Collective Intelligence for Social Change

Our current time calls for new enlightenment. Faced with ever increasing economic and social challenges, we must strive beyond our technology and help make the world a better place. Martin Luther King 40 years ago understood this enlightenment with the following quote:

“A new age brings with it new challenges. First we are challenged to rise above the narrow confines of our individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. The new world is a world of geographical togetherness. This means that no individual or nation can live alone. We must all learn to live together, or we will be forced to die together.”

“Through our scientific genius we have made the world a neighborhood; now through our moral and spiritual genius we must make of it a brotherhood. If we will join together we will be able to speed up the coming of the new world in which men will live together as brothers....”

Here, he describes that it is not enough to physically connect people together through technology. We must do more. We must make a neighborhood a brotherhood.

Many people believe that collective intelligence - a subset of Web 2.0 – offers a pathway to achieve this goal and represents the next logical step in social evolution.

Andrew Cohen continues: “Real communication is a creative process at the highest level of human potential. When human beings come together for this purpose, something new is literally created in consciousness. Miraculously, the mind of enlightenment itself begins to emerge through the collective and an extraordinary evolutionary potential is revealed....This next step that we’re speaking about points beyond individual enlightenment. It points way beyond the personal domain of the individual, to the emergence of some kind of collective or intersubjective higher mind. I am talking about a kind of emergence that would release an awakened consciousness whose source of power comes directly and miraculously from the merging of minds beyond individual and collective ego.”

Duane Elgin continues with this concept, believing that a collective consciousness will naturally arise over the next several decades:

By mobilizing the enabling tools of mass communication, I believe the awakening of our collective consciousness at the scale of community, nation, and the planet will soon become a normal part of our lives and a powerful force in our social evolution. The reason is that the human family is being challenged to awaken to an emerging whole-systems crisis that threatens our future with powerful trends ranging from global climate change and unsustainable economic growth, to diminished agricultural productivity, the depletion of cheap oil, a growing chasm between the rich and poor, the extinction of species, and growing terrorism. Within the next several decades, citizens of developed nations in particular will be pressed to awaken to the actual condition of the Earth and to make profound changes in our manner of living, consuming and working in support of a sustainable future.

If you would like to see collective intelligence in action please visit ECMHUB.com sponsored by the ECMINSTITUTE.