Recovering the Sacred Pattern of Common Life

Discovery 9: How Love Becomes People Power

What resonates with you? What challenges you?

Oct 20, 2026

The Politics of Separation

Years later, in Sri Lanka, I found myself sitting with the president of a Sarvodaya Community Bank. Nearly half the town participated in the local Sarvodaya Society. They had spent years building relationships, serving one another, creating livelihoods, meeting community needs, and developing a parallel social reality of their own.

I asked him what seemed to me an obvious question. “Do you run candidates for local office?”

“We don’t need to,” he replied.

His answer stayed with me. I had assumed that if people wanted to change their society, eventually they would have to turn toward electoral politics. But Sarvodaya had moved in another direction. They began with people’s spiritual lives, with service, relationships, and the needs of local communities. As people learned to meet their needs, work together, and take responsibility for their communities, they developed the capacity of self-governance.

The banker’s answer reflected something I had already heard from Dr. Ari. He had long questioned the party-political system itself, which he believed fostered division, hatred, fear, and ignorance. He believed people could govern their communities by working together, sharing responsibility, and making decisions at local levels, rather than depending on competing national political parties.

After fifty years of watching American politics, I agree with Dr. Ari. I’ve watched enormous amounts of money and energy poured into political campaigns that pit Americans against one another, each side promising its own version of “change we can believe in.” Our political system doesn’t simply reflect division, hatred, fear, and ignorance. It feeds and perpetuates them.

I’ve watched Democrats and Republicans fight over who gets to run the country, each promising that everything will change if their side wins. Yet after all these decades, some observers believe America is more divided than at any time since the Civil War.

And those divisions don’t stop in the nation’s capital. They reach into our communities, churches, friendships, and even turn neighbors against one another. I see the same pattern in the European Union.

Divide and rule is nothing new. Five centuries ago, Niccolò Machiavelli described how rulers deliberately kept people divided to maintain control. In The Prince, he observed that “they nursed these disputes amongst them, so that the citizens, distracted by their differences, should not unite against them.”

Sometimes I think we’re like Charlie Brown in the old Peanuts comic strip. Lucy promises she’ll hold the football so he can kick it. He believes her, runs toward it, and at the last moment she pulls it away. He lands flat on his back. But the next time she promises things will be different, he believes her again. And he lands flat on his back again.

But why do we keep believing Lucy? Around the same time as Machiavelli, another French thinker, Étienne de La Boétie, asked an equally important question: Why do people willingly support rulers who concentrate power in the hands of a few?

In his The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, he identified several reasons.

We grow up accepting the system as normal. We are distracted by entertainment and spectacle. We receive favors and rewards for supporting it. Some people benefit from those in power, while others become dependent on them.

Even religion can become entangled with political power.

And that brings me back to something I learned from Dr. Ari. If the system depends on our participation, why do we keep looking to that same system to save us?

The Third Way: People Power from Below

This is why I no longer believe that capturing political power can bring about the transformation our society needs.

We cannot overcome the Culture of Separation by continuing to organize our lives around the struggle for control. But neither can we transform society by withdrawing into separate alternatives.

The Third Way I had been discovering begins within the whole community, connecting the people and the good already present rather than dividing them into opposing camps.

Dr. Ari had shown me what this looked like in practice. His aim was not to capture political power first, but to awaken people and strengthen their capacity to shape their own communities.

As I had seen in Sarvodaya, the culture began changing before the politics did. Political power could become the fruit of that transformation rather than its starting point. In Sarvodaya, this was understood as Grama Swaraj, village self-rule.

Only later did I recognize that something similar had been happening in Northern Nevada. At the time, I had not thought of our work as political. Farmers found restaurants. Businesses shared resources and connections. Churches served beyond their walls. Neighbors helped neighbors. Networks that had once existed separately began finding one another and forming a larger web. We had not looked to government to make any of this happen.

I was beginning to see how all these discoveries fit together.

