Peer2Politics

New Age transpersonalism leans toward a restrictive non-relational spirituality because of its historical affirmation of individualism and transcendence. Relational spirituality (which is central to the emerging participatory-paradigm) swims against strong and popular currents in New Age-transpersonal thinking, belief, and practice which tend to see spirituality as an individual, personal, ?inner‘ pursuit (often) into Eastern/Oriental non-dualism …

* Essay: Par Cum Pari. Notes on the Horizontality of Peer to Peer Relationships in the Context of the Verticality of a Hierarchy of Values. Michel Bauwens. In: Pursuing the Common Good: How Solidarity and Subsidiarity Can Work Together. Fourteenth Plenary Session, 1-6 May 2008. Acta 14, eds Margaret S. Archer and Pierpaolo Donati. Vatican …

P2P starts with the requirement to treat every other human as a peer with different but equal potential to contribute to a common good.

“We live in an age of profound disruption. Global crises, such as finance, food, fuel, water, resource scarcity and poverty challenge just about every aspect of society. Yet, this disruption also brings the possibility of profound personal, societal and global renewal. We need to stop and ask: Why do we collectively create results nobody wants? What keeps us locked into the old ways of operating? And what can we do to transform these root issues that keep us trapped in the patterns of the past?

The spirit of society as a collective Buddha will require more than just the self-organizing tendency toward increasing complexity between the parts of a technologically distributed system of actors and institutions. It will require real human beings to make the inter-subjective bonds of soulful compassion and mutual understanding through empathy. Realizing the power and wealth of the Buddha among and between us will require a deep connection to one another, an unbreakable bond of love and trust that now only our closest relationships can give us within the competitive system of capitalism.

A new society could arise on the same technological base that is now still predominantly destroying the social bonds. The digital networks might be the prime catalysts in the transformation from today’s consumer society into what he calls a ‘society of contribution’. This is a strongly recommended interview to get to know the otherwise difficult …

Postmodernism announced the death of the subject, but recent developments in literature, philosophy and political agency suggest that it is alive and kicking as ever. Not in form of the modern Cartesian ego though and also not in denial of all the subjectivity-disrupting forces that postmodern theory pointed out. It returns with a great leap of faith, in a fragile moment of intersubjective trust and reveals characteristic traits that call for another vernacular, one that this webzine has come to describe as metamodern.[i]