Part 3 (Final): From Critical Theory to Civic Renewal

How One Former Progressive Learned to Move from Division to Unity.

Nov 19, 2025

NOTE TO READER:
Part Two ended with a simple but challenging truth: love becomes real only when it is made practical. Feelings by themselves cannot heal a fractured society; affection without form dissolves under the pressures of fear, power, and polarization. What we began to see is that the work of reconnection—of rebuilding a culture founded on trustworthy connections —requires more than insight or empathy.

It requires shared habits, disciplines, and moral commitments that anchor love in daily life -- the relational competencies that allow us to live together without coercion and to build a society that thrives and endures across differences.

Part 1: From Captivity to Clarity: Rediscovering the Soul of Liberation
Part 2: From Clarity to Communion: Beyond the Culture of Separation
Part 3: From Communion to Co-Creation: Birthing the Symbiotic Age

Part 3: From Communion to Co-Creation: Birthing the Symbiotic Age

The Relational Infrastructure of a Free Society – Virtue and Shared Trust

The word “love” has been so broadly used that it may seem superficial and clichéd to speak of a society that has love at its foundation – unless there is a way that love can be applied tangibly and practically in everyday life. My 40 years’ experience organizing diverse communities at the grassroots level has shown me that virtue —virtuous habits, discipline, and shared responsibility – is the secret sauce that makes love real in the public square.

For centuries, we’ve treated virtue as private sentiment, failing to recognize it as a pillar of civic infrastructure—another inheritance of the Enlightenment’s shift from transcendence to technology, and from relationship to control.

Although every society depends on visible infrastructure—roads, bridges, technologies—its true foundation is invisible. It is relational before it is physical, built from the virtues that sustain trust: the habits of the heart that form a people’s character.

Virtue is not merely personal morality; it is relational architecture—the way a people remain free without external control. When virtue collapses, society doesn’t become liberated; it becomes ungovernable, and power concentrates in the hands of the few.

Have you ever wondered why we’ve become a society of endless rules, and ever-expanding regulations –yet all the while trust is eroding?

A culture that loses virtue must inevitably replace inner self-governance with external systems of surveillance, law, and coercion. This is why the loss of shared moral formation is not just a religious issue—it is a civic emergency. When a society no longer teaches self-governance, it also loses the capacity for collective governance.

Without virtue, law becomes legalized domination and belonging is reduced to a brand—an identity we display rather than a community we live. The modern conflation of freedom with autonomy—no one can tell me what to do—betrays a more profound misunderstanding. True freedom is not freedom from responsibility, but freedom for responsibility—the capacity to respond to life’s demands in a loving and creative way. Virtue cultivates that capacity. It is the difference between a culture of self-restraint and one that breeds grievance and resentment.

When we can no longer say “no” to what harms us, we lose the ability to say “yes” to what heals us.

That is why love and discipline, compassion and courage cannot be separated—they form the living symmetry of freedom.

Virtue, in this sense, is relational competence—the embodied wisdom that allows us to live together without domination. It aligns moral life with the deep structure of the cosmos: an order that cannot be imposed collectively but must be discovered, individual by individual, community by community.

Every lasting civilization has understood this. Aristotle called it arete—the excellence that allows one to fulfill their purpose. The Hebrew prophets called it justice—a right relationship with God and neighbor. Christian tradition calls it agape—love expressed through fidelity and self-giving.

In each case, virtue is the bridge between inner formation and outer freedom. It is how personal transformation translates into civic coherence. Yet this simple truth seems to have been bypassed by most contemporary movements for social change. Each seems to be looking for – or has already found – the material, structural or technological fix to be fixated on. The problem is that our crisis is not primarily economic or political but moral and spiritual—a collapse of virtue formation.

As the machinery of modern civilization runs faster, without the “lubrication” of virtue and shared trust, its moral bearings wear down. When trust collapses, every institution built upon it fractures as well. The ties that once bound citizens, neighbors, and nations weaken, and systems strain under the weight of moral disconnection.

We try to engineer solutions from the top down—through policy, reform, or technology—but no structure can substitute for the shared trust that holds a people together.

If the Culture of Separation fragments society into warring tribes, the Culture of Connection rebuilds it from the inside out, and from the bottom up —one act of faithfulness, courage, and generosity at a time. Virtue is the “currency” of relationship—the thread that holds a free society together.