Divine Love first took form within people through the Virtues, then in the relationships we formed with one another. As those relationships grew and connected, they became Symbiotic Networks, giving Divine Love a social form.

Those same networks began creating new marketplaces where people could share their gifts and meet one another’s needs.

And now I was discovering their political possibility. As these Symbiotic Networks spread across the whole community, they were becoming a source of people’s power, not through the struggle to control government, but through relationships, trust, and shared responsibility.

At the time, many political and business leaders considered small farming a relic of the past. To them, farmland was better suited for shopping centers, condos, and parking lots.

Yet within six months, our growing network was helping transform the region’s culture around local food. Farmers’ markets, food cooperatives, and farm-to-table relationships began flourishing. Without lobbying, protests, or electoral campaigns, we had helped shift the culture, and political and business leaders began following its lead.

Our experience in Northern Nevada brought me back to something I had encountered in the writings of Havel and Benda. Havel had written about independent structures emerging not from political theory, but “from below, because life compelled them to.” A Parallel Polis is not simply designed or legislated into existence. It is practiced into being.

Václav Benda gave that practice a civic and political purpose:

“The strategic aim of the parallel polis…should be the growth and renewal of civic and political culture—and along with it, an identical structuring of society, creating bonds of responsibility and fellow feeling.”

His words clarified what I was beginning to understand: people could develop the power to govern their common life by taking responsibility for it, without first organizing around parties, elections, or the struggle for control. They laid the foundations for self-government.

In Czechoslovakia, that practice took form through a grassroots social infrastructure linking independent spaces for education, culture, publishing, religious life, economic activity, and civic life. When the Communist system began to collapse in 1989, much of that civic capacity was already in place. Those independent networks helped give rise to Civic Forum, which quickly became a central force in the democratic transition.

Within weeks, its representatives were negotiating with the government, and Václav Havel was elected president.

While Czechoslovakia developed a Parallel Polis under Communist rule, Sarvodaya was building its own parallel social reality through village awakening and self-government. In Sri Lanka, communities built roads, livelihoods, farms, and community banks, eventually connecting millions of people across thousands of villages.

What had begun as a small experiment in village awakening had grown into a nationwide network of more than 5,500 legally independent Sarvodaya societies. Together, they were building a parallel social reality rooted in local communities, with the growing capacity to shape their own economic and political future.

Our work in Northern Nevada was nowhere near as developed as Sarvodaya, but the beginnings were there: a relational network architecture through which people across the community were forming new connections, building trust, and learning to act together.

But a harder question remained. Powerful forces are shaping today’s top-down global consumer society.

Could this kind of People Power from below grow strong enough to bring about the fundamental change needed?

The Power of Connecting the Good

So much political and economic power is now concentrated in enormous systems far beyond the reach of any local community: through political parties, large corporations, global finance, technology, and media. Their reach extends deep into everyday life, influencing what we pay attention to, how we see the world, what we desire, and the choices we make, often in ways that pull us away from what we actually desire and need.

I’ve already referred to these interlocking systems as the Everything Industrial Complex. How do we respond to power like this?

Looking back at my earlier activism, I can see how deeply my own thinking was shaped by the belief that Western civilization was intrinsically bad. Within movements that viewed civilization that way, transformation naturally meant resisting it, tearing it down, or building a separate alternative to replace it.

But organizing ourselves around what we oppose separates us even further from the people whose lives are already intertwined with our own. We find others who see the world as we do and organize either to resist the larger society or to build alternatives apart from it.

The more alienated we became from the whole, the more natural it felt to find belonging among those who saw the same problems we did.

We carried this same opposition-centered approach into electoral politics, pouring enormous amounts of money and human energy into electing the right people, defeating the other side, and opposing the systems and institutions we wanted to change. Yet we were still not creating the fundamentally different society so many of us hoped for.

That brought me face to face with a contradiction: trying to create a new society while pouring so much of our energy, almost with a religious devotion, into fighting the old one. Saint Paul had written, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Taking those words seriously meant giving more of our energy to building what was good, not just resisting what was wrong.

