and Global Maelstrom’ Is Pulling Us Under

By Thomas B Edsall

…Perhaps the most trenchant comment I received was from Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard, who replied to my inquiry at the height of the controversy over the former Harvard president Claudine Gay:

I have thought for some time that America was suffering multiple elite-driven institutional breakdowns across the board, opening the door to a national and global maelstrom. But now I find myself so overwhelmingly distressed by it all, including the collapse of core values at my own university (Harvard), that I cannot write coherently about it.

Excerpts from “The Fate of Free Will”

The Fate of Free Will
Kevin Mitchell

Organisms struggle to maintain themselves. They strive to persist and then to reproduce. Natural selection ensures it. “The universe doesn’t have purpose, but life does,” Mitchell says. “Living organisms are adapted for the sake of only one thing — their selves. This brings something new to the universe: a frame of reference, a subject. The existence of a goal imbues things with properties that previously never existed relative to that goal: function, meaning, and value. And yet…no one would say that (a single cell organism) has will, free or otherwise.

Rejecting the reductionist view does not mean resorting to mind–body dualism—positing some extra, nonphysical entity, like a soul or a spirit. There is no ghost in this machine. “Our minds are not an extra layer sitting above our physical brains,” Mitchell says. They are the holistic sum of that continuous, dynamic, distributed activity. The brain is material, and its parts are increasingly well understood.

Free will, as distinct from agency, implies consciousness and self-reflection. Yet so much of what we do is involuntary. 

Yet unconscious decision-making is still decision-making. And sometimes we do think. We reflect, ponder, dither, weigh alternatives for some time before choosing to act.

Still, when the occasion requires, we can gather our wits, as the expression goes.

Thought involves continual feedback and self-correction, and the individual components cannot be teased apart. Mitchell writes:

The various subsystems involved are in constant dialogue with each other, each attempting to satisfy its own constraints in the context of the dynamically changing information it receives from all the interconnected areas.

Agency is what distinguishes us from machines. For biological creatures, reason and purpose come from acting in the world and experiencing the consequences. 

Reviving Wade’s Wire

Dear Wade’s Wire Subscriber:

After allowing it to lie dormant for more than a year while constructing the Compassionate Humanity Community website, I’m reviving this list. No more than once a day, I’ll share discoveries, thoughts, and feelings here. I appreciate your interest and support.

I just posted the January 2024 Mutual Empowerment newsletter, a publication of the Compassionate Humanity Community. If you did not receive it, you can view it here and subscribe to the monthly newsletter here. If you already have, I apologize for the redundancy.

Wade Lee Hudson