Age of Impact E-Book

James Marins

• Herausgeber: Editora Voo
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 570

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

In a time of correction, terrorism, corruption, unemployment, hunger, cancer, depression, in which we are constantly bombarded by catastrophic news, generating the "negative instinct" referred to by Hans Rosling, the question that surrounds us is: who cares? Based on a narrative that is both light and impressively profound, James Marins sets out to fight apathy and ignorance and make us feel the potential of the era in which we live. After all, our capacity for opinion, action, participation and collaboration at scale for systemic changes has never been greater. To understand our possibilities, we cannot limit ourselves to the narrow view of our personal horizon. We need a more comprehensive, complex and systemic analysis. To do so, Marins starts from three fundamental dimensions of the complex richness of our contemporary human condition: the Transforming Movement of Freedom, the Transforming Movement of Economy and the Transforming Movement of Consciousness. All these movements are interconnected, in order to constitute the Massive Transformative Movement, the backdrop in which the author weaves the entire work. The tools for action and for the updating of ourselves are available to all who care, in what is humanity's best time, our best opportunity. The Age of Impact.

Leseprobe

THE AGE OF IMPACT

The Massive Transformational Movement of Freedom,

New Economies, Social Entrepreneurs and Human Consciousness

Author:

James Marins

Editorial coordination:

Claudia Kubrusly, Joana Mello and Priscila Seixas

Translator:

Zora Morgenthaler

Cover, graphic design and graphics:

Estúdio Sem Dublê – Thais Scaglione

Revision:

Edson Furmankiewicz

Cover illustration:

Thalita Cantos Lopes

Layout designer:

Maurício Carneiro

Conversion to Ebook

Cumbuca Studio

Cataloging in Publication (CIP)

Marins, James

M339

The age of impact : the massive transformational movement of freedom, new economies, social entrepreneurs and human consciousness / James Marins ; [translator: Zora Morgenthaler]. – Belo Horizonte : Voo, 2021.

392 p.

Assuntos em inglês: Social change; Social evolution; Economic development - Social aspects; Human capital; Consciousness.

ISBN 978-65-89686-13-2

1. Mudança social 2. Evolução social 3. Desenvolvimento econômico - Aspectos sociais 4. Capital humano 5. Consciência I. Título.

CDD: 304.4833

Bibliotecária responsável: Cleide A. Fernandes CRB6/2334

Printed in Brazil

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One by one, each book a social counterpart

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Editora Doyen Ltda.