Looking at the lineage of the Ancient Blueprint, I began to see an expansion of his teaching. We could connect the good already alive among us, transforming individual acts of goodness into a collective force capable of transforming our common life.

This gave me a different way to approach Western civilization. I no longer wanted to think in terms of reforming, destroying, or escaping from the West. I wanted to heal and transform it. Western civilization had given us extraordinary medicine, technology, knowledge, mobility, and material abundance. I wanted to preserve those gifts while recovering something our culture had weakened: our capacity to care for one another and take greater responsibility for the life we share.

This new perspective also changed how I saw the movements I had been part of. I had spent years in progressive movements working with people committed to justice, equality, peace, and human dignity. Later I encountered regenerative, spiritual, economic, and other movements seeking a different future. There was much that was good in many of them.

Yet beneath their different visions, I recognize the same organizing pattern: we see something wrong with the existing society, develop a different vision of what it can become, find others who share that vision, and begin building relationships, communities, and institutions together.

We are remarkably good at finding one another, but far less successful at building relationships with people who see the world differently. The worldviews change. The organizing pattern remains the same.

Charter 77 offers a striking contrast. The people who came together in Czechoslovakia did not share a worldview. Christians stood alongside secular intellectuals, democrats, reform Communists, artists, and people from the cultural underground. They did not first resolve their differences before acting together.

Bringing people together across these differences was not simply part of Charter 77’s story. It was the source of their power. By overcoming the divisions that kept them apart, they discovered a collective power that even a seemingly all-powerful totalitarian state could not fully suppress.

The Power of the Whole

And suddenly I thought again about the conventional farmer in Northern Nevada.

“I’m already doing it,” he had told me.

I had understood that moment as a lesson about belonging. Now I could see what that meant for the power of a whole community. He already belonged. We do not need to convert him, recruit him, or make him part of our movement. We need him as part of the whole.

The farmer does not have to become regenerative before we can work together. A conservative does not have to become progressive. A secular neighbor does not have to become Christian. We can take responsibility for the life we share without first having to agree on how we understand the world.

Writing this book had brought me back again and again to the same discovery: the community itself was the container. Now I can see its political consequence. A movement usually begins with a part, with people who share a particular understanding of the world, and then tries to grow that part until it can transform the whole.

But what if we began with the whole? Not because everyone would agree or participate, but because the people whose lives are already intertwined are the source of the community’s collective capacity and power.

In Northern Nevada, we were beginning to put this into practice. Relationships formed. Trust grew. Symbiotic Networks emerged. New marketplaces took shape within the local economy. Resources and opportunities circulated. As people connected these networks and began coordinating their efforts, they developed the capacity to meet more of their needs, solve problems, and govern more of their common life together.

I began to see how this growing collective capacity becomes a form of political power. This changed how I saw our usual approaches to social change. When one part of society competes with others for influence and power, it reproduces the logic of a Culture of Separation.

Beginning with the whole means strengthening the relationships that already exist among us into a greater capacity for shared action.

This revealed another dimension of the problem I had spent years confronting: the enormous concentration of power in government, corporations, finance, technology, and media. I had already come to see the Everything Industrial Complex not as a conspiracy or single centralized system, but as a pattern that emerges across large institutions. They develop interests of their own, protect those interests, and seek greater power and influence.

Over time, power accumulates upward while people at the grassroots become increasingly divided from one another. This process has a long history. The ancient strategy of “divide and rule” recognized that power is easier to maintain when those below remain divided.

But the power of the whole does not have to be won from above. It is already present in the people themselves, waiting to be recovered through the relationships and common life they build together.

A Whole-Community Parallel Polis

That relationship between division and concentrated power brought me back to Charter 77 and the idea of a Parallel Polis, where people begin building another social reality without first capturing political power.

Imagine if those dissidents had organized around a narrower vision of what society should become, an ecological society, for example. However worthy that vision might have been, they could more easily have been portrayed as one sector of society advancing its own cause. Their concerns could have been treated as a special interest rather than as part of a broader struggle involving society as a whole.