Practicing Symbiotic Kinship: Bridging the Silos

Once I understood that virtue was love made visible, I began to see that the only way to prove it was to live it. Ideas could inspire, but only shared practice could transform. So I set out to test this truth in the place I knew best—my own community.

In Reno, we began experimenting with what we called Symbiotic Circles—small groups uniting unlikely partners: Main Street shopkeepers with nonprofits. Pastors with environmentalists. Ranchers with sustainability advocates. Bankers and farmers at the same table. Liberals and conservatives solving real problems together—local economies, neighbor networks, food systems, community resilience. None of it came from ideology or theory; it emerged naturally from trust.

What we built in Reno was the opposite of identity-based social engineering—it was moral ecology, where relationships generated structure from the ground up.

These circles brought together people who, inside the Culture of Separation, were never supposed to meet, let alone cooperate. Yet something extraordinary happened when they did. Once people stood shoulder to shoulder in shared service, labels dissolved. Suspicion gave way to familiarity and trust. Strangers discovered they were really neighbors.

We didn’t erase our differences; we transformed them into gifts—unique perspectives that helped everyone see the whole picture. No one had to convert to a new ideology or agree on a political narrative. Shared purpose overrode conflicting beliefs. Connection itself became our natural way of being.

As people worked together, ideology lost its grip. They began to see one another not through the filter of opposing identities but as kin.

The community itself became a living organism—united not by uniformity but by mutual care and shared responsibility.

What we witnessed in Reno wasn’t an anomaly. It reflected the same relational geometry that has guided healthy human societies for millennia: family → circle → village → region → civilization—each scale mirroring the same law of care.

In a world accustomed to imposing change by force, here was change emerging through relationship, through connection and collaboration. Our small experiment revealed something vast: a pattern of civilization patiently waiting to be remembered and lived again.

What we built was more than a network; it was a living reflection of an inner transformation already underway. I came to call it “fractal community empowerment”, as the inner renewal expresses itself in the outer world. The rebirth of civilization begins the moment ideology gives way to intimacy—when the structures of love we build outwardly mirror the reconciliation already begun in the heart.

But intimacy alone is not enough; it needs a deeper pattern to grow from, a blueprint that holds love and freedom together across time.

Beyond Ideology: Reawakening the Ancient Blueprint

Looking back, I’m grateful for my progressive roots. They gave me moral passion and compassion for the marginalized. Yet they also confined me within a narrow frame—teaching me to critique and resist, but not to create or renew.

To move forward, I had to integrate progressivism’s longing for justice with what it had forgotten: transcendence, family, faith, and the ordinary holiness of community.

I had to recover what ideology had exiled—the sacred, the local, the relational, the real.

Today I no longer see myself as Left or Right, but instead part of what I call Symbiotic Culture — a living network of people practicing wholeness and mutual care in every sphere of life. If critical theory taught us to deconstruct, Symbiotic Culture teaches us to rebuild. If ideology divides, relationship restores.

The age of deconstruction has done its work; the postmodern effort to dismantle meaning has reached its end. We’ve taken the old order apart—now we must learn to build again. Our task now is not to unmake what is wrong but to remember together what makes us whole.

In my book, I call this cultivating a “sane and sacred center” where we rise above the battlefield of tribes and ideas, and remember an older, sacred design—what I call the Ancient Blueprint for human flourishing. While held in “captivity” by ideology, we’ve forgotten it, but we never lost it; the Blueprint has remained hidden, waiting to be lived again.

As someone who saw wealth extracted from poor neighborhoods in San Diego and watched Reno “colonized” by big-box stores, I understand the critique of Western civilization and the distortions of capitalism that feed separation. But I also learned the danger of rejecting the good with the bad.

We are not called to destroy the old world but to redeem it—through love, virtue, and reconnection.

That, I believe, is how regeneration will be embraced by the next generation: not as ideology, but as the daily practice of symbiotic kinship. That practice is our redemption, as we shift our energy from fighting one another to building together.

In the meantime (and a mean time it is), the Culture of Separation is dominating the airwaves, exhorting us to cast blame on some “other” while diverting attention from our own – and our tribe’s – unquestioned beliefs that cause separation.

As our human crisis deepens, it’s important to remember that the same logic that fractures hearts also fractures nations. The divisions I once carried within myself now shape the world around us. The spirit of separation that once formed my inner world now structures our outer one.