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To Gláucia

My soul’s soulmate

FOREWORDS Mara Mourão Marcel Fukayama

#1 THE MASSIVE TRANSFORMATIVE MOVEMENT

1. Who cares?

2. Mankind’s best era

3. Raffaello’s armchair

4. the age of impact

5. Massive Transformative Movement

6. Massive Transformative Purpose

7. Different vernaculars – the same message

8. Transformative Movement of Freedom (TMF)

9. Transformative Movement of Economy (MTE)

10. The “anomalies” that light up change

11. Transformative Movement of Consciousness (TMC)

#2 THE TRANSFORMATIVE MOVEMENT OF FREEDOM

1. A beach covered in thin, white sand

2. The freedom to evolve

2.1 From egocentric to holocentric

3. The potentials of freedom

4. Freedom is a three-headed goddess

5. Freedom in ignorance

6. There is no freedom in brutality

7. Natural freedom is not human freedom

8. The development paradox

9. Freedom and Development

9.1 Substantive freedoms

9.2 Instrumental Freedoms

10. Overcoming hunger

10.1 Hunger and ignorance inhibit freedom

10.2 Terrible natural disadvantages

10.3 Darwin’s shock

11. The geography of hunger

11.1 Hunger and moral behavior

12. The Malthusian Solution

12.1 The tortoise beats the hare

13. Monstrous waste

13.1 Hunger and obesity

14. Ignorance is a commodity that cannot be recovered once lost

15. Massive Schooling Movement

15.1 A blogger who changed the world

15.2 Massive literacy movement

15.3 We are over 200 million university students

15.4 Qualitative intensification

15.5 Massive transformation in scientific production

16. Our health has massively improved

16.1 Vaccination on a planetary scale

16.2 We have won valuable extra lives

17. New planetary ethical concept

18. We are much smarter than a century ago

18.1 Intelligent compassion

19. Our Creativity ‘s Big Bang

19.1 The exponential explosion of music

20. Civic Freedom

20.1 Ethnocentrisms and racisms

20.2 A lime-filled shovel over racist scientism

20.3 We are equal in our infinite diversity

21. The conquest of civic freedom

22. The end of fascism, communism and totalitarianism

22.1 Democracy has won and continues to win

22.2 The suffragists and the feminist waves

22.3 The rainbow of human diversity

22.4 Water and tea, ethics and religion

22.5 Beyond religion

22.6 A Challenge for quantum physicists

22.7 Deontologists and consequentialists

22.8 Fundamentalists are on both sides

22.9 The curve of consciousness evolution

22.10 The revolution of the sensitive self

#3 THE TRANSFORMATIVE MOVEMENT OF ECONOMY

1. Economists and freedom

1.1 Individualism does not build freedom

1.2 The freedom of cooperation

1.3 Economic relations and the law of universal gravitation

2. Is economics the theology of our time?

3. The economy is no longer the same and is undergoing profound methodological and cultural change

4. A world populated by “pleasure machines”: the mythological Homo economicus

5. The ethical turning point in economics and the revision of the entrepreneur concept

6. The near monopoly of economic thought

6.1 The mathematization of economic Science

6.2 State/market dualism

6.3 Damn Nobel! The possibility of theoretical transformation

6.4 Ecological awareness

6.5 New Economies: Impact Economy

7. Bipolar Ideologies

7.1 Deideologization and decentralization

7.2 Capitalism versus socialism

7.3 Welfare state

7.4 Decentralized innovation in social designs

7.5 Polarizations are melting

7.6 Welfare capitalism and market socialism

7.7 Innovative social architecture

7.8 We are miles from the end

7.9 The innovative designs of post-capitalism

#4 NEW ECONOMIES: IMPACT ECONOMY

1. New business designs

2. Movements, Theories, Proposals

2.1 The case of cultural education in sustainable development

2.1.1 The role of the United Nations

2.1.2 Systemic needs

2.1.3.The survival of humanity and Agenda 21

2.2 Natural capitalism: salvaging human capital and natural capital

2.3 How much is a forest, a river or a child worth?

2.4 Corporate Social Responsibility: “people first”

2.4.1 Conflicting code of ethics

2.5 Conscious capitalism versus S&P 500

2.5.1 Dehumanized companies versus humanized companies

2.6 The B Corporation Movement: how to earn your children’s’ and grandchildren’s’ admiration

2.7 World alliance of ethical finance

2.8 The big anomaly

2.9 Microcredit: Grameen bank’s innovative phenomenon

2.10 Social finance: financial innovation that highlights paradigmatic shifts

2.10.1 Recommendations to the ecosystem

2.10.2 The 6 trillion-dollar man

2.11 Social enterprises

2.12 Social startups: innovation, replicability, and scalability to impact the world

2.13 Shared value capitalism: not all profit is equal

2.13.1 Just a tactical readjustment

2.14 Generative economy: spontaneous mutation of ownership

2.15 Economy of abundance

2.16 Sharing economics and collaborative economy

#5 DIMENSIONS OF THE SOCIAL ENTREPRENEUR

1. Social entrepreneurship

1.1 The social entrepreneurship concept

1.2 Social value creators

1.3 The agent’s multidimensionality

2. Social entrepreneurs are practical dreamers

2.1 Multidimensional and dynamic construction

2.2 Differences between the social entrepreneur and the business entrepreneur

2.3 An approximation language

2.4 Entrepreneurously virtuous

2.5 Five heterogeneous elements

2.6 Ethical, technological and psychological dimensions

2.6.1 Ethical dimension of the social entrepreneur: through love, pain, conscience (LPC)

2.6.2 Purpose is the moral energy that drives action

2.6.3 Dual solidarity

2.6.4 Needs and Satisfiers Matrix

2.6.5 Instrumental and substantive human needs

2.6.6 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

2.7 Purpose catalysts: pain, solidarity, consciousness

3. The social entrepreneur’s technological dimension: innovation for impact

3.1 Without innovation there is no social entrepreneurship

3.2 Seven sources for innovation

3.3 Product, Service, Process (PSP)

4. Psychological dimension of social entrepreneurs: dreamers, determined, bold and practical (DDBP)

4.1 The rich psychodynamics of an impact entrepreneur

4.2 Dreamer, determined, bold and practical (DDBP)

5. Purpose, innovation and attitude (PIA)

6. Several notions and their problems

7. ETP/PIA-based synthetic models

7.1 Social business

7.2 Yunus model social company

7.3 Entrepreneurial philanthropy

7.4 Entrepreneurial volunteering

7.5 Social intrapreneurship

7.6 Companies, governments, universities and foundations

7.7 Exponential social business

7.8 Civic entrepreneurship

7.9 Advocacy, the “good lobby”

7.10 Social finance

7.11 Businesses with a social and environmental impact and businesses for biodiversity conservation

#6 THE TRANSFORMATIVE MOVEMENT OF COUNSCIOUSNESS

1. The greatest of all innovations

1.1 Why are we able to innovate socially?

1.2 A few reasons for systemic change

1.3 A long human journey

1.4 Memories made of claws and teeth

1.5 Innovative Lucy

1.6 We evolved faster than other animals

1.7 A leap in eras

1.8 The last millisecond

1.9 Darwin can’t explain

1.10 State of permanent Innovation

2. The innovation of evolution

2.1 The sadly-famous selfish gene

2.2 Life is not an accidental excrescence

2.3 A thirty-century old mistake

2.4 We only believe in what we can touch

2.5 The axial age

3. Humanity’s stages of consciousness

3.1 Beyond our brain

3.2 Evolutionary Society

3.3 Evolutionary lines and paradigms

3.4 The evolution of consciousness’ exponential curve

3.5 Not painless or fast, but possible

4. The evolution of evolution: It’s time for us to update ourselves

4.1 Goodbye sapiens, goodbye economicus

AFTERWORD (I did not sail miles, I voyaged eras)

INDEX (Diagrams, graphics, tables, charts and figures)

NOTES AND REFERENCES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FOREWORD: MARA MOURÃO

Ever since I decided to pursue a career as a filmmaker, my goal has been to inspire and promote positive changes in society. My first comedy was already a critique on the “Brazilian way”, our flexible approaches towards honesty.

With the comedies, the audience’s reaction was always very warm: “I had a great time, I laughed a lot.” After all, this is what you expect to hear about comedy. It wasn’t until I made my first feature documentary — Doctors of Joy, the movie — that I realized the audience’s reaction was wildly different. This time, people told me that the movie had changed their lives. For the first time I felt the power cinema had as a tool for social impact. I deeply understood art’s social role.

There were hundreds, maybe thousands of reports coming in from all over — individuals, organizations, companies, NGOs, schools, vulnerable communities — all using the film as a means to start dialogues, as social engagement, inspiration or a source of information. And, of course, this experience also changed me. Feeling that I was touching people’s lives so directly truly moved me. That’s why I decided to go further, making a film about social entrepreneurship at a time when few people knew what it was about.

While Doctors of Joy, the film portrays the work carried out by one organization, Who Cares is a more comprehensive film because it offers an overview of social entrepreneurship around the world. Who Cares might have actually been the first movie on the subject. Imagine this: a filmmaker from a country where the cultural sector is not treated as a priority, produces a film with international reach. Sounds pretty unlikely, but these things happen “in the movies”.

Who cares reach stretched beyond what I expected. It was exhibited at Harvard, Columbia, Duke and Brown Universities, among others; at places like World Bank, the French Embassy in Washington, the Canadian History Museum, Google’s Palo Alto headquarters and many others; at over 30 film festivals around the world, winning six international awards and a letter of recommendation from UNESCO.

The social impact a movie can have is not measured only by its the box office. A different metric is used.

I heard moving testimonials from teachers saying that they changed the way they teach and young adults who decided to give their careers a new direction. There were unexpected stories, too. A girl who gave the movie to her best friend thinking she would love it and her friend left the DVD on the living room table. Result: her father, an elderly man, watched the movie and decided to start an NGO.

I still hear impact-filled stories continue to this day. There are cases of people who started working in the social sector, others who founded social enterprises and even a few bold souls who quit their jobs to start their own socially impacting businesses.

The film unfolded into a TV series and a high school education program — “Sementes de Transformação” (Seeds of Transformation). Alongside several partners, we created Brazil’s first Social Entrepreneurship camp and started visiting schools and NGOs, answering a recurring question we get from young people: “I want to change the world. Where do I begin?”

In sum, the repercussion was tremendous. Who cares has become a movement that inspires people to discover their own transformative power. It is the kind of movie that makes people organize viewing sessions with groups of friends at home, or one that schools recommend as homework. The social impact a movie can have is not measured only by its the box office. A different metric is used. As the saying goes: “Not all that counts can be counted, and not all that can be counted counts.”

I would already have been very happy and grateful if Who Cares transformed a single person’s life. It would have been worth our dedicated team’s effort, the years spent raising funds and the endless hours spent in the editing room.

