How to Create a Unique Self Symphony

In Evolutionary Church, we have talked about it: The Politics of Evolutionary Love.

So, let’s get real.

How do we create that Politics?

Do you want to know what love is?

Love not merely as a saccharin emotion on a Valentine’s Day Card, but love as the driving force of the evolutionary process of all that is?

Love that transforms not only ourselves but also our world and culture and creates social miracles in its wake?

CIW President Dr. Marc Gafni and Academic Director Dr. Zak Stein have written a great book called Towards a New Politics of Evolutionary Love: Unique Self Symphonies, The Democratization of Enlightenment, and Other Social Miracles that is to be published soon. Read an excerpt of the unedited draft here that gives you an answer to these questions.

The core of the Politics of Evolutionary Love is the Unique Self Symphony and the core of the Unique Self Symphony is both self-organization and Unique Self:

“One of the core ideas behind the new politics of outrageous love is enabling self-organization at the level of human culture. So we must ask, what enables self-organization at the level of human culture? The answers is clear and in keeping with both the best of what we know about evolutionary theory and the best of our ideas for political and personal Enlightenment: the catalyst of self-organization in human socio—cultural systems is the Unique Self. Paradoxically, this means that the “shape” every human needs to assume in order to contribute to the creation of a healthy social organism is unique. Strange as it may sound, a just and healthy society needs to “socially engineer” for uniqueness, especially the institutions that shape human personalities and self-understandings: schools, news media, entertainment industries, computer technologies industries, etc. The whole social system would be like an incubator for uniqueness.

Of course, this does not entail creating a society overrun with narcissists, quite the contrary. Recall the paradox of sameness and uniqueness. A just and healthy society would also instill much that was universal, such as promoting schools where everyone learns to read and do basic math. Likewise, everyone would be beholden to a system of laws, drafted through deliberative democratic procedures, which institutes a fair and safe system of basic social structures. Nevertheless, these social structures would be arranged to ensure everyone the freedom to uniquely navigate the space of social possibilities and to uniquely express the common heritages and cultures. This is unlike the “standardized differentiation” of post-modernism, where the over-emphasis on shallow differences acts to quell and stifle the complexity of authentic uniqueness. Legal systems and organizational structures can be created with thousands of differences and categories (think of how many different ways there are to file your taxes), and yet these can still be used to wrongly categorize and misleadingly classify (as in when huge companies hide money that should be taxed using simple loop-holes). Below we further discuss the organizational forms, legal codes, and economic practices (Lower-Right quadrant elements) that enable Unique Collaboratives and Cooperatives.

The new politics of outrageous love aims to create Integral social structures that liberate uniqueness and thrive on leveraging it.”