A liturgy for modern humanity

Krista Tippett brings people together to engage in civil conversations.

Common ground

Out of this most recent conversation, people from both sides of the political divide came together to find common ground. The conclusions they came to were the basic tenets of human decency.

• Be kind to each other
• Break bread together
• Discover our common humanity

A common enemy

The actual enemies are the technologies that we have created: politics and media. If we make sides, people are forced to choose a side. It is the legal institutions and the corporations that are putting humans into conflict with each other. Our own creations are destroying us. These inhuman inventions have taken on a life of their own. They have become adversarial entities that control our lives because we have willingly abdicated our power to them.

Governments, corporations and religions are human inventions. The internet is a technology.

If we take a more mindful approach to these tools that we have created, we can create a more objective distance to these objects that have become addictions, obsessions, fetishes and idols.

Media and technology

The medium is the message. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

Builders collective

We are humans looking for better ways to live with each other. We are inspired by the creative, collaborative culture of the Bauhaus, whose legacy as the progenitors of modern design has resulted in a natural world that is being challenged by the success of a technological revolution.

We recognize that technologies that are deployed by humans at a global scale create an exponential rate of effects which include unintended consequences. We can refer to this as a social arc, describing a correlation between the adoption rate of a technology and its increasing effects over time. While seeking the common good, we can inadvertently create the conditions for mutually assured destruction. Developing resilience is to account for our responsibility to deal with the unintended consequences of the things we create.

BLDRS Collective - Vision

The builders collective is a movement to build leaders to design a resilient society. We use human-centred design to create engaging experiences through art, design, social change and social architecture to imagine, design, build and grow sustainable, livable environments and communities.

Social architecture

Social architecture is the art and science of living systems. We are recognizing that we are no longer designing tools and physical artifacts. We are designing human experience. We are all engaged in the human project.

At the heart of our endeavours is a desire to discover our common humanity.

Our common humanity

We can discover our common humanity through shared experiences.

• Breaking bread together
• Creating and working together
• Sharing our lives together

We can dispense with our divisions and categories and recognize that we are all human.

As humans, we are individual organisms, like cells in a body, in a tiny seed called Earth. We may even imagine that we are the gestational phase of a new form of life that is about to be born into the universe.

Whether this is a concept of becoming one with the universe or with the merging of humanity with the divine in a mystical union or the singularity, the vision is of transcendence beyond our primitive origins. We desire to progress, to transform, to grow beyond our nascent form to a maturity that we have yet to experience.

Transcendence is something that we all reach for.

For now, we are small, fragile creatures with basic human needs. Before we can transcend, we first need to exist.

Competition cannot be the metaphor for our existence. A cancer exists only to consume for self-preservation. Collaboration is the work of the body to maintain the health of the whole.

So we start with our daily bread. We break bread together to express our common desire to enjoy peace and love. But we do so with the knowledge that something else had to die to give us life, whether it was a star that exploded in the process of forming more complex atoms or a complex organism that we killed and consumed to satisfy the need for raw materials and energy.

Life is both a joyous adventure and a solemn act of reverence and gratitude.

The mystery is that it exists at all and that it exists in this specific form.

So, we break bread to remember. We break bread to live. We break bread to transcend.

That is our past, our present and our future.