But nothing compares to what happened to James Marins!

Imagine how I feel knowing that such a beautiful and profound piece of work like Theage of impact was sparked into life through my film. I can only thank Liziane and Rodrigo for recommending the movie to James and Gláucia. I don’t think they could imagine that this simple gesture would grow into this snowball, culminating in the creation of the Instituto Legado, one of the most serious organizations in this country, and in this wonderful book you, the reader, will be happy to read. Now I can truly say that Who cares has reached its greatest point of impact.

The book I have the honor to preface is a masterpiece. A sensitive and very intelligent portrait of a new world consciousness. Moreover, it is a manifesto! A call for people to understand how we are all interconnected. James managed to bring together key contemporary issues, starting with social entrepreneurship and taking it much further. As he says himself: A Massive Transformative Movement. I could not have defined it better.

Ashoka founder, Bill Drayton, says democracy is not just the right to vote and speak freely. For him, the culmination of democracy will only come when we are all proactive citizens. Drayton’s vision — everyone a changemaker world — fits in perfectly with Marins’ vision when he describes that, while we are experiencing colossal problems, we also have the ability to endure these challenges today, individually and collectively.

J. Marins proposes that we take responsibility for, or rather co-create, this new society, asserting that in this age of hyperconnection, we can either propel problems or build solutions together. Nothing seems more accurate.

We are really experiencing something new and disruptive. The author brilliantly describes this global historical moment. And I dare to say (intuitively) that it all started with a few social leaders, fostering the creation of social organizations, which, in turn, inspired the emergence of the first social entrepreneurs, who influenced a whole new culture in the private sector.

We are witnessing the arrival of social intrapreneurs, social enterprises, social impact businesses, inclusive and shared value businesses, B Corporations, the Conscious Capitalism Movement, startups that are already born with ethical values in their DNA, collectives, social currencies, ethical banks, and this whole new ecosystem that creates a virtuous cycle from which a more just and sustainable post-capitalism emerges.

We have never lived in such a paradoxical world. Intolerance, terrorism, fanaticism, polarization, inequality and lack of empathy are in opposition to a world where we share homes, vehicles, bicycles, services, talents and knowledge; where young people no longer desire the latest model for their cars, but rather, purpose. Perhaps our youth wants a more trivial, simpler lifestyle. A way of life where we come into contact with the Beauty in the World, and fulfill ourselves through the arts and sciences, through spirituality and intimate contact with nature, not a world based on exacerbated consumption.

What will happen to our current economic system if consumption, as it exists today, collapses? And what will this world be like if people stop trying to sublimate their inner emptiness through superfluous consumption and start consuming values, education, well-being and relationships instead?

For the first time in human history we have a common enemy: environmental degradation, resource depletion and our very survival as a species unite us. And this union is something new within the history of mankind. In a profound and all-encompassing way, James proposes: “In this new age, Homo economicus, a 250-year-old creature, must give way to the younger, such as Homo solidaricus, Homo noeticus or Homo empathicus.”

It is clear that the impulse that drove James Marins to write The Age of Impact was not merely that of knowledge, of a scholar, for in the lines and between them, it boils over a deep desire to generate good, to have a positive impact, and to influence old structures into remodeling. As he says himself: “Create a world of possibilities: a world where everyone’s days are spent on dreams and achievements, not fighting for survival.”

Are we too optimistic? No, James. You are right when you see a “massively healthier, freer, more democratic, self-innovating society capable of accessing a post-conventional level of freedom, a higher state of consciousness.” After all, “the greatest innovation of all lies in our consciousness.” And surely this book will do a great deal towards raising its readers’ awareness.

The Age of Impact is a fundamental, necessary, and inspiring book for anyone who believes that everyone can change the world. May you have good transformations!

Mara Mourão, filmmaker

FOREWORD: Marcel Fukayama

I received the honorable invitation to write this preface with joy and a great sense of responsibility. I have been following James’ work in Curitiba and I am thrilled to see his leadership spread to other actors as well as the initiatives he makes to support a number of entrepreneurs committed to building another possible world.

In The Age of Impact, James carefully structures the context for the massive transformative movement we experience. Recognizing all the advances we have made within the realms of freedom and economy, he highlights the importance and potential found within the realm of consciousness. This allows us to look at the world through different lenses and create a sense of collective progress at another level of impact and scale.

Through System B, I serve a global movement that aims to redefine success in economy. In this way, we can consider success not only financially, but also in terms of society’s, the people’s and our planet’s well-being.

This broadening of consciousness towards building a new, more inclusive and sustainable economy is at the heart of our work. The Age of Impact has arrived and you can see it, for example, through five “key actors”.

Investors are the first group. The risk and return dimensions marked the industrial capitalism of last century. In the current century, impact dimension is considered an important variable in the equation of economic success. Currently, according to Credit Suisse, there are nearly 300 trillion dollars under management in the world. Of this amount, J.P. Morgan points out, 24 trillion is managed for “Environmental, Social and Governance” (ESG) investments. This is a growing category of investments, particularly after the 2008 crisis in the US, which seeks to integrate impact metrics into corporate measurements and reporting.

Along these lines, entrepreneurs are the second “key actors”. Every day, more and more companies use impact measurement and reporting

tools as a way to have comparable, verifiable and credible metrics on the effect their business has on the value chain.

While measuring impact as accurately as measuring your profit is very important, it is not enough. A favorable institutional framework must be built to build an impact economy. In this sense, governments, as the third “key actor”, have designed favorable policies. Brazil, for example, through the Impact Investment and Business Strategy (ENIMPACTO), has mobilized political actors, entrepreneurs, investors and organized civil society around this debate.

We need to have leadership for the challenges and opportunities that this transformative movement brings.

However, we recognize that an organization is essentially made of registered individuals. We need to have leadership for the challenges and opportunities that this transformative movement brings. It is critical, as a fourth “key actor,” to involve and engage academia to create new academic programs, systematizing success stories, and generating evidence that the Age of Impact has come and is truly generating prosperity for all.

Finally, impact becomes a reality for consumers, the fifth “key actor.” Increasingly informed, they are looking for more responsible and conscious consumer options. Although price is a sensitive variable, brand attributes are already influenced by the positioning of companies, their practices aligned and consistent with the discourse, and especially their responsibility towards triple positive impact.

In this sense, I noticed at least three relevant contributions in The Age of Impact. The first is James’ commitment to fighting ignorance and apathy. In the long-term voyage to this other possible world, it is critical that we raise awareness, mobilize and engage everyone.

The second contribution is to offer a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities that we experience in Brazil and in the world. Carefully, James sets the scene for the world we are in and how we got here.

