RebalancingSociety.org is up
RebalancingSociety.org is now up, thirst years in the making. Not a moment too soon!
In 1991, I visited Prague, two years after the Velvet Revolution that brought down Czech communism. At the time, while Western pundits were celebrating “the triumph of capitalism”, it looked to me like balance had triumphed. The communist regimes of Eastern Europe had been utterly out of balance, with power so concentrated in their public sectors, while the healthy democracies of the West were relatively balanced across the three sectors of society—public, private, and what I later called plural. The failure to understand this, however, would be throwing many of these countries out of balance subsequently, as private sector capitalism would indeed come to triumph.
A year later, I published Leaning in (and from) Eastern Europe, to express the point about balance, and began to collect material to develop it. Many blogs followed in these pages as well as a book in 2015 entitled Rebalancing Society…radical renewal beyond left, right, and center. One blog, posted in 2017 under the title Going Public with my Puzzle, described the puzzle of attaining social balance for which no box has been provided with the picture to make and the pieces that have to be assembled to make them. I put that bit of whimsy aside as I began work on this website, but in the midst of it, I realized that I was quite literally assembling the pieces I had been collecting over the years, into a picture that might take us forward.
This should be apparent in the diagrams that appear on each of the five pages that describe a way forward: The CHALLENGE of imbalance, a PATHWAY to balance (in three steps, shown above): I. DECLARING our interdependence, II. ACTING to reverse and renew, III. CONSOLIDATING our actions. You can get the gist of this in just a few minutes by reading these pages in order. A final page, called SITES and SIGHTS, has been designed to help you probe into all this.
Please have a look, and consider what you might do. We really do need to move forward.