In a word is a world and so reflecting on our language is critical to restoring the commons. The dominant narrative rests on the beliefs in individualism, self-interest, competition, efficiency, scarcity, and dependency. These taken-for-granted beliefs produce a language and narrative that fragment community and create no space for the commons. They create a narrative that produces isolation. They take their power from labeling the commons as communism, socialism, feminism, entitlements.

A major cause of the loss of community can be seen as the cumulative effect of accepting these dominant beliefs as being true, instead of being simply social constructions. Collective choices arising out of a past time and place which become limitations to an alternative future. Reconstructing the language, or narrative becomes the work, especially in certain core disciplines that create the patterns for much of our way of being in the world. They create and explain the world for us. They constitute much of the collective consciousness and what we accept as conventional wisdom. And the dominant story in these disciplines are unfriendly to the common good.