The third—and most important in my opinion—is to encourage and invite us to be part of this massive transformative process. Despite all of the challenges the context brings, James nudges us out of paralysis. This is our best era and we are the generation the world expected.

So welcome to the Age of Impact. It already exists and is happening now.

Enjoy the read!

Marcel Fukayama, social entrepreneur and co-founder of Sistema B Brasil and Din4mo

#1

THE MASSIVE TRANSFORMATIVE MOVEMENT

“I see entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs, popping up all over the place. And I see people telling stories of the entrepreneurs, which basically then creates a virtuous cycle of more people who are learning about social entrepreneurs and they actually start becoming social entrepreneurs, which in turn creates more social entrepreneurs. And ultimately, to be a citizen and to be a social entrepreneur, there’s probably gonna be no difference.” (Premal Shah, co-founder of KIVA, in the movie Who Cares, directed by Mara Mourão, 00: 51’: 18”)

1. Who cares?

It is a cold winter morning in Curitiba. The bright sun, more vibrant at this time of year, paints the sky with intense shades of blue. But a dystopian, discolored world unfolds before me, portrayed in a succession of terrifying images, insane conflicts, bombs exploding in dirty clouds. I hear the noise of randomly fired shots. I see physically and morally disadvantaged, disgraced, injured people. Environmental disasters hurt my retina and my conscience. Chimneys spew toxic smoke. A white plane dumps tons of pesticides. Slums sprout amid urban waste. Hopelessness. Strange faces stare at me. Children, young and elderly people are left behind. It is no use closing your eyes. Apathetic faces outline the feeling of abandonment of our own species. Suddenly, a female voice emerges, flatly, and says to me, “One of the things that always got me was the phrase ‘who cares?’, which we hear so often. The feeling of indifference is very sad. And apathy and ignorance are, in my opinion, our worst enemies.”

Everything unfolds at breakneck pace. Children play in the sewer, women in line carry water on their heads and walk painfully. Thousands or millions of human beings moving fast in monochrome train or subway cars. They are running from something, toward something or toward nothing. I don’t know. The music is strong, paced by a vigorous cello. I feel my heart speed. A male voice, in an undefinable tone, is heard: “Most people spend their lives just trying to survive. And the rest of them get lost in distractions, bombarded by meaningless information.”

Then I recognize the moving figure of Gandhi, hands in prayer. I soon see Martin Luther King’s vigorous features. The lifeless voice returns and asks me if we are still capable of caring. It questions whether you need to be a special kind of human to bring about big change. I did not have the answer. The same voice announces, “Everyone can change the world.”

And it tells me the story of social entrepreneurs—dreamers and darers, obstinate and practical—who are changing the world.

Who Cares1is a Brazilian documentary directed by filmmaker Mara Mourão. It was exhibited at US universities such as Harvard and Columbia. It has won awards in Brazil and in various parts of the world, from the United States to Indonesia, receiving a special recommendation from UNESCO. Before watching this movie, I did not recognize the concept of a “social entrepreneur”—a key piece of the documentary and this book. Like most people, I mistakenly thought that entrepreneurship served solely as a means to make money.

I found that there are hundreds of millions of people who care.

I was introduced to the film and the concept by two great social entrepreneurs, Liziane Silva and Rodrigo Brito. It is thanks to them and their incredible collaboration, that my wife Gláucia and I started Projeto Legado (Legacy Project) in 2012, an impact expansion program for social entrepreneurs from which the Instituto Legado de Empreendorismo Social was born.

In this seven-year journey I found myself facing a new universe, a world in which people use their life’s purpose, their innovative ability, their boldness and their will to change the world for the better, to positively impact our planet. I experienced social entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial philanthropy, social businesses, social finance, impact startups—new philanthropy and corporate designs that are systematically transforming economic structures. I found that there are hundreds of millions of people who care.

2. Mankind’s best era

I also realized that we are living in humanity’s best era, our best opportunity as a species, and that is one of the themes of this book. It is, as we shall see, what the voice of the best historical investigations and the most objective statistics says. Unfortunately, however, as seen in several media outlets, we humans tend to be attracted to bad news. Newspapers, magazines, television news, social media posts sell more, generate more audience, much more likes, and are more quickly consumed—swallowed and shared—if they bring carry misfortune or bad news.

Perhaps because of that, many may say that empirically evidencing the achievements of mankind as a victorious trend for human beings is foolish.

They state this, firstly, because the theme defies common sense—not to be confused with good sense. Many of us firmly believe that we are living in the worst version of humanity: wars, threats, corruption, famine, terrorism, cancer, depression, unemployment are in most citizens’ mental backdrop, mercilessly bombarded and victimized by the general press’s profuse catastrophist agenda—and social media. The “negativity instinct” referred to by Hans Rosling.2

Secondly, because so many people miss the “old days”, when they imagine things were much better. Zygmunt Bauman called it the retrotopia syndrome in the last book he wrote before he died. Deceased in 2017, this much-admired author and great social critic left a legacy of liquid pessimism, albeit rhetorically flawless, but steeped in one-off misfortunes that do not reveal the grandeur of the human species. According to Bauman, our civilization has failed to tame the animal that lives within us all:

“... the Hobbesian animal inside the human emerged from the modern reform of manners untamed and intact, in its pristine and potent, crude, coarse, boorish/loutish form, which the civilizing process managed to veneer over and/or ‘outsource’ (as in the case of transferring displays of aggression from battlefields to football fields), but not to mend, let alone to exorcise.”

And goes on:

“That animal lies in waiting, ready to wipe out the dreadfully thin coating of conventional decorum—meant to hide the unprepossessing, rather than suppress and contain the sinister and gory.”3

Bauman, in his own retrotopia, died under custody of time, as a prisoner of the twentieth century. By taking on such views, some would prefer still to be living in the vibrant Beatles-decade, when segregation was still the law; others in the charming Belle Epoque, or in the Trinte Glorieuses, when polite knights died in duels or chose to be revolutionaries in the French Revolution, the era of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, the humanist physician; some would love to live as Roman imperialists, joining orgies, and carrying their own gladius. Perhaps there are those who wish to return to the pseudo-democratic and slave-like ancient Greece, to worship the God Dionysus (or Bacchus, when amongst Romans) and enjoy peripatetic conversations with Aristotle. Lately, I’ve heard people say they’d like to have a lifestyle akin to the muscular Viking conquerors and rapists portrayed on pay-tv series’.

The most radical would like to go back to living naked as happy hunter-gatherers in harmony with generous mother nature, completely isolated from cruel civilization. This would signify total freedom, natural freedom, the return to lost paradise, perfect retrotopia.