What I discovered in my own story—how ideology can masquerade as moral clarity—has become the story of our age. The sickness of the soul has become the de facto structure of society. And once sickness becomes structure, it takes on a life of its own—reshaping culture, politics, and power. The soul sickness I am talking about is the absence of the Transcendent; progressivism – being based solely on the material world and material solutions – has been missing the point.

The progressive project that once promised liberation has calcified into bureaucracy – the rules and regulations I mentioned earlier that proliferate when trust is absent. What began as a moral awakening hardened into managerial orthodoxy—a cultural revolution waged through language, institutions, and social pressure. Its mirror image rose on the Right: a populist counter-revolution vowing to topple the old revolution while imitating its logic in reverse.

Each political side claims to save us from the other, yet both feed the same machine—a managed society where meaning is replaced by control.

These polarized extremes share one belief in common: that power, not virtue, holds the world together. But no society can remain free once virtue is displaced by control.

The Quiet Revolution of Our Times: The Return of Moral Self-Governance

Across generations, thinkers from diverse worldviews have wrestled with the same dilemma—how to balance freedom and care without collapsing into tyrannical control.

In America, President Ronald Reagan warned that dependence on centralized power corrodes the human spirit; he rightly resisted the bureaucratic state but offered little beyond the ideas of limited government (which has not yet happened!) and “leaving it to the free market.” Half a world away, Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne—founder of Sri Lanka’s Sarvodaya movement and their national network of 5,000 communities—began as a socialist reformer of governments and ended up promoting what is now called a parallel polis approach.

As a teacher of spiritual and grassroots community self-governance, Dr. Ari demonstrated that moral development—not markets or ideology—is the true foundation of freedom.

President Reagan named the problem; Dr. Ari modeled the solution: people governing themselves through shared virtue.

In Dr. Ari’s work, the progressive longing for justice and compassion for the marginalized and the conservative insistence on limited government converge in a new frame—one embodied in the parallel polis rather than trapped in old binaries.

Funny—as my friend Steve Bhaerman likes to say, whether you call it the Mommy State of the Left or the Daddy State of the Right, either way you end up with Big Brother. In defaulting to “parental control”, we never learn to become the self-governing adults that comprise a wise body politic and a thriving people.

What we face now is Caesar’s old maxim—divide et impera, divide and rule—repackaged for the modern age. Our two-party system has hardened into dueling oligarchies: mirror images that feed on conflict, battle for control, and keep citizens perpetually at war with one another.

The culture war isn’t an accident—it’s a management strategy. Polarization has become the business model of modern politics, keeping us divided so elites can preserve control. Power and profit have become ends in themselves, and both sides now depend on manufacturing enemies to sustain allegiance.

Yet beneath that noise lives another America—and another Europe (and worldwide)—decent, weary, and morally awake.

In the face of partisan capture and ideological extremes, a moral middle endures: citizens who long for integrity over ideology, for relationship rather than rage. They are not passive but patient—the quiet strength every democracy needs to be reborn.

The alternative to Big Brother is a bigger brotherhood—neighbors rebuilding trust and cooperation at the local level; decentralizing power to the grassroots; and replacing dependence on programs with mutual aid, enterprise, and virtue in action.

We don’t have to wait.

Begin now—reclaiming piece by piece the functions we once ceded to distant systems, each circle becoming a small parallel polis.

The moral self-governance we need has been hiding in plain sight for nearly 250 years. America’s founders—diverse in belief, from devout Christianity to Deism—were united in one conviction: a free people can remain free only if they consent to a higher moral order. They did not establish a state religion, but they assumed a moral-religious republic rooted in a theistic view of nature and man.

What bound “many” into “one” was not doctrine but Natural Law—Providence’s moral architecture mirrored in E Pluribus Unum. Benjamin Franklin saw it clearly: freedom without virtue collapses into domination; even the most enlightened system fails without a people disciplined by conscience.

Yet in recent years, dismissing the Founders as nothing more than “slaveholding white men” has stripped away this shared foundation. In place of moral cohesion, we now have moral confusion; the fluidity of trust has given way to a thicket of regulations; and virtue signaling has overtaken virtue itself.

This is what we must awaken to, all sides together: we are no longer living in a free society but in a managed one. That awakening is just the beginning—it is the threshold of something more intimate and alive.

The next revolution is relational—hearts reorganizing how life is lived together, love organized into practice. This is the quiet revolution of our time—the work of birthing the Symbiotic Age.

