Kansas Cooperative Commonwealth Forum

My name is Alan Avans, and I am your host here at the Kansas CCF. I'm obsessed with political and economic matters. At the core of my obcession is the vision of a Cooperative Commonwealth that I've inherited through several different means.Why do I believe in a Cooperative Commonwealth? Because I believe in liberty! And liberty happens when persons connected by a wide sense of shared purpose, deeply rooted values and respect for the inalienable worth and responsibility of persons proceed to form communities by building upon a foundation of the social capacity for people to self-govern themselves cooperatively. And this capacity for self-governance manifests itself with a "by-the-people, for-the-people, with-the-people" approach to design and development of the ethical environment required to actualize human potential and fulfill the exalted ends for which we are being created. When we self-organize (co-operate) our various endeavors and enterprises without compulsory means then both community and liberty truly exists.The dream of a Cooperative Commonwealth is not new. Chances are that your forbears shared the vision too. I view the building of a Cooperative Commonwealth as being at the core of the American Project. This dream has shown itself with the rise of populism and progressivism in North America, the preaching and praxis of the social gospel and in my own particular religious confession, in migrations to promised lands.I believe this vision should be recaptured. My perspective on the necessity of building the Cooperative Commonwealth is the result of over 15 years of observations made about human civilization in general and as a result of involvement in the political process and in various social and economic development projects. It has grown apparent that the current systems and worldviews underlying the military-corporate-financial complex and the nation-state are fundamentally flawed, untenable and not worthy of being sustained. There is no place on the face of dear Mother Earth that doesn't cry out for an approach to human development that meets the actual economic, social and political aspirations of people of good will the world over. Further use of methodolgies and ideologies based on the outdated, inadequate and often downright dysfunctional materialist worldview can only further us along the road to global disaster. The trillions of dollars worth of time and labor spent in reaction to the world's social, economic and ecological distress will continue to meet with limited success until the underlying systems, worldviews and core assumptions are seriously examined-and dispensed with in favour of a reflexive, open and adaptive system that can evolve and facilitate the development of balanced working and physical environments in all communities, integrated according to a common social vision of social and economic justice, political liberty and the creativity of the human spirit.