For these and other reasons, I was told it would be a waste of time to write about the achievements of humanity, social entrepreneurship, and the opportunities in our Age of Impact, because what people really prefer to read about is our species’ defeats, their delusions, and their ignorance. For some, collective defeats and the colossal failures of our civilized experience would serve as justification of our individual unhappiness, our befuddlement towards the world. It is a “stop the world I want to get off” view.

But I don’t think it foolish to talk about our real possibilities for action, our advances, both material and conscientious, as do Hans Rosling, Steven Pinker, Ken Wilber, Miriam Leitão, amongst many others, because the problem is that bad information (information deficit) generates enormous comparative difficulty and this convinces us that we are a defeated species. As the narrator in the movie Who Cares tells us in voiceover, apathy and ignorance are our worst enemies. I intend to fight both here.

While Bauman believed that there is only a thin layer separating us from barbarism, Hans Rosling created dynamic, spectacular, robust graphics to depict our great advances as a society in terms of wealth, health, education, art and culture. It is not a thin layer, but rather several layers of civilization that we have interposed between our animal atavism, between the carnivorous life of the bestial sapiens of 200,000 years ago, and our contemporary achievements.4

While Bauman saw us as bloodthirsty and on the prowl, Steven Pinker writes a monumental book illustrating, through solid research taken from paleontological and historical sources, that—despite common misconception—we live in the safest era ever, with fewer violent deaths and less wars than any other period.5

While Bauman described us as crude, rude, rustic, coarse and tribal, Ken Wilber uses social psychology meta-analyzes, interspersing thousands of studies of the West and East, to conclude that we are at the most advanced stage of human consciousness, a global consciousness that continues to overcome the shackles of egocentrism and tribalism.6

In her book História do Futuro (History of the Future), the experienced journalist Miriam Leitão realizes the importance of our present moment: “No other time in our history has given us as many favorable conditions as the 21st century. Let us hurry, there is much to do, the future is being written”.7

My goal in this book is to show that no rhetoric is able to outlive facts. Misinformation and retrotopia end up having a paralyzing effect that can freeze our best collaborative possibilities. We need these possibilities for action and we must hurry because, although we are recognizably the best version of ourselves, much remains to be done.

We cannot ignore that we live in the age of humanity’s greatest production and accumulation of wealth, nor that the inequality of resources and opportunities is the mother of all evil. An OXFAM report entitled An Economy for the 99% tells us that since 2015, the richest 1% amongst humans possess greater wealth than the rest of the species and that just 8 men own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity.8

According to the World Health Organization, there are 2.2 billion people overweight and 850 million living in hunger. While 4 billion people use smartphones, 800 million people have no electricity, says the World Bank.

At an environmental level, extractive economy is depleting our planet, endangering future generations. UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns us that an environmental catastrophe is imminent if the planet’s average temperature experiences a two-degree temperature increase. It is our ecological emergency that can no longer be treated as mere externality, as many economists would prefer. At the same time, 175 countries around the world have already recognized the problem and are engaging in solving it.

Sad paradoxes of our bisecular utilitarian development model. Scarcity and abundance, hunger and overweight, coal and sun, darkness and light.

What I propose within and between the lines of this essay is self-reflection. Who cares? Are we paralyzed by the speed of our contemporary world, left dizzy, heading nowhere? Do we believe there is no way forward? Have we reached our own conclusions or decisions or do we prefer the comfort of outsourcing the problem? Are we able to build the future or do we prefer to inhabit the past?

Of course we have economic problems and issues with the design of a market that has ruled out human and ecological ethics. The perception that socialism has lost is growing, but capitalism has not won. That means there are alternatives.

The point is that we can no longer frivolously believe in old solutions, sometimes State-centered, sometimes corporation-centered, or even in universities or churches or totalitarian ideologies, and this does not point towards the demise of the human “animal”. Much to the contrary.

Finding a solution depends on each and every one of us. This phrase, which might have sounded foolish once, an ordinary self-help book mantra, is finally real: in recent years, we have all gained a slice of power to accomplish that we have never had before. Our capacity for mass-scale opinion, action, participation, and collaboration towards systemic change has never been this expressive.

Digital technologies have rebooted our behavioral patterns. Our pockets carry small windows of information, knowledge and action. Smartphones have become extensions of our brain in a way no science fiction book or movie has ever been able to anticipate. The psychogenetic drama in Gattaca,9 the terrifying future described by Harari10 in Sapiens, or even Ridley Scott’s dystopian Blade Runner and its charming pseudo-human androids, were all unable to give us a glimpse of the possibilities we live in today.11

Today, over half the beings of our species are endowed with the power of ubiquity (being everywhere at once) and omniscience (the ability to know everything). Not by use of a crystal ball, but with something even more powerful, a disruptive technological crystal display. In it, we can watch what is happening in the world, in real time.

On this magical screen, the choice may or may not be conscious, it is exclusively up to us. Our conscience is the only filter capable of meeting the challenges created by digital machines and algorithmic robots, perhaps programmed under falsehearted intentions.

As the world becomes more transparent, for evil and for good, by exuding all that is bad daily and multiplying all that is good—which is not a small amount—we have to choose what we will propel forward, minute by minute: selfishness, ethnocentrism, utilitarianism, hatred, tribalism and nationalism, or understanding, tolerance, love, empathy, diversity, collaboration and globocentrism. Within the dynamics of hyper connection, the logic of ecosystem connections, it is exclusively up to us whether we boost problems or co-identify solutions.

Freer, better informed, better connected and more aware, our responsibility to all of humanity increases. Our individual actions are easily multipliable and count more than ever. The freedom conquered, be it physical or digital, is not the comfort zone some imagined. It is a territory for decisions, where thoughts, when shared, become massive action.

Because of this and much more, we must act. And the good news is that we can. We must because we are facing colossal problems and we can because over the last decade we have gained the ability to meet these challenges individually and collectively.

This book is not about “naive optimism”. On the contrary. In the present essay, I mainly visualize the “big picture”, that is, the evolution of humanity seen from its most comprehensive perspective, using a complex combination of empirical and theoretical data. Therefore, it is important to keep in mind that everyday facts such as poverty, ignorance, selfishness, violence, unemployment or hopelessness, while relevant and shocking to our senses, do not represent the whole of humanity and do not even express the current state of evolution in which we find ourselves. To understand our possibilities, we cannot limit ourselves to the narrow vision of our personal horizon. We need a broader, more complex and systemic view.

When I say that we can act, I am not simply formulating a moral statement, but proposing to share the experience I had over the past eight years while immersing myself into a new universe: the universe of impact, of the ethics behind the social and environmental impact that changes the world.

