Demonstrating Any Alternative At All, Composing, 19/07/2018

Another quick meditation. I polished off about half of my official review of The Quest for Prosperity over the last couple of days (as well as the draft of a policy paper I’m writing for the think tank). That’s why I didn’t have time to write a blog entry for Wednesday.

One of the leftover ideas from Raphael Sassower’s dense yet accessible book regards the different ways we try to create new forms of life. Now, this is a major concept in my own political philosophy – the utopian drive to build a new society.

The Occupation left Wall Street, but it never failed. It's still
succeeding, because Occupy was the uprising that generated the
ethical energy of anti-oligarchical politics in the 2010s.
Art by Eric Drooker

I’ve mostly been concentrating my historical eye on those creative revolutionary processes that have had real success. Maybe they’ve overthrown a government or two, like the Arab Spring or the Maidan protests. Maybe they’ve inspired an entire generation – on average – to reorient their deepest ethical and moral beliefs about what kind of political economy we want in our society.

Sassower, in a few remarks late in chapter one, makes me wonder what I can learn from the unsuccessful cases.

We’ve got to be careful about how we understand success and failure here, though. Remember that success is more complicated than having a succinct list of demands that are fulfilled. That was the complaint I often remember levied at Occupy – how to make change without specific demands.

But we’re talking about a social movement – not an election campaign or a collective bargaining session. So a utopian uprising’s focus must be general as it generates. The uprising is the social movement in embryo – the flurry of energy that focusses people’s thought and minds, and dedicates their lives, to the hard work of actually changing society.

The hard work of transitioning Tunisia to democracy, or overthrowing Bashar Assad. The hard work of restoring social democratic principles to governance in a globalized civilization and economy.

Actual material success in a specific task isn’t necessary to whether a particular utopian impulse is a success. It’s also difficult to tell when such a project is a material success. The Tunisian democratic government, for example, is still only a few years old and still embattled. Is a democratic Tunisia that lasts only a few more years a success?

Let me put this to you, to demonstrate that asking about persistence of an institution isn’t the right question here. Would you consider the Abbasid Caliphate a failure as a pluralistic society because it lasted only 800 years?

The energy of the uprising is not the same as the institutions people create with that energy. What remains when you bracket the material achievements of a social movement is the energy of the movement itself.

From one of the few long-term successful hippie commune farms.
The Stephen Gaskin Farm began as a community of radical utopian
Americans, who moved to Tennessee to drop out of industrialized
society. It still exists today as a scientific and political research
centre and charity. Its energy, creativity, and practical intelligence
continues to renew itself for more than four decades now.

If the energy of the movement, the revolutionary dedication and drive in a society – or at least a fairly significant number of people in it – is what matters, then we know what success and failure of a social movement is.

A social movement succeeds when the energy of its uprising is sustaining and renewing itself – when people join and contribute to its creative processes, as different contexts to do so appear. There is no point when a social movement has succeeded – that would imply that the movement is finished, and so no longer sustaining itself.

So the death of a social movement is its stoppage. Once people’s creative drive dies, the institutions that movement built immediately ossify and become authoritarian. Their only justification is their existence, which is no justification at all.

Now we have a conception of how to know the success or failure of a social movement on any scale. Success is sustaining its vibrance. Failure is dissipation.

I worked this out Wednesday night as I wrote this post, thinking about Sassower’s example of a failed, small-scale social movement – an experimental agrarian community. These are the farming communes to which frustrated Vancouver office workers retreat when the alienation of their corporate lives becomes too much for them.

That they go is a demonstration of their creative drive to develop a new way of life – a living demonstration that their old lives were obsolete. Not many get too far, though.

The utopian energy of their small group’s social uprising against the constraints and blandness of corporate life isn’t strong enough to overcome even their first challenge. When everyone arrives at the experimental farming commune and they realize that none of them know how to grow food.

So What Is “Pragmatic Radicalism” Anyway? Composing, 03/08/2016

The wonderful photo SERRC published with my last piece.

Last week, I published a new essay at the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. I thought of the idea in response to an essay by my colleague and long-standing argument partner Steve Fuller, “Prolegomena to the Deep Sociology of Brexit.”

