Every imperialized form, institutional and relational, repeats a similar deception: that change requires their consent. Justice, it says, must pass through their process. Your access to mercy requires their seal of approval. The dispossessed must wait for the powerful to become sufficiently incentivized toward generosity.
But here is a proposed truth that has broken many empires in history: the authority to heal, feed, house, and liberate comes from the act itself. When you share bread with the hungry, you don’t need permission. When you forgive a debt, or a harm, or a slight that would overwhelm or even destroy your fellow, you don’t need approval. When you convert vacant spaces into shelters, you don’t need to wait for legislation.
The Commonwealth of liberation, what some call the Kingdom of Heaven, others call Beloved Community, and we might simply call justice made tangible - it exists wherever people enact it. Not in some future time, not even in tomorrow. Not after the revolution. No, it happens now.
The Covenant as Concrete Infrastructure
Let’s be clear about what we mean by “Covenant.” Many will undoubtedly come to this description from an experience of sentiment or Sunday school metaphor. The Covenant as we describe it is a social technology as practical as plumbing, as structural as building codes, as measurable as a budget.
When the ancient confederation of Israel proclaimed a holiday now known as Jubilee (yovel) their systemic cancellation of debts, the real liberation of those in bondage, and restoration of land to its original stewards was more than metaphor and practicing poetry. These stories describe logistics. Debt records destroyed. Land deeds transferred. Prison doors opened and shackles removed. This was infrastructure on top of inspiration.
When the prophet Isaiah declared the “acceptable year of the Lord,” he listed specifics: release for captives, restored vision for the blinded and obscured, emancipation for the marginalized. When Yehoshua bar-Yosef ben-David (“Jesus”) stood in that Nazareth synagogue and declared “Today this scripture is fulfilled,” he wasn’t announcing a metaphor, or a spiritual abstraction. He was invoking an ancient practice of socio-economic and political reset, a declaration that the logistics of liberation were to begin immediately, with or without permission.
The early Jerusalem community that was described in Acts of the Apostles as having “held all things in common”? They didn’t create a commune for ideological purity. They created an self-contained economic system where no one went hungry because no one else hoarded as private possessions. They made mercy into math: from each according to ability, to each according to need, mediated not by market but by obligations rooted in Covenant constitutional practices.
Your Institution Is Already a Commonwealth Embassy
Here’s what these endless manifestations of “empire” spend so much time trying to distract us from remembering: every institution we inhabit can become a jurisdiction of conscience. We don’t need to wait for systemic change. We are the system, and we can change now.
In Your Workplace
The warehouse, the office, the factory, the dealership, the platform where all of us, you included, sell our hours - it can become a cooperative tomorrow. You and your coworkers have every skill needed to run it. The only thing management provides is the fiction that you need them.
Start small: Form a mutual aid fund for emergencies. Share skills and tools freely. Document every process so no one becomes indispensable. Build solidarity across departments and shifts. When you’re strong enough, make the offer: We’ll buy this business and run it ourselves, or we’ll build our own.
Platform workers: Your apps are just databases with fancy interfaces. Build your own dispatch cooperative. Own your data. Set your rates. Keep your dignity.
In Your Neighborhood
Those rental buildings bleeding you dry: they can become Community Land Trusts. Pool resources, secure financing from credit unions or community development financial institutions, buy the land beneath your feet. Remove it from speculation forever. Make housing a human right, not an investment vehicle.
Start a tenant union today. Share maintenance skills. Create a repair café. Build a tool library. Start a community garden on that vacant lot. Create a time bank where an hour of childcare equals an hour of plumbing equals an hour of tutoring. Make money obsolete for meeting basic needs. Doing any one of those things inches forward the lines of resistance. Sharing the burdens in communal solidarity manifests real cells of Commonwealth presence.
In Your House of Worship
These sanctuaries that sit empty six days a week, they are all already zoned for assembly. Most, if not all, have kitchens, classrooms, gathering spaces. Stop waiting for heaven and use use buildings to begin it.
Consider models similar in spirit to the one below:
Monday: Free clinic (recruited volunteer nurses and retired doctors)
Tuesday: Free meal (not charity—community dinner where everyone contributes what they can)
Wednesday: Bankruptcy clinic, debt counseling and a micro-fund for buying out predatory loans
Thursday: Skills workshop and tool library
Friday: Youth programs that teach cooperation over competition
Saturday: Legal clinic for tenant rights and worker organizing
Sunday: Celebrate what you’ve built together
Create a modern gleaning program: Partner with local farms and groceries to redistribute excess. Start a closet for professional clothes. Offer your parking lot for a farmers market that accepts SNAP and gives away surplus.
In Schools and Universities
That curriculum teaching competition and scarcity, replace it with cooperation and abundance. Form study circles outside the classroom. Teach what you know freely. Create alternative credentials based on demonstrated skill, not purchased degrees.