And in this new universe lies both the realization and the proposal. In recent years, I have had the opportunity to closely monitor social impact initiatives in all scales. I am constantly amazed at the capacity of social entrepreneurs, their extraordinary sense of purpose, how big they dream, how bold, determined and practical they are. In my personal journey, whether in the corporate or legal world, or as a writer or teacher, and more recently as a co-founder, co-creator, mentor, and investor of several social impact initiatives, I have met hundreds of social entrepreneurs who redefine the way we can systemically solve our society’s complex problems.

I have learned that there are thousands of entrepreneurs who measure their success not through the profit they make, but mainly through the social and environmental impact they seek to benefit society as a whole. Entrepreneurs who do not want to be the biggest in the world, but the best for the world.

I spoke to an inspiring Bengali banker who challenged conservative financial principles and built the world’s largest bank for poor people, impacting millions of human beings.12 I was also with a brilliant Spanish financier who created a paradoxical ethical bank and led a worldwide movement that handles money consciously to positively impact the world.

I was directly involved in the evolution of a startup with high social and environmental impact, made up of people who decided to change their lives to change the world. Using nanotechnology, they built, in Brazil, the largest photovoltaic factory on the planet, to produce sustainable, recyclable and organic film cells, capable of generating unimaginable, scalable, clean and renewable energy (organic photovoltaics [OPV] cells).13 I signed up for an app that uses video calls to help blind people carry out their daily tasks and was surprised to see how, in two years, this app made it possible for nearly 3 million volunteers to assist around 150,000 visually impaired.14

But it is not just the big initiatives that count nowadays—and that is where the difference lies. I witnessed the birth and development of transformative ideas, initiatives of all sizes, for all scales of action, capable of decentralizing solutions.

Without having to leave my city, I interacted with young idealists and mechatronics scholars who use a brilliant combination of technologies such as mechanics, electronics, agronomy, and the Internet of Things to distribute and revolutionize the world’s food production. I took part in a project, initiated by a PhD scorpion specialist, who created a satellite–based location app to connect the disabled with students willing to offer assistance. A simple, transformative, empathic, inclusive and unprecedented idea.15

I witnessed 13-year-old hackers from the suburbs of Curitiba coming up with technological solutions to help NASA fight forest fires in the United States. They nonchalantly communicated how they created innovations that no other aerospace engineer had even considered.16

I followed the efforts of a young, unemployed designer who literally started from scratch and created an innovative social business that combines empowerment, income generation, female empowerment and recycling textile industry waste. In three years, this ingeniously resourceful social entrepreneur helped over 600 families.17

I was touched by the story of a hard-working mother from the outskirts of Paraná who turned her little daughter’s pain into an innovative entrepreneurial philanthropic project that, using 3D printers built by her brother, produces highly functional, small-sized, hand prostheses, that are sent to children worldwide suffering from limb agenesis.18

I met a father who, from the unspeakable grief of losing his daughter to a hospital disease, found the transformative energy to create an intensive care unit robot that now saves ten lives a day.19

Seeing as I didn’t have to go far to find these many examples of transformation, can we really claim that we are destined to rudeness, as Bauman suggested? While some prefer to see a world of rude nationalists, utilitarian traders, xenophobes, tribalists, ethnocentric leaders, fundamentalist terrorists, and dictators who have fun enriching uranium, I see a universe of empathetic human beings, conscientious entrepreneurs, all-embracing leaders and collaborative citizens working as a network and systemically enjoying unprecedented possibilities, locally or globally. Those in the first group are prisoners of the past, of retrotopia. Those in the latter group are the designers of the future. Again, the choice of which one to tune into is up to us alone.

So how do such distinct and seemingly distant stories relate? What is the connection between the creative suffering of a mother living in a small country town in Brazil and the unrest of a Bangladeshi-born economist who won the Nobel Peace Prize? There is an immeasurable amount of invisible threads that intertwine all these stories.

I understood how the purpose of social and environmental impact has been established, en masse, within the new global ethics operated human beings that move life and the cultural sauce we call market, redefining the directions of our arduous trajectory on planet earth. A reflection of a new level of human consciousness.

As I began writing this book, I became acutely aware that I was looking at something more, something considerably larger than a handful of ethically responsible initiatives. In writing it, I found that all these seemingly anomalous events are not isolated. These are occurrences related to a global historical moment, an era of planetary transition, an auspicious moment for our species.

We find ourselves at a turning point, one that can be understood by considering the combined strength of various unignorable achievements that we must strive to comprehend to their fullest transformative extent. By elevating the condition of physiological, intellectual, civic and conscientious freedom—post-conventional freedom—of hundreds of millions of human beings and giving them access to technology capable of generating exponential innovation, an unprecedented creative energy is born— the first of its kind—and can be used through new civic and business designs that propose the reinsertion of ethics into economic actions.

A gigantic Massive Transformative Movement is underway, accessible to all and interlaced with invisible threads. It is the Age of Impact.

3. Raffaello’s armchair

Although every era in history can be considered special due to certain aspects, the last few decades have given us an unprecedented intersection of very powerful factors that are rapidly redefining the human journey. That is what this book is about. But explaining a worldview is a complex task. As such, I chose a simple triadic analysis model as a foundation, and then covered it in colorful complexity. This option has always spoken to me because of its aesthetic elegance and pedagogical strength.

The triadic way of seeing reality boasts a certain tradition—almost intuitively—within several thought systems common to all ages and in all fields of inquiry.

Francis Bacon said that three discoveries differentiated his time: the press, gunpowder and the compass. For Thomas Hobbes, three branches of knowledge surpassed all others: physics, psychology, and politics. The Catholic religion consecrated unity in the holy trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Augusto Comte divides history in three states: theological, metaphysical and scientific. Karl Polanyi perceives three major economic eras: reciprocity, redistribution, and the market. Richard Parnas maintains that Western thought can be divided into classic, religious, and scientific. Peter Watson, in his monumental history of ideas, states that humanity’s greatest discoveries were the soul, Europe, and experimentation.20. And the Pulitzer Award winner, Jared Diamond, explains the world as a trivial combination of germs, guns and steel.21

In fact, there’s no need to go very far. After all, we all agree to inhabit a biosphere composed of land, sea and air and school teaches us that our physical body is composed of a head, a trunk and limbs. We don’t have to, but we should. Therefore, some important triadic views of the world can be found in this book. Evolutionary psychologist Ken Wilber proposes that our worldview contemplates the triad me, us and this, and explains that the conscious evolution of humanity starts from the egocentric, follows into the ethnocentric and reaches the globocentric.22 From an epistemological point of view, systemic thinking is described by Maria José Vasconcellos as the triadic relationship between complexity, instability and intersubjectivity.23 Like them, I also discuss the figure of the social entrepreneur under an ethical, technological and psychological three-dimensionality.