Now that I’ve returned from the wild woods of central Quebec,* I wanted to start the month with a breakdown of that essay – so you can see what I’m doing with it, and how that work expresses my newly-formulated mission statement as a writer and researcher.

* It was a very pleasant and necessary vacation, thank you, but I really am quite happy to be back in Toronto and returning to my work. More like my many works.

I’d say I learned two things from my time at this May’s Canadian Philosophical Association. 1) Progressive politics among academics lags far behind the actual activists developing new ideas, approaches, and outreach methods. This was more of a re-confirmation than a discovery. 

But most important was 2) There doesn’t really seem to be a place in the academic community for voices that aren’t affiliated with professorial positions in universities. I had a lot of very good conversations, but I was essentially an alien among this crowd. 

Even in seminars where my contributions went over well, some attendees appeared completely unable to process what I was – a researcher unaffiliated with a university who wasn’t at all jockeying for a university position anymore. Just someone here to share their research, able to write, publish, and speak on the same level as the university-based folk.

I had a guiding ideal of what I suppose
became pragmatic radicalism when
writing my last book, but I couldn't
get its publication out of academic
marginalization of high prices and
the catacombs of libraries.

So I’ve begun developing a brand for myself as a public intellectual whose institutional home is in activist communities and political parties. A blue-collar scholar, if you want to put it in a rap.** Part of that brand and identity is developing a philosophical language that addresses immediately relevant public issues while simultaneously crafting complex concepts.

** Please don’t do that. It would be terrible.

That’s what my “Pragmatic Radicalism” essay is. A work of philosophical creativity in response to an occasion. I mean ‘occasion’ in the sense of, “the event that occasioned this response.” An event in our public life of such a significance and complexity that it prompts a public work of philosophical reflection and creativity.

One thing that frustrated me about philosophy as a discipline, from the time I started work on the project that would be Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, was the disconnect of its creative thinking from the concerns of the world. 

In turbulent times like these, we need contributions to our politics that encourage thought – not thought instead of action, but thought that is one with action. Protest that generates policy. Creativity in harmony with activism.

I’m developing a new brand of blended philosophical research and creativity with worldly activism and social engagement. And my essay at the Reply Collective, “The Pragmatic Radicalism of the Multitude’s Power,” is both a sketch of what that writing style would be, as well as an example. 

How it’s an example I’ve already explained: a work of abstract philosophical creativity, produced on an occasion. But what’s the concept? What is pragmatic radicalism?

When I first floated the title to Fuller, he told me it sounded paradoxical. And that’s definitely part of its spark. A paradox – broadly speaking – is the juxtaposition of several ideas that don’t typically fit together. To me, there are two kinds of paradoxes. 

Vicious paradoxes confuse, frustrate, and arrest thought. But creative paradoxes let you work through a new way of thinking while you figure out the logic by which the juxtaposed ideas make sense together. A new harmony emerges from a dissonant collision.

Pragmatic radicalism is fundamentally about expanding
the realm of the conceivable in your society's public
conversations and thinking.

Pragmatic radicalism sounds paradoxical. Radicalism is a pure idealism, usually thought of as a refusal to compromise, the refusal to give up on anything but your opponents’ total capitulation. A radical’s hopes are usually so distant from the real world that their achievement seems impossible, but they’re committed to them totally anyway.

Pragmatism appears the precise opposite. You have ideals, but you’re prepared to accept compromise with opponents or askew allies – to make allies from opponents – to achieve some progress toward those ideals. Pragmatism is political realism, while radicalism is a refusal of the real’s resistance to your ideals.

Pragmatic radicalism embraces ideals, but also acknowledges and pushes against the resistance of the world as it is to achieve those ideals. It is the admission that practical achievement in politics can take other routes than compromise alone. 

Pragmatic radicalism is philosophical in that it develops new and revolutionarily different frameworks for our political and social institutions and relationships. It’s pragmatic in its resolute focus on material action to achieve those goals. Not compromise, but community organizing to bring these radical ideas to public discourse and make them seem ordinary.

Our current political climate is full of pragmatic radicalism, for both democratic and fascist ideals. One impressive achievement of the Trump campaign has been rapidly bringing ideals of white supremacism and strongman leadership to mainstream political discourse. Though it took much longer, UKIP has been successful in not only making Britain’s exit from the European Union popularly plausible, but apparently a coming reality.

