Creating a dense social fabric, which we are calling community building, is more critical to the common good than creating more funding, more programs, new leadership, and more expertise, the usual solutions. Building community shifts the context within which funding, programs, leadership, and expertise operate. It is the path to value what is neighborly and local in the face of the existing context of empire. We need to understand the existing context of competition, scarcity and monopoly and constitutes a modern form of empire, expressed through its reliance on the dominant business perspective. This perspective is the enabling belief system for the consumer economy, which, in reality, fulfills all the functions of what used to be called empire. Empire being the antithesis of community and care for the commons.  

Believing that only what is scarce is valuable dramatizes the real essence of the modern economy, which is imperial in nature and in its mindset. Imperial in the belief that no matter what our talents or how well we perform, it is never enough. Imperial in its demand for restless productivity. Imperial in the modernist view that new inventions and better prepared individuals and leaders are what will make the difference. Imperial in the idea that some people know and others don’t. Imperial in the belief that only the most credentialed voices are worth listening to. Imperial in the view that the built environment is a testimony to its architects rather than its inhabitants.

An imperial economy is given life by the business perspective, spelled out below, which rests on a foundation of scarcity economics, fundamentalist theology, fear-producing journalism, marginalized art, and imposing and unfriendly architecture.