As a community builder, I had watched a similar pattern unfold over the last forty years. What began as a broad concern for the environment became increasingly identified with one sector of society. Environmentalism gave way to sustainability, and sustainability became an established field of organizations, government programs, corporate departments, consultants, and professionals. More recently, I have watched regeneration begin moving down a similar path.

The ideas evolved, but the underlying organizing pattern remained much the same.

Politically, that pattern took the form of separate movements competing for enough influence to change the larger society. And when movements enter the institutions they hope to change, those institutions end up shaping the movements instead.

Sustainability offered a telling example: the system became much better at absorbing it than sustainability became at transforming the larger society.

Charter 77 revealed a radically different source of power. Rather than organizing around a particular vision of what society should become, it brought together people from different religious, political, and cultural constituencies around a shared commitment to truth, human dignity, and civic responsibility, without requiring them to share a worldview.

Their unity gave them a source of collective power that no single constituency could have generated alone.

But Charter 77 was not the only movement to reveal this kind of power. As I was reading through one of the final drafts of this book, my wife Marta, who grew up in Communist Poland, asked me why I hadn’t included the Solidarity movement. She was right. Here was another extraordinary expression of the same pattern, one that had helped transform the country in which she grew up.

Beginning in 1980, Solidarity grew from independent workers’ organizing into a movement of nearly ten million people, bringing together workers, farmers, intellectuals, Catholics, secular democrats, and others across Polish society. Alongside their resistance to Communist rule, they began organizing important parts of their common life independently of the state, building networks of publishing, education, culture, civic life, and economic self-governance.

Farmers formed Rural Solidarity, small-business owners and craftspeople established independent associations, and workers developed councils seeking greater control over their workplaces and economic decisions.

Much of this independent civic life drew strength from the Catholic Church, whose extensive network of parishes, Catholic intellectual circles, and community relationships had already created spaces for people to gather, build trust, and sustain independent civic life. Pope John Paul II’s historic visit in 1979 helped millions of Poles recognize their collective strength.

During the years of repression, churches supported underground publishing, cultural activities, and families of imprisoned activists. One remarkable example was the Solidarity of Families initiative, launched in Lublin in 1981 by Solidarity activists inspired by Catholic social teaching. Its parish-based neighborhood groups strengthened relationships, mutual aid, and shared responsibility among families.

In both Poland and Czechoslovakia, people were building a parallel social reality beyond the control of Communist authorities. The regimes controlled the institutions of political and economic life, but they could not extinguish the relationships, trust, and solidarity networks developing among the people themselves.

Despite repression, those relationships and independent institutions endured, helping lay the foundations for the democratic transformations of 1989. They had begun organizing their own workplaces, communities, civic institutions, and local economies long before gaining political power.

Charter 77 and Solidarity revealed the deeper relationship between separation and power. When movements organize around their separate visions of a better society and compete for influence, they reproduce the very separation they hope to overcome, weakening the collective power needed to transform the society we share.

The answer is not to compete more effectively for power within the existing system, but to recover the power already present in the relationships, trust, and shared responsibility of people acting together across their differences.

From Movements to the Whole Community

That realization pointed toward a more radical inversion of the usual strategies we had defaulted to: instead of asking others to join us, we can show up for them. The same inversion can shape how movements relate to one another.

Rather than create another movement competing with the others, we can connect the movement threads already working toward a more positive future and invite them to bridge across their differences within each local community.

faith and spiritual communities
charities and social-change efforts
civic engagement and bridge-building movements
regenerative culture and creation-care movements
purpose-driven businesses
New Economy and commons movements
localization and bioregional networks
pro-democracy and civil-society movements
arts and cultural communities

But connecting movements is not enough. Their relationships have to take root within actual communities, around the Common Needs people already share. The farmer, the restaurant owner, the pastor, the businessperson, the neighbor, and the community organizer do not have to become the same. They only have to learn to act together where their lives already intersect. That is how relationship becomes collective power.