More details at the website.

Thankfully, the Sanders campaign achieved a similar miracle in returning social democratic policy to America’s mainstream discourse – even embedding these ideas in the policy platform of the previously horrifyingly compromised Democratic Party. 

Most importantly, the Black Lives Matter movement has brought its radical critique of America’s police, court, and prison systems to the realm of mainstream plausibility. BLM has launched several concrete policy platforms for institutional reform, first the policing reform packages of Campaign Zero, and recently the larger policy framework of Movement 4 Black Lives.

The Arab Spring – and its ripples throughout the Arab world, as well as the refugee movements from the Syrian Civil War and Iraq’s war against ISIS – was similarly a movement of pragmatic radicalism. An explosive moment of democracy’s becoming conceivable in the Middle East. 

Communication – networked community organizing and cultivating social media communities – is the essential medium of pragmatic radicalism’s transformation of political possibilities. Practicing that communication of simultaneous advocacy and philosophical creativity is the task of the contemporary public intellectual. 

Maybe it won’t be the university or the academy that will product these thought leaders. It seems there’s a wider community of well-educated activists and organizers driving this model of politics and social transformation.

Maybe the occasional blue-collar scholar.

How Unions Fossilized in the Global Economy, Research Time, 10/02/2016

Right now, I’m the acting President of my electoral district’s New Democratic Party Association. I originally was the Vice-President, then President T-Boz got a contract working on the Bernie Sanders campaign in New Hampshire. 

So congratulations on the primary victory, T-Boz! Now, get back to Toronto and make me the Vice-President again.

But I want to talk today about an issue that’s very important to me as an NDP official: the slow, grinding crisis of labour unions as institutions. Canada’s big unions and their leadership are still powerful influences and voices in the NDP. That has its drawbacks (any old guard ossifies) and its benefits (activists aren’t allowed to forget the needs of working people).

Now, the strong influence that the union movement has had on the NDP has waned in recent years. Major union figures like Buzz Hargrove don’t have as much direct hold over NDP policy. The 2012 leadership convention was the first conducted by a one-member-one-vote system, and unions no longer had a block share of the vote. And the old guard candidate Brian Topp lost.

Violent clashes during the 2012 general strikes in Greece
against the government of the time and its austerity
policies. Not much has changed, as Greek people are
still victims of priorities that put corporate profits and
credit ratings above ordinary people.

Also, the party’s tent has had to widen, as the progressive left has expanded into ecological activism, anti-racism, and the movement for the liberation of indigenous people. 

Beyond their shrinking dominance in the party itself, the wider union movement has faced an existential problem from globalization. Unions have historically been able to win their victories by a hostage strategy. 

A strike and threats of a strike are, essentially, workers taking a business hostage. Normal production will return when our demands are met, at least in part. A general strike does the same to all the industries of a country.

But the effectiveness of strikes and labour action depends on one stable factor, which the globalization of the economy has completely disrupted: territory. The factory floor. The city streets. The national state. 

The Earth itself is now the terrain of the business world. This is why union movements are so easily neutered: workers can no longer hold a company hostage. If they take control of a factory floor, the company can simply move the factory to another city whose workers will take the deal on offer.

And the unionizing workers will find themselves wandering around a gutted, idle factory in a ghost town. 

Corporate power today surpasses state jurisdiction. Just as union action has become impotent, so have anti-trust laws. Although international governance institutions have grown over the last century, they aren’t nearly so powerful as sovereign states were a hundred years ago to break up trusts and cartels.

Most of the international organizations that come closest to being governments are either toothless to enforce workers’ rights, or are easily co-opted by oligarchic interests. I’m talking about organizations like the International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank, as well as treaties like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

So what’s happening here? Antonio Negri describes the process very well. Transnational corporations, international organizations, and treaties overcome territorially-defined state governments, but they don’t literally overcome governance. They become the structure of governance itself.

Organizations like unions are left behind because their activity still relies on a strictly defined territory to be effective. Governance in our era has been deterritorialized. The sphere of politics as a place autonomous from authority – the places where people can organize themselves and their movements – has disappeared.

The only place where it exists now is on the internet. As such, it can be everywhere, because the speed and interactivity of internet communication can make you think it’s a space without territory. Cyberspace. 

