New book: Free, Fair and Alive

With subtitle: The Insurgent Power of the Commons. You can buy it or read it online as the chapters are released over time at this link. An excerpt from Part I below, now available:

"The larger story of the human species is its versatile capacity for cooperation. We have the unique potential to express and act upon shared intentionality. 'What makes us [human beings] really different is our ability to put our heads together and to do things that none us could do alone, to create new resources that we couldn’t create alone,' says Tomasello. It’s really all about communicating and collaborating and working together.' We are able to do this because we can grasp that other human beings have inner lives with emotions and intentions. We become aware of a shared condition that goes beyond a narrow, self-referential identity. Any individual identity is always, also, part of collective identities that guide how a person thinks, behaves, and solves problems. All of us have been indelibly shaped by our relations with peers and society, and by the language, rituals, and traditions that constitute our cultures. In other words, the conceit that we are 'self-made' individuals is a delusion. There is no such thing as an isolated 'I.' As we will explore later, each of us is really a Nested-I. We are not only embedded in relationships; our very identities are created through relationships. The Nested-I concept helps us deal more honestly with the encompassing reality of human identity and development. We humans truly are the 'cooperative species,' as economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis have put it. The question is whether or not this deep human instinct will be encouraged to unfold. And if cooperation is encouraged, will it aim to serve all or instead be channeled to serve individualistic, parochial ends?"