Why Not Just Privatize the Government?

Why not privatize city government? Jane Jacobs described two moral syndromes necessary for a human social system to survive – one called Guardian and the other called Commercial. She argued that mixing their ethics created “monstrous hybrids” that were immoral and subversive to life. Reframing these syndromes from an integral perspective, allows the retention of the collective dignities of purple and blue in the Guardian syndrome to be re-aligned with the innovation dignities of red and orange in the Commercial syndrome, while avoiding the unhealthy misappropriation of the disasters inherent in Jacobs’ moral codes. This transcendence and inclusion in evolutionary social systems requires commitment to a purpose-driven, planet-centric set of life-giving principles (captured in the Integral City’s 12 Evolutionary Intelligences and Elisabet Sahtouris’ 15 principles of living systems). Essentially when the health of all the holarchies in the city (and the planet of cities) is contexted with the health of all living systems, a superordinate goal for city governance emerges. Integrally informed organizing practices like Holacracy, Biomimicry Investment Codes and Almere City Principles are all experiments that demonstrate how healthy hybrids based on life-giving principles are emerging in human systems. They suggest ways to develop integrally-informed city governance that avoids monstrous hybrids because they are based on evolutionary life-principles, as requisite levels of complexity for survival.

This is an Abstract from a longer article for the Integral Post. The complete article is available here: http://integrallife.com/integral-post/integral-city-systems-survival#comment-5040