For all of these reasons, in the following pages I will explain the historical stage in which we find ourselves based on the spheres of freedom, economy and consciousness. Three fundamental and comprehensive dimensions of the complex richness of our contemporary human condition that characterize the Age of Impact.

The first dimension is the transformative movement of freedom, because we need to understand just how much has been achieved within this field—on fronts such as physiological needs, race and gender equity, and political and religious freedom—and the impact this has on our future.

The second dimension is the transformative movement of economy, in the face of the profound changes happening in thought and action within this terrain as the market moves from capitalism to post-capitalism. It is also the dimension for innovation, where technological tools for building the future reside.

The third and perhaps most important dimension is the transformative movement of consciousness. Consciential evolution is the intangible adhesive matter that promotes our collective development and enables us to reach the level of post-conventional freedom.

All these movements are inextricably intertwined to form this book’s backdrop, the Massive Transformative Movement (MTM), where the Age of Impact sprouts and flourishes. The division serves my didactic purpose alone, without the intention of establishing any kind of epistemological reductionism.

Although this essay has no philosophical pretensions, as I merely propose to describe a worldview presented from as much of a systemic perspective as possible, it is a worldview stemming from my recent experiences, which I hope can be useful, as it is for me, in better guiding our actions. This view can be seen in the figure below, whose movement is represented by the image of a pinwheel with three identically powerful blades capable of providing transformative action:

Diagram 1 – Mass Transformative Movement (MTM)

In this triadic structure I chose to highlight the existence of the phenomenon we call Massive Transformative Movement, each dimension is also divided into three, almost invisible, but equally intertwined sub-dimensions. The first examines the important movements that provided civic, physical, and spiritual freedoms. The second launches the critical dimensional triad that affects state, private, and environmental economy as the evolutionary movements of this representation and its association with social entrepreneurship and new economic designs. And the third sub-dimension is devoted to the evolutionary movements that span from egocentrism, ethnocentrism all the way to globocentrism.

To conclude the book’s veiled backbone, all three proposed dimensions will be examined as vertical columns that will be traversed by three horizontal constants: decentralization, exponentiality and innovation. These elements are transversal to all the covered themes, sometimes operating as presuppositions, sometimes as results. For example, in the MTM Era, hundreds of millions of citizens have gained the ability to think and act, which exponentially increases the decentralization of decisions, solutions and resources. Innovative technology supplies billions of people with the necessary tools to foster collaboration like never before. Resources and information that until recently were accessed only by governments, corporations and universities, are now distributed across the globe, decentralized. These are exponential numbers.

These tremendous transformations occur worldwide and are associated with the rising level of human consciousness, an evolutionary phenomenon of the human species that has been studied in recent decades by developmental psychology researchers. These surveys indicate the existence of an exponential curve in the development of consciousness for all individuals.

With this synthesis, we can finally shape the following diagram:

Diagram 2 – Massive Transformative Movement (MTM)

That is, graphically speaking, the anatomy of this book. In fact, at first, I thought I shouldn’t reveal the text’s backbone. But I decided, for pedagogical reasons, to highlight this hidden infrastructure, which I call “Rafaello’s Armchair”. I gave it that name in allusion to the technique used by the Renaissance master. Radiographs of his pieces reveal that Rafaello, before painting a seated human figure, for example, drew the structure of the armchair as a means of establishing a reference, a proportion, even if the chair itself did not appear in the final portrait. Rafaello brushed thickly over the structure. Therefore, the above skeleton will be akin to my “triadic armchair”, since I will write about the design of the armchair, respecting—almost always—its proportions.

I recognize that the number of subjects dealt with in this essay generates a complex fabric, ranging from immemorial concepts of freedom to ethics, sociology, psychology, economics, ecology, technology, and spirituality to quantum mechanics. Considering the systemic view proposed here as much as possible, it is important that its representation expresses relationships and interactions rather than fragmentation and independence. The emphasis here is more on Vasconcellos’s relational (systemic)24, and Wilber’s 25 holistic and integral narration. For the systemic view that I seek to adopt here, I recognize that—despite my enormous limitations—the subject requires an approach that respects its complexity and, beyond interdisciplinarity, its transdisciplinary. Likewise, in the course of the book itself, I highlight the instability of the concepts employed and the need for dialogue between the several vernaculars, and variety of domains.

As I seek to convey some of my personal experiences here, I also do not intend to create a false impression of objectivity (although whenever possible I resort to objective discourse, which cannot be dismissed). But, on the contrary, I stand as the subject in the narrative itself, highlighting the intersubjectivity required by the subject matter. In fact, I understand that, as I write about this object, I am building it.26

I am well aware of the danger I am facing and that the reductions, formalizations and, in this case, the graphic representations like the ones I make above, are always very risky, even if they are used to fulfill an important informative role. Achieve this same instructive result without compromising the original spirit of the work, which is to demonstrate ongoing systemic changes, is what would ultimately make me happy.

I wish I could say, as Maimonides did, over 800 years ago in his fabulous Guide for the Perplexed:

“If you wish to understand all that this treatise contains in such a way that nothing evades you, relate its chapters to each other. In this treatise, things are never said by chance, instead everything is said with great accuracy and great precision. Nothing is expressed out of place.”27

But I cannot. Therefore, to make myself understood, in addition to the drawings presented here, I will use many other figures in order to make some issues more comprehensible—mostly where I felt my scarce literary and intellectual resources fall short. I will also use, both first and second hand, graphs and statistical tables that illustrate the proposed themes. Incidentally, all figures, graphs and tables will be available on the book’s website, as a presentation, so that they can be used freely by teachers, researchers, students, speakers, managers, social entrepreneurs, etc.

As I will be using many impact initiatives examples that are part of the Rede Legado de Empreendedorismo Social (Legacy Social Entrepreneurship Network), I have attached the case report for Instituto Legado, prepared by Erasmus Project researchers from the European Union, so that readers can have an external outlook of the several ecosystem fields of action the initiative covers. This European Union program, in which researchers at Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná (PUCPR) participate, is called “Empowering Change Makers: Youth Social Entrepreneurship and Social (Innovation in the Citizen Sector” and comprises a consortium between five countries (Brazil, Bulgaria, Greece, Namibia and Mexico), generating educational material about social entrepreneurship on a digital platform translated into several languages. Instituto Legado is one of eight cases chosen in Brazil (the case description is in the book’s Annex).

