#36 Ingredients for flourishing Democracies
“Making inner, personal development accessible to large parts of the population is a prerequisite for stable and flourishing democracies.”
There seem to be patterns that connect individual personal development (cognitive, moral) to the development of societies through stages from pre-modern, to modern, to post-modern and beyond. The question is then, how can we collectively raise the level of consciousness of the citizens? Through which means? And what can we learn from societies collapsing? And with the looming fate we collectively face, where many signs of the omni-crises point into collective Armaggedon and Apocalypse until the end of this century, where do you personally see signs of hope? What could be a “third attractor” beyond the extremes of surveillance state capitalism China style and late stage extractive capitalism in the West?
- Whereas it seems clear to us that the meta-crises, omni-crises and meaning-crisis are all interlinked, what are ways to build the capacities for meaning making to adresse the many converging global challenges?
- As you spent more than a decade exploring with the leading renegades and experts the field of societal development, what are your main takeaways?
- What can we extrapolate from the Nordic Secret? Meaning the uprise of Scandinavia due to large investments into public education?
- From the many endeavors you are supporting as a philanthropist and serial social entrepreneur, what are promising examples?
- Perspectiva – laying the academic and philosophical foundations and publishing books
- What is Emerging? Through the Emerge Gatherings we try and facilitate a breakthrough for the emerging civilization with participants from very different backgrounds instead of focussing on siloed expertise as we cannot isolate the many converging crises and hence need to bring the different experts into conversation.
- Inner Development Goals – deliberately focussing on the need of inner development for corporates and organizations
- 29k – platform to scale inner development through an online platform
- From all the initiatives and projects you helped kick-start, what will you do differently in the years ahead? What is the legacy you want to leave behind?
- Do you see a realistic change in the next decades ahead that some of the code explored in your books, moves into more mainstream applications? Or the other way put, are there already large scale applications of personal development into societies that you see taking fruition?
Tomas Björkman
has a long career behind him as entrepreneur in a variety of businesses within financial services, IT, property and banking – working all over Europe. He founded Investment Banking Partners AB and served as chairman of EFG Investment Bank.
In 2008 Tomas established Ekskäret Foundation in Stockholm. The foundation has established a conference facility on its island Ekskäret in the Stockholm archipelago. The mission of the foundation is to facilitate personal development and social change with the aim to help create a more conscious society. A special focus of the foundation is supporting the development of social entrepreneurs and the understanding of the complexities of social change. The foundation also operates the Ekskäret Klustret co-working space in central Stockholm with the aim to bring together organizations working towards a more conscious society.
Tomas is also a member of the Club of Rome, a fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science and a fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Science. Among Tomas’ initiatives are the Perspectiva Institute in London, Co-Creation Loft in Berlin, the Emerge media initiative (www.whatisemerging.com) and the digital platform for personal growth: 29k.org.
Tomas has published three books: The Market Myth (2016), The Nordic Secret (2017, co-authored with Lene Andersen) and The World We Create (2019).
https://www.tomas-bjorkman.com
https://www.whatisemerging.com
https://systems-souls-society.com
https://www.innerdevelopmentgoals.org