That is the difference between building a movement around a particular vision and building the power of a whole community. Movements can create strong communities of their own while remaining separate from the larger society they hope to transform.

A Whole-Community Parallel Polis gives that broader people power a social form. Not because everyone participates in everything or agrees about everything. They never will. But no ideological, spiritual, economic, or cultural faction represents the people as a whole.

The whole community, made up of people whose lives are already intertwined across different relationships, organizations, and institutions, is the larger political body from which that power emerges. That is why there can be no people power without the people themselves, across the whole community.

And this is where the meaning of parallel matters: parallel does not mean separate. Independence from the dominant system and separation from one’s fellow citizens are not the same thing. A community can recover more of its own capacities while remaining part of the larger society, drawing upon what is good within it while becoming less dependent on systems that have gradually absorbed more of its common life.

Seen this way, I thought again about the Sarvodaya banker. “We don’t need to.” I understood his answer differently now. He was not telling me that politics did not matter. He was telling me that politics does not come first.

Sarvodaya showed what could come first. It began with people. With Virtue and service. With relationships. With the needs of their community. With people learning to take responsibility for one another. From those relationships grew economic and social capacity. And from that capacity grew the ability to shape their own future together.

What emerges is this: political power grows from relationships, shared responsibility, and collective capacity. Love has political consequences without politics being where the process begins.

Share Symbiotic Culture

The Ancient Blueprint Is Already Here

And now I saw a larger Pattern running through everything I had experienced. We tend to approach social change from the opposite direction, looking first to politics, institutions, economic systems, movements, and new worldviews to create the society we desire.

But everything I had experienced pointed in another direction. The sequence I had already traced was now visible across the whole journey: Love becomes Virtue. Virtue shapes relationship. Relationship makes service, trust, cooperation, shared responsibility, and growing networks possible. From there, economic and social capacity grow, giving people greater power to shape and govern their communities together.

That sequence now revealed its political consequence.

It was the same inversion I had come to see in Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount: rather than trying first to change the world through political power imposed from above, transformation begins in the human person and moves outward through relationship, service, and common life.

Politically, this means we cannot allow the society we share to be shaped for us from above. We have to recover the ability to shape it together as we learn to take greater responsibility for the whole community.

Political and economic systems matter, but they are not where transformation begins. They are shaped by what lies beneath them: culture, relationship, values, habits, and ultimately our relationship with the Transcendent. That orientation is not only something I have come to believe intellectually. I have experienced it inwardly.

What I had first experienced inwardly, I could now see echoed in history.

Despite their profoundly different religions, cultures, languages, and circumstances, the people and movements that had shaped my journey arrived at remarkably similar ways in which Love takes social, economic, and political form.

C. S. Lewis had given language to this deeper order in The Abolition of Man. Drawing on traditions across civilizations, he wrote of the Tao as “the reality beyond all predicates…the Way, the Road,” “the Way in which things everlastingly emerge…into space and time,” and “the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and super-cosmic progression.”

What Lewis called the Tao gave me another way to understand what I had come to call the Ancient Blueprint: an order we did not invent, but learn to recognize and live in alignment with.

I discovered that same possibility in San Diego and Reno. As I tried to live from the reality I had encountered and let it shape how we related, served, and built community together, another kind of common life began to emerge. I came to understand that this Pattern is not confined to extraordinary people or historical movements. It is something any of us can begin to live together in the communities where we already are.

The expressions are different, but the same relational Pattern keeps appearing. It is the Ancient Blueprint I have followed throughout my journey. And I now understand that these different expressions are not isolated from one another. They are already part of a larger whole, even when the people and communities expressing them remain disconnected.

The Pattern is not something I need to create. It is already alive all around me and within and among all of us. The Love, relationships, and capacity to transform our communities are already present, woven into the lives of people who may not see how deeply we belong to one another.

We do not need to create the whole. We need to recognize it, reconnect its separated parts, and begin living from the wholeness that is already there.

Go to Discovery 10: The Whole Community is Already Here