Cross-walk, below… Backstory, here… Over a decade ago, I met Dr. Bill Benet at a Polarity Learning Community gathering where he shared his doctoral research on the Polarities of Democracy. I was immediately intrigued and deeply impressed by his work. In the intervening years, civic life in the U.S. was fraying at an accelerated pace [...]
Tom Atlee’s The Tao of Democracy was sitting on my bookshelf alongside several other Tao-focused favorites. It had been a while. I remember when it first came out in the early 2000s feeling genuinely excited. I was deep in my exploration of Eastern philosophy at the time and had just completed another iteration of my [...]
From: American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress,” by Wesley Lowery Lowery, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist implicitly discusses polarities (“conundrums” or “tensions”) underlying our common conceptions of racism by probing recent surges in white-supremacist violence. The central premise of “Whitelash” is “a pull back on the rope”: “Each step toward a more [...]
Created as a nonprofit social change think tank in 2017, the Institute for the Polarities of Democracy joins the tools and processes of decades of polarity approach development with the basic principles of democracy drawn from centuries of literature about freedom and governance under one unifying Polarities of Democracy theory, which the Institute uses to [...]
Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II Army Talks. The series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers” -- the topic for the week March 24, 1945 was “FASCISM!” The War [...]
A special invitation just went out to key political and policy influencers from government, non-profit, academia, and think-tanks for a May 13th workshop entitled: From Polarized to Optimized. We only had space for 30 people -- so if you didn't get an invitation and are experiencing FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), Fear not! We’re exploring ways to [...]
(Portions of the text below is taken from an article by William Benet, PhD, Suzanne Rackl, MM, CFRE, CFRM and Cliff Kayser, MSHR, MSOD, PCC) In 2017, the Institute for Polarities of Democracy was established as a Washington, DC-based nonprofit organization to promote and advance the Polarity Thinking theory of Dr. Barry Johnson and the Polarities of Democracy [...]
I love and highly recommend Richard Rohr and his work at the Center for Action and Contemplation (https://cac.org/). He lives and talks polarities and is a frequent visitor to my gratitude journal. In a recent post, he talked about the polarity of Action AND Contemplation -- and about “and”!: "The most important word in our [...]
Umm. OK. Check this out… A new book, titled “Empirical Paradox, Complexity Thinking and Generating New Kinds of Knowledge” by Dr. Bruce West, a senior scientist at the Army Research Office, uses mathematical modeling to address why thinking in terms of either/or outcomes means the inevitability of another world war. (JULY 23, 2019 by U.S. Army [...]
Many writers now say we’re in code blue, and we need a blueprint to revive American Democracy. In his Washington Post August 4th review of two books Carlos Lazoda highlights how in the weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the muse of the death-of-democracy bookshelf began expanding – and not focused exclusively on Trump. He says, [...]