Symbiotic Culture is not a reform project or a dialogue initiative. Unlike movements that seek to mend the existing order or aim merely to make us more tolerant, the Symbiotic approach builds a parallel society—one that models the future within the shell of the present. It is not about moderating difference but about re-weaving moral coherence, building shared life grounded in love and virtue. We are not negotiating with the old system; we are replacing its illogical logic with love.

The Architecture of Renewal: Building the Symbiotic Age From the Ground Up

The collapse of trust in our institutions is no accident; it exposes a deeper captivity. Competing narratives—each serving its own power structure—keep us distracted from the one truth that matters: our shared humanity.

Nothing truly human or spiritually alive is born in the halls of Washington, Brussels, or Davos. Renewal always begins from below—from people bound by love rather than ideology, from relationships that cultivate courage, trust, and resilience.

The future does not belong to the ideological but to the relational—those who stand in love without bending to lies, who create what politics cannot, and who rebuild what has been lost. Their strength is not outrage but steadiness, not slogans but service.

Our task is clear:

• Recover the Transcendent
• Ground our lives in Love
• Revive civic virtue, family, and neighborhood
• Reweave trust-based community
• Claim grassroots responsibility
• Weave regional Network Commons

We are not waiting for permission. We are not asking the national or global oligarchies to set us free. We are already free—because we choose to live as people practicing Symbiotic Kinship and mutual benefit.

And so the work begins—not someday, not after the next election, but now. In every town and every nation, with whoever is willing to begin again. Renewal is not waiting for a mandate; it starts wherever love accepts responsibility.

What I once sought in ideology, I have found through lived practice. The more I surrendered the need to be right, the more reality revealed itself as relational—ordered, yet woven by love, not will.

Civilization renews itself each time we remember that truth without love divides, and love without truth loses coherence—but together, they rebuild the world.

When I look at our fractured world—movements debating who belongs and who must be canceled, systems collapsing under the weight of brittle ideologies—I do not despair. I see a turning. I see labor pains. Something ancient is struggling to be born again.

That is what I mean by birthing the Symbiotic Age. It is not a theory to debate but a pattern to embody—a return to the Ancient Blueprint already beneath our feet, waiting to be lived. Yet no architecture of renewal can stand unless we confront the deeper crisis beneath it: we have forgotten the fundamental purpose of civilization.

Society’s “Come to Jesus” Moment: Recovering Love as the Purpose of Civilization

“Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.” — George Santayana.

That warning names the danger of our time. Whether political, religious, or cultural, we lose our way the moment we forget that love—not power or purity—is the aim.

Fanaticism wears many faces: progressive, conservative, nationalist, religious, even spiritual. It appears whenever conviction overtakes compassion, and the need to be right eclipses the call to love. Renewal begins with remembering who we are.

Our primary identity is not political but transcendent.

We are not first defined by Left or Right, but we are sons and daughters of the living God.

Every claim to moral superiority—whether ideological, religious, or cultural—feeds the same illusion: my tribe is better than your tribe.

Symbiotic Kinship calls us back to remembrance—to the simple truth that belonging does not require uniformity of thought, just agreement on a Loving Presence.

For me, this realization came slowly and painfully. I used to live in resistance against so many things. Against corruption and greed. Against the blindness I saw in religion and politics, against Western civilization itself, capitalism, patriarchy, America, Christianity, white males, and sometimes even faith. It all came from love for what I felt was being lost, and only now do I see that love was buried under anger.

Over time, I learned that I couldn’t truly build anything while still standing in resistance to it. I couldn’t create what I continued to condemn.

Many still feel this on both the Left and the Right—a fatigue of fighting, a quiet despair that comes from being perpetually “against.” That realization was not abstract for me; it cut to the core of how I had been living.

Share Symbiotic Culture

From Resistance to Renewal: Learning to Build from Love

What began to change me was recognizing the grief beneath the anger.

When I finally allowed myself to grieve—not just to rage at the world’s suffering but to feel it—something opened. Through time and through real community, that grief began to transmute into compassion. My anger softened into a desire to connect. To see that we are all human beings, all suffering, all yearning for peace and for the flourishing of our families. That was the turning point: realizing that love doesn’t mean avoiding suffering and brokenness, but embracing them.

As St. Paul wrote, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” True change comes not from resisting what we hate, but from creating what we love—and in this networked age, connecting the good is the natural amplification of what St. Paul was describing.

