A Beautiful Anarchy

RIPPLES

I could have called this book A Beautiful Democracy, but as beautiful as the idea of democracy is, it’s a poor fit for the creative life; who we are and what we create is not a matter of majority rule. No one else gets to cast a deciding vote. Our lives together, in community, rely on interdependence and kindness, respect, and often, compromise. But who we are at our core, and what we believe about our calling—our life’s true work—is something only we can know, subject as it is to a voice only we can hear. Democracy depends on a population that lives like this; it is the only way a vote is meaningful. To merely be a sheep and vote as you’re told is not democracy; it’s tyranny.

That said, if all these many words have encouraged you to ...