Why Goodly?
Many of us find ourselves in a trap. We care about our families and friends, about our children and grandchildren, and their grandchildren and friends, and all of their friends and family, too. We love to imagine them happy and thriving, yet, it seems there is very little we can do to help ensure they flourish. We can wish them well and provide them advice sometimes, perhaps gifts. But most of us spend 40 hours (or more) per week – the bulk of our life’s energy – doing work that can hardly hope to influence their lives for the better. Our economy simply does not reward good deeds. So, what are we to do with all this care in a world that does not reward it?
Goodly wants to be the answer to that question. Few of us believe we can help future generations through the political system… and we are mostly right. But what if there was some way that each of us could spend just a few hours a month contributing to a wider effort, one that carefully organized all of our contributions into broad-spectrum change that would make life more livable for all of us and the generations to come? Goodly bets that we can do just that. And we’ve already started.
The key to social change, we have found, is not political action per se. It is not more persuasive debate. It is not physical force. It is what all these traditional paths to social change seek: legitimacy. Social change happens when new ideas ideas becomes legitimate – when most of us agree that the new ideas are right, proper, and authoritative... that they are arrived at via transparent, inclusive processes we all experience as just. Everything Goodly does flows from this realization.
Right now, nearly all of the institutions of our Democracy are experiencing an erosion of legitimacy. Congress is hardly more popular than the DMV. The legitimacy of the presidency, and the electoral processes determining that office, are openly questioned. The ostensibly independent judicial branch has become yet another arm of the two major political parties. And long before the “fake news” crisis, changes in the media landscape generated a new normal of lower quality reporting focusing excessive attention on matters that distract the public more than they inform us. Police, more and more, are seen as “bad guys,” too, even though they are the first people we call when we need help. Observe: it is nearly impossible to identify a government organization or institution thought vital to civic life that has not lost credibility and trust over the last several years.
And yet, there is no real among those who work in these institutions to recover the lost trust. There is no plan because neither the public nor the people who work in these systems were trained to understand them holistically as part of a yet-broader set of systems. They were not trained to understand that ‘legitimacy’ even exists, or that it is the basis of those systems’ power. On the contrary, they take the power of these institutions for granted and try to build their own power within them. What they don’t see, what they can’t fix, is the fact that all of their competition for power within those institutions has rendered them inefficient and deeply untrusted.
We cannot stand by and watch as democracy slowly decays. Goodly proposes that we engage the public, that “we the people” once again join together and work together to improve our media, reduce the violence between governments and their people, and build a set of governing processes that actually work. Goodly has already begun projects focused on all of these and we will ask for your help, more and more, in the months and years to come.
Please join our mailing list. We will reach out from time to time, with increasing frequency as we build momentum. It will not be easy, but it will be worth it.
