Coherent Pluralism

and the implementation gap.

Seven years ago, I reached a point of deep frustration. I kept speaking about a "good world," convinced we could build it—feel it in our bones—but I couldn’t for the life of me describe what that world actually looked like, smelled like, felt like, or how it worked. I could sense it, but I didn’t have the words. So I made a decision: to sit down, focus, and give shape to this vision. Not just for myself, but for anyone else who carried the same knowing but lacked the language to point to it.

I held a deep respect for the task I had set for myself—and I knew I didn’t want to do it twice. If I was going to attempt this, it had to be as complete as possible. That meant capturing the full spectrum of human experience. But my perspective, of course, was limited—just one person’s lens. So I started searching for a framework that could help me stretch beyond that, something that could offer a 360-degree view and keep me honest as I moved through the work.

As I began exploring different frameworks, it became clear that I needed a way to meaningfully compare them. So I came up with a set of questions—six at the time—that I wanted each framework to touch on. It was a way to stay grounded, to make sure my eventual choice wasn’t just based on vibes. I shared those questions with a handful of people whose judgment I trust deeply. One of them was Jim Rutt, who ended up flipping the whole thing on its head. He asked: “Why not use the questions as the framework?”

We refined the questions, added a seventh, and the whole idea expanded. I didn’t just use them to write the book—I started using them as a kind of serious game. A way to help others dream, too. To articulate their own version of a good world and a good life. Not just in abstract, but in detail. Tangible. Real. It turned into a mirror, a compass, and a bridge—all at once.

After playing this game with people from every walk of life—from tech founders to subsistence farmers, teenagers to elders, across cultures, continents, and belief systems—I began noticing something unexpected. Despite all the differences, the visions they shared had a striking coherence. The details varied, yes. But at the core, the good life people described kept sounding like the same song. Different instruments, same melody.

Nothing I uncovered—nothing I wrote in the book—was truly new. At best, I was giving shape to echoes. Echoes of ideas that had surfaced in the global North and West during the early 1970s, which themselves were just faint reflections of what most of the world had never really forgotten. If anything, I was translating cultural memory—my own included—into something legible. One of many such attempts.

Which begs the real question: if our sense of a good life is so clear, so consistent across culture and class and continent—then why the hell aren’t we living it? Why then are we still trapped in the business as usual gravity well towards species wide suicide? Why haven’t we just started living that way?

Why is it that leaders everywhere—political, economic, cultural—haven’t stepped into the arena the way people like Daniel Wahl or Joe Brewer have? Why aren’t bioregions everywhere being woven into thriving, life-serving places? Why don’t we see a global fabric of coherent pluralism rising—rooted in local culture, attuned to place, yet deeply interconnected? What’s stopping us from stitching this world together? The vision is there. The knowledge is there. The hunger is there. So what’s holding the threads?

If we look closely—really honestly—at the many experiments in alternative living that have sprouted around the world over the last five decades, a sobering pattern emerges. No matter how radical, beautiful, or intentional they appear, most of them remain deeply entangled in the industrial-financial complex. Strip away the trucks, the tools, the imported parts, the bank accounts, the grants, the digital infrastructure—and they would collapse. They don’t escape the system. They depend on it.

At the same time, we’re not starting from zero. Scattered across bioregions and buried under centuries of suppression, we still find intact fragments of indigenous wisdom—knowledge systems that knew how to live without constant extraction, that built entire lifeways from what the land offered, in balance and reciprocity. And on the other end of the timeline, our most advanced material scientists are starting to catch up. They’re showing us how to grow, ferment, and enzymatically transform materials—locally, regeneratively, and without waste. The future and the past are speaking the same language. We just need to listen.

And we can make it loud. We can weave this scattered knowledge into coherence—into a shared infrastructure that empowers the real heroes of our time: those restoring bioregions, rebuilding kinship, and tending the future. We can unhook them from the industrial leash, remove the need for capital pipelines and global dependencies. Not hypothetically. Not someday. We know it’s possible—because we’ve done it before.

The world today would look nothing like it does without the Manhattan Project. We can debate the ethical consequences, but one thing is hard to deny: without it, the Nazis might have won World War II. That project changed everything. It was fast. Focused. Relentless. It mobilized minds, materials, and meaning into a single-pointed thrust that reshaped history.

Today, we’re up against a different kind of enemy. The symptoms wear old uniforms—fascism, greed, extraction—but the real crisis runs deeper. We’ve torched the foundation of human life on this planet. Broken the climate. Eroded ecosystems. Crashed through every planetary boundary like nothing matters.

The difference? This time, we don’t need to split atoms. We need to stitch them back into coherence with life. This time, it’s not about power—it’s about possibility. About the possibility to do the place based work without extraction, without fear, without greed. The difference is that we can create a Manhattan Project that creates the foundation for mutually assured thriving rather than mutually assured destruction.

But i am confused. I see less than a handful of projects on the planet that actually aim at such a appropriately proportional response to the current situation. Projects that don’t aim at fixing and solutionism, but at a fundamental rebasing of the human predicament.

What am i missing? What do you see?