On the missing architecture between who we become and the wild world we create
We've become devilishly good at building things.
We can put a telescope a million miles from Earth and use it to stare backward through thirteen billion years of cosmic history. We can edit the instructions written into a living cell. We can cross an ocean before lunch. And we can summon nearly the entirety of human knowledge from a rectangle in our pocket
This is all fairly miraculous, isn’t it?
But when we ask anyone what makes a life worth living, things start to get really complicated...
Ask what an economy is ultimately supposed to produce. Ask what makes an institution worthy of our trust. Ask whether technological progress is actually making us wiser. Ask what responsibility comes with freedom. Ask what we owe one another… or the people who will take on this world after us.
Suddenly, the civilization that can land a machine on Mars starts staring awkwardly at its own shoes.
This contradiction is beyond fascinating…
We know an extraordinary amount about how to make things happen. We’re so good at it.
BUT…we seem considerably less certain about what should happen, why it should happen, and what kind of people we should become in the process.
Somewhere deep inside the liminal space of this tension is the reason Skandere exists.
A Strange Divide
For much of my life, I’ve been fascinated by two worlds that rarely seem to know what to do with one another. (Perhaps a harrowing gap within my own existence I've been trying to bridge).
The first is the inner world.
Philosophy. Psychology. Consciousness. Spirituality. Identity. Meaning. The wild and often inconvenient experience of being a human being on this planet. What a trip…
This world asks wonderful questions!
Who am I beneath everything I was told to become? What do I actually value? What makes me feel alive? What is freedom? What is enough? What the hell am I doing here?
Entire traditions have been built around these questions! Religions, philosophies, therapeutic systems, contemplative practices, psychedelic traditions, rites of passage, monasteries, mystery schools.
Human beings have apparently been trying to figure themselves out for quite some time… (I wasn’t the first…???)
Then there is another world…
The great wide world of creation.
Enterprise. Economics. Leadership. Technology. Organizations. Capital. Politics. Infrastructure. Institutions. EXTERNAL PROGRESS.
This world tends to ask different questions…
What can we build? How do we organize? How do we scale? How do we allocate resources? How do we coordinate millions of people who will never meet one another? How do we turn an idea in someone's tiny little head into something capable of changing the entire physical world?
I love this world, too.
There is something alchemical about enterprise. A person imagines something that does not exist, convinces a few other people that perhaps it should, gathers resources around the idea, and… through some combination of competence, stubbornness, luck, caffeine, and deep delusion… brings it into reality.
This is damn juicy. The problem is that these two worlds have become not-so-strangely estranged.
The people asking “Who should I become?” are often nowhere near the people asking “What should we build?”
And the people building the world are often moving too quickly to ask what kind of world their architecting is even producing. Not ideal…
The Missing Bridge
Walk through the modern material landscape, and you can see the dire consequences everywhere.
We have a vast self-development industry teaching people how to optimize themselves, heal themselves, understand themselves, awaken themselves, improve their morning routines and, apparently, submerge themselves in increasingly cold bodies of water (with literature now debunking the whole thing).
Some of this is genuinely useful. But there is a question that tends to arrive afterward:
Then what?
You found yourself? Cool. Wonderful.
What are you going to do with yourself, now? How will you apply this cosmic self-understanding? It usually just ends there...
Personal liberation that terminates at the individual becomes another form of consumption. We collect insights the way people collect furniture. They just go back to the store for more.
They’ll get another book that basically says the same thing. Another retreat with cacao instead of ayahuasca. Another facet on the huge diamond of a crystallized revelation of self.
Meanwhile, our economic institutions have the opposite problem…
They are astonishingly brilliant at turning intention into action, but often without enough philosophical interrogation of the intention itself.
A company can become efficient at producing something before anyone even asks whether producing more of it actually improves human life or the planet (it usually doesn’t).
An organization can optimize its culture around performance while making everyone inside it miserable. (It usually does).
Technology can solve the problem it was designed to solve while creating three new problems nobody anticipated. (There will be a solution for that one soon, I’m sure).
