What This Is and What This Isn't
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many—they are few.
~ Shelley
Next Step Together is an relationship based, evolving
sociocratic structure to enable groups and individuals to connect
and work better together in the furtherance of common aims.
NST is not dependent on money, we hope. The currency most
needed is your will to act more powerfully and to be an active node
in the sociocratic structure we're developing together.
NST is accepting monetary donations to help cover the costs of
spreading this message through the media, and for setting up the
technical network for sociocratic communications. If you can help
in that way too, please do. We suggest each person give $1
because we need billions of people involved for this to work, and
billions of dollars should be enough to run Next Step Together. If
you can spare more, it will help jump start the
movement!
This is simple: not a Registered Product, or something you
have to wait to use until you totally understand it. Basically,
it’s playing fair, and doing first what needs to be done first.
It's about:
- Caring for life.
- Being honest.
- Considering that other folks are possibly doing the best that
they can.
- Halting the inertia of "business as usual".
- Amplifying everyone's effectiveness in the world.
- Connecting, linking and solidarity.
This is about you, because you are the only person in
the world with your unique network of friends, contacts,
co-workers, family members, compadres, neighbors, acquaintances.
Only you can be the fired-up node that links all these groups that
are already important in your own life. Just as each individual is
unique, each individual represents a unique network of connections
between people and groups. No one else can do your connecting but
you.
Your Organization is Safe. We will facilitate communication,
networking, decision-making and governance between exisiting people
and groups. Next Step Together is committed to not replacing,
overpowering, or competing with other organizations. We want to
enhance the power of each individual and group with the strength of
practical cooperation. This is not a power-grab. It is first a
recognition of existing organizational realities, then a linking,
and then a new level of efficient collaboration to accomplish
common, pressing goals. In sociocracy, power is always with,
never over others. Together We Stand. This is about all of
us working together to complete all of our plans quickly and
efficiently. It's about a new, massive solidarity. It’s about those
who are already leading organizations linking up and becoming
better organized for collective, effective mass action. It is a
practical, commonsensical structure to increase communication,
cooperation, and power. Great organizations, people, and leaders
already exist and are working hard. Your agenda, money and
constituency are safe!
Revolution? We neither propose nor refuse to propose major
structural change in any nation’s governmental or economic status
quo. Such strategic decisions will only be appropriately made by a
fully constituted sociocratic structure, involving all stakeholders
— and we're not there yet.
Sit Down in This Circle. There are many reasons to resist
working together, but there are many better reasons to stop
resisting— for instance, those 50,000 people who will die
unnecessarily of poverty today. If all of us who are already
working for global justice, peace, and biospheric sustainability
put our minds together and cooperate, we'll amplify our
effectiveness in unknowable ways.
If a united, enthusiastic, practical and visionary movement
begins to connect and emerge, even more people will be awakened by
hope and join the movement. Below their depression, anger and
anxiety, everyone wants justice, peace and sustainability. The
numbers are on the side of equality. We can break out of the
helpless, lonely stuckness.
Try, Try Again. Throughout history there is always the
seemingly hopeless stuck place between the giant evolutionary
cultural advances we need, and the place/time we're in. In many
ways however we're moving out of inertia and beyond it. The scale
has not tipped yet, but it seems it may be about to. For us not to
gather together and change the way the world works, simply because
we haven’t yet succeeded at it, is understandable, but
shortsighted. The moment is pregnant with the potential for a
coalescence of collective, progressive power.
Fear, the mind killer. We legitimately fear blowback against
a powerful movement. We know what happened to Martin Luther King
Jr., the Kennedys, Malcolm X, Gandhi, Biko. We fear embarrassment
if we fail, and persecution if we succeed. We fear we'll have few
successes. We fear our incompetence. Surely fear—conscious and
unconscious—impedes vast numbers of potential and actual activists.
If those 10-20% of us who already have the requisite courage,
vision, desperation or faith will just lead the way, many more will
join us. Then we'll find comfort in our great numbers, in
companionship with like-minded people, in hope for the future, and
in the joy of living with eyes and hearts wide open.
This is about choosing: Are you for life or not? There is no
way not to choose. Not to decide is to choose the status quo.
This has never been done before. Of course we don’t know
what we’re doing! We’ll learn as we go. When billions of supremely
complex human minds work efficiently and cooperatively on noble but
achievable goals, the results will be impossible to predict. Let’s
go where no culture has gone before. For our sake, for the sake of
future generations, it's the right thing to do. Join the
adventure!
Start meeting, planning, acting, with overwhelming force. We
care. We'll help.
