Think, write, teach, implement. That is the chain of development to share knowledge and wisdom with others. Hermetic writers may one day reach many people, but today a writer, in order to be effective, must be able to share that wisdom publically. Today, “publically” means to share it with millions of people in the course of only a few weeks.
For myself the “thinking part” that initiated my pursuit of social sustainability began when I was in Viet Nam as a First Lieutenant in the Medical Services Corp, 58th Medical Battalion, Long Binh Post, ’68-69. Every week I would read the latest edition of the Army’s “Stars and Stripes” newspaper that contained articles about the peace demonstrations by students across America. I wondered why the Constitution did not offer a legitimate mechanism for protest by the public. I wondered how a democratic society could survive social change when its democratic political institutions were not adaptable to change.
I kept a very loose journal of my notes from what I read and my thoughts about those topics. But it was not until ’72 that I discovered those notes during a move from the city to our small country farm. Flashback! Questions of the war and the protests welled up like an abundant artesian well. Was there a valid need for a legitimate process for public protest and for more direct citizen participation in the legislative process to show their preferences by weighting their choices for the options?
As I began to work over those notes using some basic literary research on the topic of democracy and related subjects, I realized that the forms of democracy that had developed in nations over the last 250 years were not well developed of sufficiently evolved to remain in existence for many centuries. That is, they did not have a structure that allowed for their adaptation over time, to learn from successes and from mistakes. Huh? More research.
Decades later I read a book, “Action Science,” by Chris Argyris, Robert Putnam and Diana McLain Smith, that described “learning organizations.” It became obvious from related reading that adaptability was paramount to survival and ongoing existence for any species, and that it could actually be built into organizational structures. Juxtapose that insight with the awareness of institutionalized democracies in any nation that are based on their original organizational documents, and you will come to the same conclusion as I did — all 21st century democracies will fail. Now what?