A dozen questions below from Making Global Sense may open conversations in book clubs and academic courses, or be a starting place for reflections.
1. Thomas Paine wrote, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Why and how is this true for us today?
2. Where in yourself and in society do you see evidence that a global sensibility is emerging? How can you enhance this trend n your home, job, and community?
3. How does personal transformation create social change, and how does social change create personal transformation?
4. Which signs of split perception — e.g., denial, bias, either/or thinking, rationalization — do you recognize in yourself and in society? How can you know what and whom to trust?
5. At what point does healthy skepticism become bitter cynicism that closes off the possibility of personal and social change?
6. Where in your life — family, job, community, politics — do you see authority addiction operating? What would recovery look like?
7. If authority addiction makes authoritarian leaders possible and even inevitable, what breaks the patterns in ourselves and society?
8. If alpha male rule is rooted in the way we raise children and define masculinity, how can meaningful change be achieved?
9. How are founding-era political ideals missing in institutions today, and what are the ways those ideals can be implemented now ?
10. Adam Smith pictured capitalism with a moral foundation of empathy. How do empathy and global sense inform conscious commerce?
11. What conditions must be actively maintained for any democracy to survive, and how stable is your own national democracy?
12. Discuss the principle that people have a natural right to ratify by vote the laws governing them. Could a “direct republic” ever be viable in organizations or communities or nations? What would need to happen?