The Tecumseh Project hopes to help you wade into these questions, to wonder about the world we live in and to dream deeply about the world you would truly love to live in. Yes, love to live in. Truly each of us has such a short time to live it makes no sense whatsoever to waste a minute treading on roads that lead to nowhere, that are in fact roads of suffering and destruction for ourselves, our families and our ecosystem on which we depend.
We have to aim high.
To all neoliberal ideologues: We don’t want what you’re selling, we don’t want to borrow from you, we don’t want to work for you and we don’t want to study what you think is important. We don’t aspire to be you. We repudiate you. May the house you built fall and may humanity flourish as a garden among the ruins.
This is what Timothy Leary meant by "turn on, tune in and drop out." We must stop in order to see. It is a vision quest of a Native American, the mindfulness of a monk and the meditative reflections found in all religious and philosophical traditions. Because the world is deeply interconnected and completely interdependent, your awareness seeds a better world.
We must aim for a better understanding and that will foment a revolution in values.
"The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints."
Will and Ariel Durant
The Lessons of History 1968
We have constructed our site under several headings, each of which overlaps the other—indeed they are all intimately connected. We don’t claim to cover everything, nor certainly to “know it all.” We are in a process of discovery, just like you. Thus our site will change as we learn. This is something humans love to do. Learning, you will see, is not something that supports the malignant frame, but instead weakens it, and enables new frames to be built.
That is our goal: to enable new frames to be built.
We hope to write and catalog material to enable your understanding, to help you build a new world from a solid foundation of your discovery.
We believe an authentic steadfast pursuit of true happiness and well-being will enable both true democracy and sustainability. Very often answers are found through doorways one least suspects.
Importantly we don’t ascribe to any ideology. We prefer “putting out on the sea of thought,” as the economist John Kenneth Galbraith said. We avoid steadfastly the comfort of being moored to an ideological pier and therefore recognize the multitudes of inhabitable islands, places of succor and prosperity to be found by the multitudes of cultures—which surely may clash, but nevertheless are always bound together by the sea. Indeed such diversity is an imperative for life on earth. If such a deconstruction of the present dogma can be achieved it must be done using the best of our humanity, and if so, what rises in its place will be built on what’s best in humanity. And so our ends and means are closely allied. As we said at the outset, we aim to aim high.
I dream of a world in which all people flourish being who they are, an economy built and replenished by its interdependent constituents, both human and natural. I dream of a world in which people are free to live meaningful lives of purpose—each of these joining seamlessly with others, with every other in authentic concert to become a pulsing life-filled organism.
We must do what needs to be done, not what is possible. What is possible is not up to us.
Faith is stronger than hope.
tecumseh