4. the age of impact

Some clarification on the book’s title is needed. The term age means a historical period, a given space of time marked by certain occurrences like a era. It can be a geochronological unit, indicating a time frame for geological reference, such as the Ice Age, or it can determine a cultural, religious, artistic or even technological period, such as the Christian Age, the Renaissance Era, the Napoleonic Age or the Space Age. An age or era, therefore, indicates a given moment in the course of time, in which a new order, a particular change in the status quo, comes to light. I have no intention of dating the Age of Impact or the when the MTM began, but I can say that the events that determine the changes analyzed here have gained momentum since the 1980s, with environmental awareness, the fall of the Wall of Berlin, the collapse of totalitarianism in Europe and Latin America, global economic decline, and the dawn of the Information and Knowledge Era and its characteristics of exponentiality.

The fact is that we are experiencing a transitional period that includes our conceptions of freedom, the introduction of new economic designs and the unprecedented capacity for innovation, not only technological, but of humanity’s evolution as well.

Impact is a polysemic expression, which is to say, it can have many meanings, and its use in the title of this book can hold more than one. The first and best known, refers to a sense of shock, a body in motion that encounters an obstacle. It is, in a way, what we feel when we find ourselves psychologically hurled, driven against or because of the acceleration of facts, technology, innovations, changes in the world that do not allow recreating. Impact is the strong impression, the reality shock we suffer in times of accelerating life.

While much of what I will deal with in the following pages relates to this sense of being thrust, of shock and bewilderment, this is not the main connotation of the word in this book. In addition, there are other spheres of impact in our era, such as what Rifkins calls “entropic impact,” referring to the shock our planet suffers when we consume a colossal amount of unrecoverable energy.28 This entropic impact is also included in the context of the book.

But the main meaning of the word impact, the semantic function often used here, is that of a new economic ethics that aims towards a positive social and environmental result. This important contemporary semantic strand has not yet been detected by dictionaries or encyclopedias. For example, if you search for “impact” on Wikipedia, you will find only one “disambiguation page”29. As it is used here, the word takes on new meaning, one that is most common in social entrepreneurship and new business designs. Impact, in this case, refers to the positive results that an economic activity must generate in society and the environment. Topics such as impact business, impact finance, impact startups, impact measurement and many others are common in this field. Although not yet in the dictionaries, it is already in conversations, lectures, books and actions.

In fact, with a little word play, I can say that this book talks about the positive shock caused by the introduction of an “impact ethics” guideline on the economy, a decisive and transformative cultural and conscientious blow.

5. Massive Transformative Movement

Today, major changes can occur in a matter of decades or even years. Or is there still any doubt that the device generation launched by the iPhone in 2007, and its thousands of apps, has ushered in a new era, profoundly changing the way people communicate, interact, have fun and work? Would it be too farfetched to talk about The Age of Smartphones, considering that about 4 billion people use handsets of the type today? The Age of Impact is embedded in this larger context that some call the Age of Acceleration, in which significant changes occur over very short chronological periods compared to other ages. It is precisely for this reason that the human being feels a sense of dislocation, capable of causing abrupt discomfort. A psychological sense of free fall for some and of inspiring ascent for others. Or, a sense of accelerated forward movement, like an airplane using the full power of its turbines, a rush capable of causing vertigo, an inexplicable acceleration of local air that becomes planetary. Have you felt it?

Therefore, our Age of Impact implies movement. This term can have several meanings. It can mean displacement (as above) or agitation, animation, rhythm, beat. But it also represents the proposition of change, alteration, revolution. However, in this book, my perspective on movement is more in line with the idea of evolution—social, artistic, political, cultural, economic, technological, and consciential. I therefore use the notion of movement in the widest possible sense, capable of encompassing both a conscious evolutionary action and an unconscious, but universal, modifying displacement. The phenomenon can also prove to be individual or collective, massive and exponential, enabling millions of human beings to be linked by subtle invisible strands representative of a new planetary culture.

In our Age of Impact, this evolutionary movement is transformative. When I say transformative, I refer to that which promotes change in a system’s state, which takes a new form, new paradigms, adopts a new arrangement. Something that innovates. I use the idea of transformation in the sense of positive change, evolution that improves our human, biopsychosocial, ethical, political, economic, technological, ecological, consciential and spiritual condition. A systemic evolution capable of creating new standards for our life on planet Earth, innovating old paradigms and promoting us as a species.

The transformative movement can be instrumentalized by one or more cultural, political, social, economic, ecological, movement. A strong example—and the basis of our reflections—is social entrepreneurship, which acts as a conscious transformative movement by adding an ethical element (the ethics of impact) to an economic action. But this movement encompasses initiatives that deliberately seek positive transformation through social entrepreneurship as well as those that do so unconsciously.

The social entrepreneurs’ movement is an example of a movement that transforms the world. Indeed, transformative movements may be the result of deliberate and organized, individual or collective actions, but they might also result from a convergence of ideal though unconscious conditions. You don’t have to know MTM or social entrepreneurship to be a part of it—as a matter of fact, most social entrepreneurs, for example, still don’t know they are social entrepreneurs.

I also want to explain why the transformative movement I address is qualified as massive. Normally, when expressing the idea of MTM, I am referring to the field of unconscious displacements. It concerns a process of displacement of millions or hundreds of millions of individuals who are part of the transformative movement, whether or not they are aware of this condition. Therefore, it is massive in the sense that it is countless, broad, comprehensive, transversal, decentralized, democratized. It refers to the fact that it reaches millions, hundreds of millions or even billions of people, contemplating, identifying and even proposing the current exponentiality of the movement. So, the movement is massive, but it does not mean massified, standardized, fixed—on the contrary, diversity is its hallmark. Time acceleration and exponentiality in physical space are related to this characteristic of massive transformation.

However, it is important that social entrepreneurs and other transformation promoters recognize themselves as such and, in this inspiring condition, evolve from unconscious agents to MTM conscious actors in the Age of Impact.

My specific object in this book is the transformative movements that are positive in various spheres of human thought, action, and condition. Although it is not within my limited reach to speak for everyone, many will be represented here, directly or indirectly. The MTM, being so broad, encompasses the entire set of conditions and actions that universally promote the ethical, economic, cultural, spiritual and technological transformation—individual, collective or exponential—of our individuals, our communities, our societies and our planet. But, most importantly, the movement we are studying transforms freedom, economy and innovation, all in convergence to build a better world.

6. Massive Transformative Purpose

At this point, I feel I should offer an explanation—as a sideline to the text—as to the origin of my inspiration for the perception of the Massive Transformative Movement. Contemporary management theorists have identified that many corporations, especially those called “Exponential Organizations” (ExOs—a concept created at Singularity University), often disclose in their strategies something that can be translated as a Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP), which are abridged statements used to express the organization’s larger aspiration. According to Singularity University researchers Salim Ismail, Michael Malone and Yuri Van Geest, MTPs are aspirational and some “intend to transform the planet, while others focus purely on a productive sector. But radical transformation is the ultimate goal”.30