Help us start a new conversation and foster diverse perspectives
Very soon, when the Covid 19 restrictions are lifted throughout Europe, we will be able to meet again in person. It will be the right moment to fully kick off the Protopia Lab with a big conference.
However, fundraising is not easy in these pandemic times. We need your support to make the Protopia Lab thrive.
If you believe like we do that we urgently need to plant the seeds for a new undogmatic conversation to regain trust between different tribes, please become a supporter and join us on this journey.
We need to grow beyond our ideological bubbles and start seeing issues from multiple perspectives if we want to meet the considerable challenges we face in our societies.
We would especially value if you could become a regular supporter but are grateful for any support that you can afford.
Please get in touch if you work for an NGO or a grant-making organisation that might be able to support our project, or if you know a funder who might be interested. We would love to have a conversation about how we can collaborate.
Before you become a supporter, you surely would like to know more about what we're planning, who we are and why this project is important. In this concept note you can find all the details. The project summary below provides a taste.
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Project Summary
Tackling our most pressing problems like climate change requires ground-breaking solutions that can reach broad societal consensus, but that are impossible to achieve in the context of an increasingly polarised discourse in Western societies. People increasingly live in separate, very different realities and ideological bubbles, and public conversation around our most pressing issues has become highly dysfunctional.
The shutdown of pluralistic conversation stifles the creativity that is needed for solving the most pressing deep-rooted social and ecological problems.
With this project, we will create innovative tools and work with change agents from across civil society to step out of our ideological frames and exemplify non-dogmatic pluralistic dialogue. We will seek deeper wisdom and truth from a plurality of disciplines and ideologies.
Our aim is not the perfect world, but protopia, which is a process that takes into account multiple perspectives, acknowledges that there are always multiple trade-offs to consider and avoids throwing the baby out with the bathwater when making changes to the system. Nobody has all the answers for how a better system will ultimately work and look like. We propose a process of trial and error, an evolutionary search process towards protopia.
We hope to contribute with this project to the emergence of new alliances and syntheses of ideas across ideologies and movements with a high potential for renewing societal trust and cohesion and creating high levels of societal support for solutions and pathways for ecological transition.