But we should never forget that our online political organizing does have a place. Idle No More, Occupy, and the Arab Spring didn’t just happen in the neighbourhoods of Canada, Zuccotti Park, and Tahrir Square. 

They all happened in the same place, the same territory. A server farm in Cupertino, California. A fragile place.

Save Us III: You Hide to Stay Alive, Research Time, 14/12/2015

I had to put Leo Strauss down for a while. Normally, I like to read a book all the way through, but two related things about Natural Right and History made me step back from it. 

One was that after the first two chapters that laid out some directly original political thinking, the book delved into exploring different epochs of Western political thinking. A long chapter on ancient Greek thinking had many ideas that were quite useful to me and my current project. Same with his chapter on Hobbes. But as I moved forward?

Is this small, unassuming man who you'd
barely notice if you bumped into him on
the street really a revolutionary? Maybe
his anonymity and the ease with which
you can dismiss him is a revolutionary's
greatest weapon.

Related to that is a curious idea about how Strauss actually wrote. The notion that Strauss is the hidden (in plain sight) Yoda of neoconservatism doesn't seem to fit with most of his writing and teaching, commentaries on the classics. 

But Strauss also wrote a book on esotericism in writing, and there's a curious comment about John Locke in Natural Right and History that fits with this. Basically, Locke looks horribly inconsistent in that he wrote many books that said the Christian books of revelation contained all the moral teaching you’d need.

Yet it also wrote the Treatises on Government, two books that justify liberal democracy, at least in his prototypical theory, with entirely material and practical grounding. Christ and the Christian God are nowhere to be seen.

So Strauss talks about this idea that, in politically turbulent times, it makes no sense to speak openly and frankly about your political views if they displease the ignorant / deceived masses or the state / rulers and military. 

You have to hide your true beliefs to avoid the fate of Socrates: arrested and executed for laughing in the face of popular morality and encouraging others to do so. Every open revolutionary faces the same danger: the consequences of the revolution’s failure. And most revolutions fail.

So philosophical texts that seek to change people's minds, causing a genuinely transformative social revolution, can’t do so explicitly. Readers will resist you when their views are directly challenged. And if the politically and militarily powerful of your society are directly challenged?

This weekend, I attended the JAYU Human Rights Film Festival as a representative of the Syria Film Festival. They closed this year's screenings with a film called Trials of Spring. It followed several women’s rights activists in Egypt, through the 2011 revolutions and their aftermath.

The main leader in focus was Hend Nafea. She took part in many protests against the government of Egypt: against Hosni Mubarak, the interim military government, Mohammad Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, and finally against Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Over those three years from the revolution until mid-2014, she set up organizations to provide legal aid to activists arrested by the regime, fight against a pervasive climate that permitted all intensities of violence against women. She was one of the most visible and important leaders of popular resistance to oppression from both the military and the Islamists.

An explicit revolution will always have enemies,
because you will have already declared from the start
that you actually are revolutionaries.

In 2014, the Egyptian courts, controlled by Sisi’s military government directly, sentenced her to life in prison, so had to flee to the United States. Nafea continues to advocate and network with others working toward a democratic Egypt.

She spoke her mind explicitly, and was punished for it, like millions of others across Arab and Persian societies after the 2011 revolutions. Only Morocco and Tunisia have secured anything like democracy. 

King Mohammad of Morocco was happy to transition to a constitutional monarchy, and Tunisia was lucky to have had a strong labour movement and a weak military. Everywhere else, there’s been crackdown and mass murder.

What would Strauss say? “See what you get?!” or something along those lines. Yet he was a revolutionary himself, apparently, without making a noise. His revolution would change the culture such that the autocracy would collapse naturally, without anyone knowing a thing. Before I can really understand what he means by this, I need to read more about esotericism, what kind of revolution this would be. 

I have to figure out how a person can look utterly inoffensive, and yet spread idea that constitute a genuine revolution. Until I can get my hands on some books about this idea, and where Strauss engages the idea itself – giving away his key – I feel like I won’t be able to understand precisely the meaning of Strauss himself.

Until then, there’s still plenty to learn about different aspects of political philosophy. Particularly, some of his ideas about Hobbes – who's important to the Utopias project in his own right – are quite illuminating. 

