A ranch-style house in a gently gentrifying neighborhood. Smudged wineglasses and finger food. The gentle murmur of polite conversation; then an unexpected simultaneous gap in the conversation. Renewing, there's a tone of quiet urgency.

Jax: I suppose I might be a bit old-fashioned, but isn't the challenge not so much of what to do to change the world, but rather the will to actually do it and do it well?

Mary: What do you mean by that?

Jax: Well... it is clear that what we need to do is unite working people across differences, to engage in principled, targeted struggles that combine tangible wins that improve lives, with a clear vision of what's wrong in our society -- the 1%, the bosses that take the vast wealth of our labor and use it to perpetuate their own power. We need a true worker's party to coordinate those struggles, and democratic structures to build confidence and transparency. We need to fight, and people will join us.

Crystal: I can feel your heart chakra burning with passion, Jax, and it's moving. Thank you. But I'm afraid this sort of divisive, us vs. them approach is a bit old-fashioned. Look at all the wars of the last century, and where did they get us? Because really, is it so clear that it's just the 1% that are the problem? Aren't we all complicit in various ways with the destructiveness of the system? Don't we need to learn to deeply change ourselves within... and do it in ways that invite that sort of deep change in others, until it becomes a sea-change, a sort of spiritual gestalt shift that aligns all of us more deeply with the interdependent co-arising of life? When you're so focused on placing the blame elsewhere, it's a kind of short-circuit of the real work we need to do.

Nonkululeko: Eish, man, all this talk of the "system" and the "people" as if there's just one big shebang. I mean yes, sure, in the big picture we're all woven and everything's connected, but the core of what it means to be humanly social is that there are so many different ways of being people. The only way you get to paint us into one big picture is by going around and putting people in chains, psychological or very very physical, and forcing them into your world. Oh, yes, right: that happened. But we fought back, and we're still fighting. A lot of us "colonized" are very much not giving up: we don't want the "gift" of being able to be as white as you Europeans; we're decolonizing. We're taking ourselves back. The land: yes. The means of production: sure, on the way to a new future. But most of all: ourselves, the cultural and semiotic and profoundly material ways in which our humanity is reproduced through our relations with each other.

Mary: I think I really hear what you're saying, Nonkululeko. So many progressive nonprofits and universities and the like are talking now about the need for diversity, but too often it's just a rebranding campaign to recruit a few new faces without changing the underlying logic and ways of knowing. It's similar to when women have joined workforces, without changing the logic of labor, so that they have to act like men, work like men, to be successful. What we need is to really be able to see the whiteness, the patriarchy, the classism too, Jax, the heteronormativity and gender essentialism, that all intersect to keep difference suppressed. Then we can really start to dismantle the interlocking systems of oppression.

Jax: But surely, even amidst all this talk of difference, there are some universal values we can all agree on: justice, surely, and equality, and freedom! And core problems like capitalism! Right?

For a moment, it seems as if everyone will speak at once. Then a breath. And the moment extends.

blakkat: (musing) Jax, I think something interesting is happening here. Of course it makes sense to you that those should be values that permeate the whole world, and I honor you for it, and I think they motivate you to positive, courageous action against capitalism, for example. And because I'm familiar with your worldview, I can step into it and share those values and debate about how to actualize them.

But I can also see how those are very specific values that come bundled with an entire complex of other ideas and assumptions, and also material realities, that are part of the stuff of the Empire that has colonized so much of the world. The only way to actually make these ideas of the universal into universal ideas would be to impose that larger world on everyone else ...

Nonkululeko: That's a good point. Now this doesn't mean that your worldview and my worldview can't find points of connection. There's ways to mobilize my ubuntu with your solidarity that be very fruitful together -- but they don't collapse into the same, not as long as there's breath in my body!

Crystal: Yes, in fact, it seems to me that we have to stretch, to distance ourselves a little from our beliefs, our assumptions, in order to find the ways that other worldviews can connect with them. We start to see ourselves and our ideas as part of a web of consciousness that makes us, and we're coming to the edge or ending of one cluster of consciousness, and looking for ways for the familiar tendrils to adapt enough to another cluster's sinews to articulate them together.

blakkat: So we're most universal, in the sense of participating in the grand interweaving of life, when we're very practically seeking alignment between differences in specific situations. And we're most local, in the sense of speaking within a specific shared set of meaning-making patterns, when we speak about the world in universals.

Nonkululeko: Yes indeed! And both are important, and can live together well when you don't get a stick up your ass and think everyone should be like you, should be part of the same people you are. Eish. Why do you think most of us non-Empire-building peoples don't go all to pieces when your stories about your gods don't like up with ours? But, still, I don't see how this talk of universal and local gets us anywhere closer. It feels like university jargon.