Capital can compound and systems can scale.
But scale is not the same thing as wisdom.
And so we find ourselves in a peculiar situation, don’t we…
One part of civilization is sophisticated at understanding the human interior landscape.
Another is sophisticated at manipulating the exterior world.
What remains massively underdeveloped is the architecture connecting and braiding the two. And, thus, a lingering question…
How does inner understanding BECOME outer creation?
That question became an obsession of mine in some ways.
And eventually, it became Skandere.
From Self to Society
The basic proposition is almost embarrassingly simple:
The world we create exists downstream from the people creating it.
Every company, institution, law, technology, neighborhood, school, movement, economic system, and culture ultimately passes through the hands of human beings.
Through our imagination. Through our incentives. Through our fears. Through our wounds. Through our courage. Through what we believe constitutes a good life.
We can talk about systems as though they descended from the sky fully assembled. They don’t, though. People built them. Usually very imperfect people.
Which means the work of civilization cannot begin exclusively with civilization, but rather, it has to begin with the individual.
But… and this is important… it cannot END there (Tony! Joe! Other cultural empowerment gurus!)
This is where much of modern personal development loses me.
The liberated individual is not the final product…it is the raw material.
Freedom for this person creates capacity. Capacity creates an infinite void of possibility. And possibility might start to ask something of us…
What will you do with your freedom?
Maybe you raise children differently. Maybe you make art. Maybe you start a company. Maybe you teach. Maybe you restore a piece of land. Maybe you become a better physician, carpenter, architect, scientist, neighbor, mayor, investor, or friend. Maybe you build a fucking institution.
The form matters less than the movement...
A process that begins internally eventually leads to an external expression:
Self becomes purpose.
Purpose becomes creation.
Creation becomes leadership.
Leadership becomes stewardship.
Stewardship becomes culture.
…And culture, given enough time and spice, becomes civilization.
That is the arc Skandere is interested in.
You Were Never Supposed to Be the Whole Puzzle
This is another foundational idea within Skandere that I return to again and again.
Human beings seem to suffer enormously from trying to become people they were never designed to become.
We compare ourselves against people with different temperaments, gifts, histories, appetites, bodies, circumstances, and callings… and then wonder why our own lives feel strangely ill-fitting and miserable.
We are encouraged to become impressive way before we learn how to become ourselves.
What if the goal was never to become everything? What if the goal was to become distinctly something? SomeONE.
I like to imagine humanity as an enormous mural assembled from billions of puzzle pieces. The absurdity would be a puzzle piece spending its entire life trying to become the piece beside it. Its whole value comes precisely from its particular shape.
The same may be true of US.
Our peculiar combination of abilities, curiosities, sensitivities, obsessions, experiences, relationships, wounds, and desires creates a shape that no other person quite possesses.
Personal liberation, then, isn't about feeling better. It’s about becoming sufficiently free from absorbed expectation to discover what shape you actually are. Your puzzle piece.
And then finding where that shape belongs in the grand mosaic of existence.
…That second part here matters the most. A puzzle piece sitting proudly by itself on a table has achieved authenticity, perhaps, but has missed the point of being a puzzle piece.
Autonomy is not isolation.
The deeper promise of individuality is participation and entrance into the greater puzzle!
We must become someone!… in order to become no one…
Finding One Another
This is another reason Skandere cannot be an annoying collection of courses, consulting services, essays, or programs.
Those things are useful, but they aren’t really the point of this whole thing.
People are.
A person may arrive at Skandere because something inside their life is restless. They may want greater clarity or be trying to build something. They may be questioning why their life has unfolded the way it has.
They may feel that there must be a way of living that does not require choosing between freedom and responsibility, prosperity and meaning, or individuality and belonging.
Some will be able to articulate this in a way, and others will just feel it… a sort of existential call.
But what happens when people responding to similar calls encounter one another??
The lonesome privacy of that journey finally opens up. Ideas are exchanged, friendships start to form, people challenge one another. Someone knows something you don't. Someone has already crossed a threshold you're approaching. Someone is building the thing that complements the thing you're building. Someone introduces you to someone else.
