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Dropping Knowledge, an innovative organization dedicated to bringing about social change through a global dialogue, asked American Environics to partner with them in analyzing different theories of social change and to define the most effective role they can play in that process.
Our first step was to create a comprehensive audit on the evolution of values that details how values are changing, what those changes are in reaction to, and what kinds of opportunities those changes create. The audit identifies the complex and often contradictory values that evolve as a society undergoes the dramatic cultural, economic and religious changes of modernization. Today's postscarcity societies have created new and unprecedented longing for postmaterial desires, expressed positively through ecological concern, spiritual exploration and individual freedom, and negatively through isolation, reactive religious fundamentalism and Social Darwinism. Recognizing that social change strategies that ignore or swim against these trends simply will not succeed, we advised Dropping Knowledge to help channel postmaterialist desires for fulfillment into postmodern social values.
The most effective role an organization can play in fulfilling postmaterialist needs is that of a pre-political affiliative community — whether that community is a church, gardening club, political movement or parenting support group. A successful pre-political affiliative community must meet postmodern psychological needs for status, belonging and fulfillment. These groups often play the role of a "transformative community." A transformative community provides a coherent ideology and agenda to its members based on desired social values, as well as a practice that allows members to exercise these values. These groups and communities create affiliative identities, model desired worldviews and practices, and lead to desired politics as entailments of their members' shared worldviews.
In order to both create social change and serve postmaterialist needs, Dropping Knowledge can assume the role of such a transformative community, in a way that is consistent with Dropping Knowledge's practice of encouraging change through questioning (by soliciting questions about the world from its members). This practice is a perfectly natural extension of postmodern values and theories of social change. We introspect by posing questions to ourselves, and we express empathy by asking them of others. We learn about other cultures through questioning. We explore, and accept, certainty and uncertainty through questioning. If used in the correct way, questions are a powerful tool for expressing our values and encouraging social change. In order to strengthen its connection to its members and assume the role of a transformative community, we encouraged Dropping Knowledge to further embrace and develop a transformative, values-based practice of questioning. By urging its members to ask questions that can change the world, Dropping Knowledge can transform itself and society.
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