That inner transformation eventually reshaped how I saw systems, politics, and economics themselves. Rather than trying to force others to agree with our ideas about regeneration, new economies, or post-capitalism, we begin from the organic reality on the ground—showing up in our families, neighborhoods, and local communities and economies.

Coming from this state of Love doesn’t mean forgetting about injustice or inequality, or ignoring the growing chasm between rich and poor that signals civilization’s decline.

It means recovering from the secular belief that the world can be healed primarily through material changes or political power.

I didn’t stop caring about injustice. But I gave up believing that systems alone could save us. That realization led me, twenty years ago, to begin building symbiotic networks—around the economy, food, neighborhoods, arts, and culture—a living parallel polis, a virtuous economy independent of the existing system yet still interconnected with it.

In rediscovering love as structure, I saw how Jesus and the early Christians lived this truth not as ideology, but as a way of life through economy, community, and care. That’s why the way of Jesus is so radical and enduring: he and the early Christian communities didn’t try to reform or overthrow the Roman Empire, but built covenantal, loving communities in each village, built on mutual care.

We must follow in those same footsteps—with a new heart and a transformed mind.

That is how the family becomes the true nucleus of love and belonging, not a degenerate tool of “the System.”

It may sound strange, but I had to learn to affirm the obvious in today’s toxic political environment: it’s okay that I am a white male. It’s OK that I love and cherish my family—it’s the foundation of civilization. But it is also part of a larger, voluntary, collective effort to expand that love outward—to the neighbor, to the stranger, to those who are not like me—naturally and organically.

It’s okay that I am a Christian and love Jesus Christ, and that I want to work alongside others—religious and non-religious alike—for civic renewal. It’s okay that I am a businessman and own a home. It’s OK and necessary to work under the broadest tent possible—to include conservatives, progressives, secularists, religious, and seekers alike.

The point is not who is included or excluded, but whether we remember why we are building at all: to serve love, not ideology.

From circles to networks, from networks to regions, from regions to societies, the pattern of renewal remains the same: love expands by inclusion, not exclusion. True renewal begins when we reconnect across difference—when conservatives and progressives, secularists and seekers, people of every faith and no faith at all rediscover what unites us at the deepest level.

Symbiotic Culture is not against anything except falsehood. It exists to heal the fragmentation that fanaticism produces by re-centering every form of belonging in the Transcendent Source of all life.

When we live from that center, even our smallest acts of faithfulness become revolutionary. They restore coherence where ideology breeds confusion, and communion where politics breeds fear.

In the midst of polarization and separation, we can already see signs of this reweaving taking place. Across towns and cities, people, nonprofits, faith groups, businesses, and local governments are stepping up to meet today’s crises. Again and again, leaders and citizens sense that a deeper level of collaboration is now required. These scattered efforts are not isolated sparks but “islands of coherence” — vibrant initiatives that reveal a new world being born.

Symbiotic Kinship recognizes these islands as kin and begins weaving them into a greater whole. Rather than competing for attention or resources, Symbiotic Networks serve as connective tissue—a delivery system for “connecting and weaving the good.”

They provide a living infrastructure that amplifies the kinship already forming in our communities.

If love is to become structure again, it must take form through the networks already awakening in our midst.

And these are not abstractions; they represent real people worldwide:

• Faith-based and spiritual groups that cultivate moral depth and shared compassion
• Charities and social change efforts that meet urgent human needs
• Civic engagement and bridge-building movements that heal polarization
• Regenerative culture and ecological initiatives that restore the land
• Faith-based creation care networks that embody stewardship
• Purpose-driven small businesses that anchor local resilience
• New economy and commons movements that experiment with shared ownership
• Localization, bioregional, and Cosmolocal networks that rebuild place-based trust
• Pro-democracy and civil society groups that strengthen participation
• Arts, culture, and creative community projects that reawaken imagination

These are the early signs of a new civilization being born—not through ideology, but through love organized into practice. Each represents a vital organ in the body of a healed society, waiting to be connected.

This is how civilizations are reborn: when communion deepens into co-creation—when the love we rediscover becomes the shared life sturdy enough to carry it. When we remember who we are, the world begins to heal.

The work now is simple and sacred: to weave the world back together—one act of courageous love, one shared table of fellowship, one circle of trust, one network at a time—each becoming its own parallel polis, all rising together across the world.

Thank you for reading. Let me know what your thoughts and feelings are by replying to this message.