'The Tao of Democracy' - Using Co-Intelligence

In the introduction to his book, Tom Atlee (the proponent of the co-intelligence concept) says, "I called this book The Tao of Democracy because Lao-Tzu, the founder of Taoism, is famous for his insistence that when leaders lead well, people feel that they did it themselves, and that it happened naturally. Democracy is, in the end, about creating processes that allow people to empower themselves, not about Great Leaders saving the people."

As he points out, our civilization is racing headlong into massive breakdown or breakthrough -- or both. Gone are the days when the worst we could do was conquer a neighboring tribe or overgraze a local hillside. We are reaching a point where individuals and small groups will be able to create, or destroy, almost anything. We have moved beyond the scale of centimeters and miles down into the microscopic, even subatomic realms, and up into the planetary and interstellar realms, from angstroms to light years, from nanoseconds to gigabytes. We break up atoms and chromosomes. And collectively we change forests to deserts. We litter the upper atmosphere with layers of space junk zooming around earth at hundreds of miles an hour. Our inventions are transforming the lives of our grandchildren's grandchildren -- and we do not have the foggiest notion how. And we are doing all of this faster and faster, more and more, bigger and bigger.

Meanwhile, individually, we can directly comprehend only a tiny fraction of what we are collectively doing.

The Tao of Democracy website provides a peek into a sample chapter on 'Collective Intelligence' and examples of its operation. [Proceed to the Tao of Democracy site]