Recently, as a result of many conversations (almost all with women) about the subjects of love, conversation and community*, I’ve come to realize that this ‘Natural’ social worldview has two flavours: a ‘masculine’ analytical one and a ‘feminine’ integrative one (lower right graphic), with different vocabularies and different understandings of how change occurs in the real world — the feminine integrative understanding being one of one person at a time Letting-Themselves-Change, rather than the evolutionary/revolutionary change process espoused by most male progressives.

This article is an attempt to explain how these masculine and feminine ‘Natural’ social worldviews are consistent. I originally wanted to synthesize them into one, but they seem to be as irreducibly binary as yin and yang.

When there is love, conversation has purpose, context, engagement, trust (while, without love, conversation is sterile and selfish). The best conversations are in fact a form of play. Good conversation entails listening and paying attention, and it is through this that we learn (unschooled), discover, develop capacity to understand how the world works and how to make it better. The best conversations are a form of ‘making love’ — empathetic, collaborative, even erotic. One could even argue that sex is a form of wordless conversation.

The best conversations are also polyamorous (all participants love and trust each other) — this provides safety from hurt and cruelty, and this safety encourages openness, honesty, courage, and true innovation.

We are constrained in our ability to change by our inability to envision different ways to do things, see things, live, make a living. We can overcome these constraints, and Let-Ourselves-Change, only when we see a demonstration of other, more intuitively sensible, working models. How are such models created? As experiments, as play, by the right, loving people, conversing in community about the right issues, using the right methods. Not communities of practice or communities of interest. Communities of passion, of love.

Intentional Communities (and communes) are examples of models of a better way to live and self-manage our political and social affairs, an improvement over the corporatist-dominated and disconnected state politics and the atomized nuclear families that characterize our lonely and dysfunctional civilization society.

What I have called Natural Enterprises — non-hierarchical, joyous, customer-responsive, responsible, sustainable, community-based businesses, are similarly models of a better way to make a living, compared to the destructive, acquisitive, competitive, oligopoly-prone corporatist businesses. Natural Enterprises are a form of Intentional Community, and both are products of their partners’ shared passion and love, created by self-managed communities through conversation with the larger communities in which they operate.

Natural Enterprises exist in a Gift/Generosity Economy, one of sharing, giving away in love in the expectation that others will give generously in return. The work of self-management, consensus, self-creation of such communities are acts of love which evolve through conversation.

Conversations could be seen as a form of Open Space event. Like other Open Space events they begin with a generous invitation, and their success depends on how well the invitation is crafted, who it attracts, the love and passion of participants, and their capacity to listen, pay attention, Let-Themselves-Change, and converse. (The word ‘converse’ comes from the Latin meaning ‘to move with’; the word ‘community’ comes from the Latin meaning ‘shared, unified’.)

Do you see how these masculine and feminine Natural social worldview models and vocabularies relate to and complement each other? They are different ‘languages’ saying the same thing — about a better way to live, perceive, understand, relate, and make a living. Since I’ve learned to use the ‘feminine’ language (with the help of my suddenly predominantly female commenters and e-mailers) I’ve found it a more powerful, intuitive, grounded language than the analytical ‘masculine’ language. But boy it’s tough to learn a new language when you’re so comfortable with the old one!

This pretty well says it all, doesn’t it? Just about anything important you have to say about politics, economics, education, society, technology, art etc. can be couched in the language of these three magic words: love, conversation, community.

Take Knowledge Management for example. Forget trying to explain it in terms of content, websites, sharing and social networking. KM is simply the art enabling trusted, context-rich conversations among the appropriate members of communities about things these communities are passionate about. That’s it!

Whether you want to change the political or economic system, save the whales, stop global warming, reform education, spark innovation or anything else, the answer is in these three magic words, in how meaning and understanding of what needs to be done emerges from conversation in community with people you love,people who care.

Now you know how to save the world.

* I credit Nancy White and her colleagues, Juanita Brown, Nancy Margulies and Amy Lenzo with getting me on this three-word jag; they ‘got’ this long before I did.