A World that Works

"We can choose to be audacious enough to take responsibility for the entire human family.  We can choose to make our love for the world what our lives are really about. Each of us has the opportunity, the privilege, to make a difference in creating a world that works for all of us.  It will require courage, audacity and heart.  It is much more radical than a revolution – it is the beginning of a transformation in the quality of life on our planet.  What we create together is a relationship in which our work can show up as making a difference in people's lives. I welcome the unprecedented opportunity for us to work globally on that which concerns us all as human beings.

If not you, who?
If not now, when?
If not here, where?”

Werner Erhard, 1977

 

“Transformation does not negate what has gone before it; rather, it fulfills it. Creating the context of a world that works for everyone is not just another step forward in human history; it is the context out of which our history will begin to make sense.”

Werner Erhard, A Shot Heard Round the World: A World that Works for Everyone, 1980

 

“I am a sort of revolutionary.  I have a strange ambition, though.  I don’t want any statues. What I want is for the world to work.  I want to create a context in which government, education, and families are nurturing.  I want to enable, to empower, the institutions of man.  Social transformation doesn’t argue against social change.  Radicalism and resistance produce obvious values.  But after a while, social change chases its own tail.  Social change just produces social change.  After most ordinary revolutions, after most social change, the world still doesn’t work. For the world to work you must have social transformation, which creates the space for effective social change.”

Werner Erhard, from Werner Erhard, The Transformation of a Man, a biography by W. W. Bartley, III, Ph.D., Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1973