Place-finding vs Place-making

In the United States, and across the globe, we exist as social beings navigating through a fractured society. Many of us are aware that a more peaceful, unified, and more universally just collective life is possible, but the barriers to realizing this potential are numerous, varied, and complex.

A powerful truth that is morally, spiritually, and scientifically substantiated is human wholeness. This definitive way of seeing the the human species suggests that much of the social conflict that we witness is a deviation from our true nature and that a peaceful coexistence is indelibly linked to realizing—even institutionalizing—our latent wholeness. In the same manner that a seed becomes tree, caterpillar becomes butterfly, and the babe becomes man, we can sense that our collective human journey is leading to an in-gathered global culture colored with peace, prosperity, and a realized promise seeded by the blood of many martyrs.

Achieving acceleration towards the realization of a sustained peace requires wrestling with the ideologies and practices that stand against universal human nobility. These ideologies and practices structure the formation of social divisions such as race, gender, and class. The marginalizing actions that flow out of these social divisions do not proceed in parallel, they are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. On the ground level, this means that the actions enforcing marginalization, exploitation, and exclusion are multifaceted and particular. This dynamic strongly suggests that uprooting these ideologies and practices requires analyses and social practices that are able to grapple with such complexities.

The return on investing in this form of capacity building will be establishing resource edifying place-finding cultures and eliminating resource draining place-making cultures.