Visionary Organizing does not create change by marshaling resources and people to force what already exists to change. Visionary Organizing transforms reality by recognizing and nurturing interdependence, transforming relationships, and creating new patterns and systems that — once taken to scale — become capable of replacing what already exists.

From a big picture view, it feels right to say that in the last three weeks our collective sense of day-to-day stability has ended. Our respective material needs may or may not yet have been threatened but our collective nonmaterial needs for security and predictability are under threat every day. If we take time to name and grieve what we’re experiencing while building community, I think that this crisis can become a transition to something meaningful.

When we learn to equally emphasize our material and non-material needs instead of prioritizing our material needs at the expense of our non-material needs, we start existing differently than human beings have for the last 500 years. When we create organizations and communities that equally emphasize material and non-material needs, we create systematic opportunities to exist differently.

When we understand the world around us, we don’t have to react to chaos. Instead, locating ourselves in systems and history empowers us to respond to chaos in ways that align with our inner wisdom. In chaotic times we have a nonmaterial need to locate ourselves in systems and history to avoid being overwhelmed. By unpacking hegemonic transitions, we can locate ourselves in systems and history.

Lagos, 1444 can be usefully thought of as the place where the systemic disconnection from our inner wisdom began. According to Zuara’s description, those men responsible for the partition of Africans were confused about what to do. Instead of choosing to follow their inner-wisdom, they chose to follow the logic of individual gain. They weren’t the first Europeans to facilitate enslavement, brutality, horror, or pursue individual gain at the expense of others. However, the choices made by these specific Europeans in this specific place and time had implications similar choices made at previous times did not. Because this specific form of slavery was racial and occurred during a major social and economic crisis in Europe, it became a building block of a new economy and world.