People eat together. Argue. Travel. Create. Fail. Try again.
Participation in this place morphs into something surprisingly rarefied in this day and age… relationship.
And relationship becomes belonging.
And belonging, given enough time and care, becomes culture.
This is the part of Skandere that cannot be manufactured no matter how much I could try.
It can only be cultivated... Skandere can build the hearth.
The people have to make the damn fire that keeps it alive.
An Ecosystem, Not a Ladder
This is why Skandere has taken the form of an ecosystem rather than a single organization, doing a single thing in a singularly boring, transactional way.
Human beings don't develop in straight lines. Life doesn't behave like a corporate onboarding funnel... never has.
Sometimes we need to retreat inward. Sometimes we need to build. Sometimes we need collaborators. Sometimes we need to stop building and start listening. Sometimes our greatest contribution is an enterprise. Sometimes it is an idea. Sometimes it is a friendship. Sometimes it is guidance of something that existed long before us and, if we do our job properly, will exist long after.
Skandere has thus developed four interconnected expressions:
The Institute is concerned with development: the inner architecture from which meaningful participation becomes possibility in this wild world.
The Agency works where insight meets application: with individuals, founders, organizations, and institutions translating principles into decisions, enterprises, structures, and systems.
The Network carries ideas and people through culture: through conversation, publishing, media, art, gatherings, and the creative work emerging from the ecosystem.
And the Foundation turns capacity outward toward public benefit: research, education, ecological conservation, civic collaboration, leadership development, and long-horizon work whose value may extend far beyond the people creating it.
None is intended to stand alone. They can’t!
They are different organs of the same organism.
People may enter through any one of them. They may move between them. They may eventually create things Skandere itself could never have imagined.
Good! That’s the ENTIRE point.
The Civilization Question
The word civilization can sound comically large.
It conjures marble columns, empires, history books, and people wearing elaborate hats while pointing at maps. (at least in my head).
But civilization is actually being produced all around us, every day, isn't it...
It is the accumulation of all that we normalize. What we reward. What we teach children. What our companies incentivize. What our technologies make easier. What our institutions protect. What our stories celebrate. What we tolerate. What we refuse.
Civilization is not something that happened to people in the past.
We are making one right now.
The uncomfortable question is whether we are making it consciously and intentionally.
Skandere is interested in that question at both ends of the telescope.
At one end is the individual human being asking:
How should I live?
At the other is society asking:
What kind of world are we creating together?
I suspect these are not two questions, but rather the same question viewed at different scales.
Why Skandere?
So, why Skandere? Why this thing that my brain wants to birth into the world.
Because I know human flourishing can’t be reduced to private happiness.
Because I know economic prosperity can’t be meaningful if the systems producing it impoverish human life.
Because I know spirituality shouldn’t lead to withdrawal from the material world.
Because I don't believe enterprise needs to be embarrassed by ambition, nor that ambition needs to be divorced from responsibility.
Because I don't believe community requires conformity.
Because I believe individualism and collectivism can be good friends.
Because I think we desperately need people who are free enough to think for themselves, grounded enough to know what they value, capable enough to create, courageous enough to lead, and humble enough to eventually shepherd something larger than themselves.
And because I think there are MANY people searching and wanting for the same thing.
It ain’t another ideology. Or a prescription for the correct life. (Whatever that is). It’s not another institution demanding allegiance.
It’s something far more alive than that.
A place to explore.
A place to build.
A place to contribute.
A place to find one another.
A place to find yourself.
A living ecosystem organized around a simple possibility:
...that becoming more fully ourselves might make us more capable of serving the whole… and that a healthier whole might, in turn, create the conditions for more people to become fully themselves!
That reciprocal breath of movement sits underneath everything Skandere is attempting to become. This is its heartbeat...
And there’s a name for it!
Generative Humanism.
(But that is a conversation for the next essay.)
I hope this excites you as much as it excites me…
Welcome to Skandere.
- James