Member-only story
Co-Creating a New Community Social Contract
I recently had a conversation with a very bright, well educated, intellectually curious Millennial about the importance of the social contract as a tool to enforce accountable engagement in the world. She looked at me blankly, smiled and said, what a great idea, how did you think of that? I laughed and told her it was far from my original idea, in fact the concept went back to the Age of Enlightenment, well discussed and documented by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th Century. From that short exchange, it became clear that the concept of the social contract is no longer a standard part of the educational framework, even at the elite education level, which is a sad turn of events and could explain some of the disconnect in our communities today.
The concept of the social contract has been a part of my thinking as long as I can remember. It was a basic tenet of my family life, school groups, neighborhood organizations and every level of engagement inside and outside those organizational frameworks. I saw it expressed in daily news stories, setting the boundaries of every interaction we had as community members and reinforced our shared vision of how individuals interacted with institutions and with each other. Although I knew it didn’t exist as a written document, for me it had the strength of the Constitution and…