So if I may continue from the last post . . . 

A Poetry of Ideas, Composing, 30/10/2015

Lately, I’ve been writing a lot of posts about increasingly odd philosophy. Well, and Doctor Who reviews. But most of my posts are about odd philosophy. 

The last few weeks of posts sort through ideas I had while reading Natural Right and History by Leo Strauss, Spectres of Marx by Jacques Derrida, and relating many of the ideas in Derrida's book to the philosophical meaning of the Arab Spring. This is all reading related to my Utopias manuscript, and this book is going to be weird.

Why I'm writing a book so weird has to do with my position as a writer right now. Since I no longer work in the academy, I have nothing to lose. No tenure & promotion committee to disappoint, no editors forcing my work to fit a dull style for publication in locked-access journals.

My personal assistant Philthy
helps me write the blog.

I can do whatever I want. And I want to push philosophy as a writing style in new directions. There are two dominant styles of writing philosophy, generally speaking. 1) The academic style of the university-based research discipline. 2) The accessible but lightweight style of pop philosophy books.

If you see some of my work at the Review and Reply Collective, you can see that I'm working on a style that fits neither of these categories. Utopias is going to be a heavy book, dense with ideas. It’ll build those ideas from detailed arguments and illustrate them with allusions to historical events, political movements and events, works of philosophy, art, literature, television, cinema. 

At the same time, it’ll be written in a tone that invites the reader along for a strange ride. In a style that any reasonably intelligent person can follow. Kind of what I try to do on the blog.*

* I know I don't always succeed. That's the nice thing about a blog. You can try one style, it doesn't work, and then move on to another.

So what will these ideas turn into once they end up in the Utopias manuscript? The third and final part of the book will apply the first two sections’ trippy ideas about time, progress, revolution, and political ideals to several major problems in Western thinking today. 

A major task of this last third will be a critique of neoliberalism, liberal political philosophy more generally, modern Marxism, the injustices of capitalism, inequality, and libertarianism. And from that critique, it’ll build a positive program for social progrss. Needless to say, the style I’m working on for this book will do a lot of things at once.

For instance, here’s one chain of that critique of libertarianism that is springing from my reading these Derrida lectures. 

Derrida often writes creative philosophy around interpretive riffs several layers deep. In chapter five of Spectres of Marx, he builds a philosophical engine around Marx’s critique in The German Ideology of Max Stirner’s masterwork The Ego and His Own. Stirner’s philosophy revolves around the power of self-assertion. The force of the individual’s egoistic influence on the world is the essence of the human.

Marx offers a political critique of this hardcore individualism, a twisted reflection of the modern libertarian’s individualism. The assertion of irreducible selfhood as the primary force of meaning in the universe isn’t enough to get rid of the ghosts.

Ghosts, spectres. These are the primary forces in political activity. This is how Derrida reads Marx.** They’re the ghosts of the dead, lingering traces of injustice. In societies that haven’t known political violence on a mass scale in a while, these traces may be hard to understand.

** One of the many spectres of Marx, and one which is important to what I want to write.

That’s where the Arab Spring comes in. Not because it’s the central people’s revolution of my generation of humans, though that’s one reason why I’m including it in the book. 

The struggles of people rising up against their autocratic rulers. Those traces are the screams that will always escape the prison walls, that filter through cracks in the doors to become louder than ever.

What Will the Revolution Be in 2030? Jamming, 28/10/2015

I remember when the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011 happened, and the crackdown came down, I heard a lot of commentary. Chatter. The historical allusions were flying fast. 

Only one of them really made sense. As a Westerner, the hope for these revolutionary movements was that it would be 1776 or 1789 for Arab peoples rising up against their dictators and kings. It turned out to be more like 1848.

The Egyptian Spring was especially disheartening, as
the people ended up stuck between an Islamist
government who won an election but was building
a new autocracy, and the return of an openly
autocratic military dictatorship.

Every basic history class in high school (at least in Canada) covers the American and French Revolutions. But there was nothing about 1848. No one really expects education in high school to be complete, comprehensive, or even adequate.*

* It damn well should be, though.

I can only speak for myself in this post, because I haven’t done any comprehensive research into history curriculums across Canada. But I didn’t really learn much about Europe’s autocratic traditions, or how long they survived past the dates of democracy’s supposed victories.

