LIVING COMMONLY WILL BE REBOOTED IN FALL 2022

Mission and vision - in a nutshell

Living Commonly aims at completing the work of thousands of years of activism for a better world in just a few more generations, with a clear roadmap and measurable progress along the way.

Living Commonly's innovation is on the transition methodology rather than on the destination itself. The destination has been sketched fairly consistently many times throughout History. We want a world which promotes happiness and fulfillment, and therefore a society that promotes the practices of altruism, gratitude, autonomy and mastery. Ancient wisdom already pointed towards this path. Advances in neuroscience, psychology and anthropology in the recent decades have confirmed and refined it. It has also been pointed out repeatedly that a society with such characteristics would be much easier to achieve with an economy that decouples people's contribution to society with what they get from society. I.e. a society where everybody contributes voluntarily according to their capacities and obtains according to their needs. Which quite easily leads to a society with communal property rather than private property, and with collective gift-giving rather than individual for-profit trading.

Living Commonly's transition strategy innovation consists of building communities of entrepreneur activists. These communities will, on one hand, prototype the new society we want to build, practicing personal growth and communal economy, within the community. To speed up the process the community founders will be drawn from the privileged with legal rights and spare time and money to invest in the collective. On the other hand, towards the external world, we will build an extensive holding of startups. The profits from the communally-owned startups will be used to help the less privileged with resources to be fully autonomous so that they can eventually choose to join the communities as equals.

The main diffence with this strategy and other strategies that use social entrepreneurship is that we propose to decouple the two bottom lines rather than try to achieve them at once. Typical social entrepreneurship tries to find a balance between generating profit and achieving social and environmental goals. That is typically a rather hard optimization problem since both variables tend to have opposite behaviours. Selling services to the people who need it most is challenging because typically they are the ones with the least economic resources. Producing products in an environmentally friendly way tends to be more expensive. Both concerns can easily put a firm at a competitive disavantage which, in a grow-or-die economy, means they won't last long. Alternatively they might resort to greenwashing which rather than achieving the social and environmental goals instead discredits entrepreneurship as an avenue for real change.

Instead we propose to decouple both bottom lines. On one hand we'll create firms that will have the goal of maximizing profit, unconstrained by moral concerns beyond the legal framework in which they operate. On the other hand, we'll use those profits to buy communal resources so that the people who want to live according to ethical values can do so sharing those resources without being constrained at all by profit-making motives. When we achieve enough people who want to live ethically and resources to suppoort them the market won't be a threat to the environment and the society anymore.

Recruiting leadership

In March 2022 we’ll reboot Living Commonly recruiting more co-leaders who share the vision, mission and strategy. We need people passionate about leadership, community building and entrepreneurship. Will you join us?

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Living Commonly

E-mail: info at livingcommonly.org

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