What does it take for a society to grow?

Carl Rogers was an American psychologist and a founder of humanistic psychology, a field that emphasizes human potential, growth, and the search for meaning. He shifted the focus of therapy away from the expert authority of the therapist toward the client’s own inner experience, insight, and capacity for self-direction. A Way of Being is widely regarded as his most personal, reflective, and explicitly political book—part autobiography, part manifesto, and part vision.

What kind of culture and institutions make it possible for ordinary people to correct their leaders—before it’s too late?

Karl Popper worried about the day a Donald Trump would walk onto the stage. He had watched democracies erode from within—fear rising, dissent narrowing, leaders claiming special authority in moments of crisis—and he asked a simple question: how do free societies keep the ability to correct power before it hardens? The Open Society and Its Enemies, written during World War II, reads less like history and more like a field manual.

Sometimes the most practical thing a community can do is to listen to each other.

Most regional planning follows a familiar script. Experts pick the topic first—housing growth, economic development—then build the plan around it. Consultants study jobs, traffic, and land use. Targets are set for new housing units or employment. Maps appear showing growth zones and transportation corridors. Only after the framework is mostly built are residents invited to comment on it.

A practical social technology for building a more "peace-able" world

Mediators Beyond Borders International (MBBI) is a nonprofit peacebuilding organization that trains and supports communities worldwide to prevent, resolve, and heal from conflict, with a strong emphasis on mediation and local capacity-building. Its mission centers on building local skills for peace and promoting mediation globally, keeping people directly affected by conflict at the heart of peacebuilding efforts.

What we’re facing is serious, and we need to acknowledge the whole truth of it.

In early 2017, just after Trump’s first inauguration, journalist, Dahr Jamail, interviewed eco-philosopher Joanna Macy to ask what it means to live well in dark times marked by accelerating climate disruption, collapsing ecosystems, chronic war, and extreme inequality. Macy argued that the most radical act in such moments is to remain fully present rather than numbing ourselves with distraction.

Many Americans still want to live in a compassionate country.

Tara Sonenshine is an American diplomat and Emmy-winning former broadcast journalist whose career has taken her to the center of some of the late twentieth century’s most consequential events. In the 1990s, she reported on war and trauma across the globe, including the violent suppression of protests in Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later.

What does a creative response to polarization look like?

Activist, sociologist, and writer George Lakey is as troubled by today’s polarization in the United States as you and I are. But while the moment is painful, he also suggests that polarization can be a precondition for major democratic and economic advances—if people respond creatively rather than retreating into despair.

Care, dignity, and belonging as the core antidotes to resentment politics

By invading Venezuela in defiance of both national and international law, Trump is fulfilling a campaign promise. He has been explicit about his intention to pursue an imperial mindset.

Love with a civic address

Martha Nussbaum is a philosopher and legal scholar who has spent her career asking what human beings need to live lives of dignity—and how law, education, and culture can support that aim. In Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice, she brings this work together to suggest that certain shared feelings—compassion, solidarity, and a critical kind of civic pride—provide the emotional infrastructure diverse societies need to pursue genuine justice.

Libraries as essential civic infrastructure

IREX is a global nonprofit dedicated to strengthening people, communities, and institutions so societies can function more justly and resiliently. Its work prioritizes human capacity and civic trust.

Current fears about the erosion of democracy offer an opportunity to examine the false myths of American democracy—and the psychological work required to confront and engage with their legacy.

İpek S. Burnett is a Turkish-American writer and psychologist who uses Jungian ideas to examine American democracy, violence, and innocence through a social justice lens. In this article, she suggests that American democracy is in what C. G. Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, called individuation: “the lifelong, nonlinear journey toward self-awareness, integration, and wholeness.”

A general blueprint for how any cooperative human group can function well

Elinor Ostrom was an American political scientist and political economist best known for showing that communities can successfully manage shared resources without relying only on government or markets. Her work challenged the idea that commons inevitably collapse into a “tragedy of the commons.”