In 2011, millions of people across the Arab world – first in Tunisia, but then Syria, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Iran, Oman, and Yemen – organized popular demonstrations against autocratic rule. 

Their goal was to force a transition from autocracy – military governments, police states, monarchies – to more democratic forms. The goals included civil liberties, social and economic freedom, and a change in governance culture from dictators to public servants. 

Only Tunisia and Morocco are functioning new democracies today. Libya and Syria have been torn apart by war ever since. The Libyans are lucky that their war has only two sides – the heirs of Gaddafi based out of Tripoli and the revolutionary government based in Benghazi. Almost all the other autocrats have succeeded in crushing the democratic movements, Egypt and Saudi Arabia being particularly horrifying.

Syria has devolved into a multi-front war. The Free Syrian Army and other revolutionary groups are at war with the Assad government. ISIS** builds their brutal state on violence and sex slavery across eastern Syria and northern Iraq. The Kurds fight ISIS, but their attacks inside Turkey have forced Erdogan’s hand, even though they should be allies for a democratic Syria. The Russians and Americans support their allies with air strikes and subversive forces, Putin for Assad and the White House against ISIS.

Egyptian military dictator Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. What
philosophy and literature will emerge from the wails
of mourning for Arab democracy?

** I prefer its Arabic derogatory term daesh, but their official name is most widely recognized.

My work with the Syria Film Festival plays a small part in advocating for peace in the region, and a warm reception for people fleeing this violence.

Germans, Hungarians, and many other central European people (and peoples) once fled their homes in the same way. Prussian kings, the Habsburg emperors of Austria, and French reactionaries cracked down on their democratic movements in the years after 1848. 

France had the most ironic result of the crackdown: its new emperor was Louis Napoleon, the nephew of the man who tried to conquer all of Europe a generation before.

Only in Denmark and Holland did the democrats win concessions from their kings. Like Tunisia and Morocco over the last four years, they were the relatively marginal countries where autocrats and reactionaries were overthrown.

Running from the oppression of their home countries, people dedicated to democracy went to more secure democracies away from continental Europe. Many came to the United States, Canada, and Britain. 

One of them was Karl Marx.

He was a democratic revolutionary, one of the radical socialists, but part of the alliance of forces opposed to autocratic governance in Europe. The other night, I read some of Derrida’s speeches about the meaning of Marx’s fire-spitting tribute to Louis Napoleon, 18th Brumaire. 

French Emperor Louis Napoleon. Military rulers have
more in common with each other than with the people
they rule.

I couldn’t help but imagine some Egyptian or Syrian democrat, in a run-down apartment in Manchester, Chicago, or Mississauga, writing a similar book or blog about Abdel Al-Sisi or Bashar Assad. I can’t wait to read her work.

Marxist literature is enormous – the creative philosophy that continues Marx’s tradition in new political and social contexts, as well as the historical studies of his own works. Its sheer size means I can’t include the picture of the whole thing in the Utopias manuscript. 

I’m only one person, and I work for a living, so I can’t spend all my days reading two centuries of scholarship. A few spectres of Marx is all I can really handle. I just have to make sure that I pick the right ones. 

So imagine young Karl, deported from multiple countries in Europe as an agitator, finally able to settle with his family in Britain where he still couldn’t gain an income. Having lost the revolution to overthrow dictators, his view is hardened. 

There’d be no more compromises with democracy, no alliances with groups that were anything less than radical. No risk of betrayal to the autocrat classes. 

Even in democratic Britain, he was cast out, a radical who gained no public support. If we leave today’s revolutionaries of the Arab world to rot, as we left Marx, we’ll only create more of the destructive, jaded, violent kind of radicals. 

The revolutions of 1848 were democratic in spirit, but the crackdown and abandonment of those revolutionaries made the survivors the forerunners of the 20th century’s totalitarianism.

Democrats must be allies across the world, especially to those that are in exile. The central Europeans had to wait another 60 years and a devastating world war for Austria’s autocrats to fall. Democracy in continental Europe wouldn’t be secure for a century after the failed revolutions, thanks to wars that killed nearly 100 million people.

We mustn't abandon the idealists of the Arab world, whether to geopolitical games or pessimism. We all want to build a better world.