Start a free school in your community. Share knowledge like you share bread: freely, knowing it multiplies when divided. Build apprenticeship programs that connect youth to elders, skills to needs, learning to doing.
In Uniformed Services
Those of you who took oaths to protect and serve, start protecting the vulnerable from systems of exploitation. Start serving human need over property rights. Put your bodies between oppressive knees and vulnerable necks. Put your badges between a pointed firearm and a frightened citizen. If you are a watcher on the walls, then let your eye be as sharp on corruption and criminality in uniform as outside of it. You need no permission beyond courage and integrity.
Consider forming peace guilds within your departments. Master de-escalation. Refuse unlawful orders. Document abuse. Protect whistleblowers, with your bodies if necessary. When you leave service, train communities in self-defense and transformative justice. Convert your skills from domination to emancipation.
Veterans: Your discipline, logistics expertise, and ability to function under pressure are exactly what movements need. Build cooperative businesses that construct instead of destroy. Teach survival skills that build community resilience. Your bands of brothers and sisters can become cells of reconstruction.
In Public Service
You civil servants who keep the gears turning - you know where the inefficiencies hide, where resources get wasted, where human need gets lost in bureaucracy. Restructure from within.
Make budgets transparent. Redirect funds from control to care. Prioritize projects that renew ecosystems, protect vulnerable populations, and de-commodify life-sustaining resources. Streamline processes that frustrate the vulnerable. Leak information about waste and corruption. Build parallel systems that supplement when official ones work, and replace when official ones fail. When a failing system collapses, have a reclaimed commons infrastructure ready to catch those jumping from the sinking ship.
The Prooftexts Are Already Written
Many will come to this with a strong sense of culture, tradition, and faith. The richness of justice held within those manifold paths of humanity are full of sage wisdom and divine truth on these topics. For any of us who benefit from acting from a place of scriptural authority, it overflows:
From Hebrew and Yahwistic Scriptures:
“Proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants” (Leviticus 25:10)
“Learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow” (Isaiah 1:17)
“He has told you, O mortal, what is good: to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly” (Micah 6:8)
From the First Century Apostolic and Christian Texts:
“The Breath of YHWH flows through me to proclaim good news to the poor... to set at liberty those who are oppressed” (Luke 4:18)
“[All those who joined the Disciples] held all things in common... there was not a needy person among them” (Acts 4:32-34)
“Belief that doesn’t produce action is as useful as a corpse” (James 2:26)
From Islamic tradition:
“The believers are but one brotherhood” (Quran 49:10)
Zakat as mandatory wealth redistribution
The prohibition of riba (usury/interest) as economic exploitation
From Buddhist teaching:
The sangha as economic community
Right Livelihood as refusal to profit from suffering
Interdependence as economic reality
From Indigenous wisdom:
The Seventh Generation Principle
Gift economies that build relationship over accumulation
Land as relative, not resource
But here’s the radical claim: You don’t need ancient texts to authorize feeding the hungry. The authorization comes from hunger itself. You don’t need scripture to justify housing the homeless. The authorization comes from human need meeting human capacity.
Six Verbs That Build the Commonwealth
Forget complicated theory. The Commonwealth runs on six actions, repeated until the world changes:
HEAL - Set up first aid stations, mutual care networks, free clinics. Share medical knowledge. Create healing circles. Treat trauma with community, not just chemistry.
FEED - Cook extra and share. Gleaning programs. Community gardens. Free fridges. Meal trains. Buy from local farms, cook together, eat as equals.
ORGANIZE - Build unions, cooperatives, assemblies. Create communication trees. Establish rapid response networks. Make decisions together.
FIX - Repair cafes. Skill shares. Tool libraries. Maintenance collectives. Fix what breaks instead of throwing it away. Restore buildings, relationships, and hope.
TEACH - Free schools. Apprenticeships. Story circles. Document everything so knowledge isn’t hoarded. Every person a teacher, every person a student.
BUILD - Construct tiny homes. Retrofit abandoned buildings. Create energy systems. Build the physical infrastructure of liberation with your own hands.
The Federation Model: How We Stay Ungovernable
We don’t build another hierarchy to fight hierarchy. We build a federation—autonomous cells that support each other without surrendering sovereignty.
Two Gates Protocol: Keep the edges porous for new people and ideas. Keep the core protected from co-optation and extraction. Welcome many, trust gradually.
Fleet Doctrine: Multiple modes for multiple moments:
Peace mode: Sustainable daily operations
Storm mode: Mutual aid when crisis hits individual members
Battle mode: Coordinated resistance when empire strikes
The Table as Charter: Authority comes from sharing meals, not holding titles. Leadership rotates like dishes at a potluck. The agenda emerges from actual needs voiced at actual tables.
Transparency as Witness: Publish what you do. Share your budgets, your methods, your mistakes. Make it easy to replicate and hard to co-opt.
The Release Ledger: Track what matters: Debts forgiven. Meals shared. People housed. Hours of rest restored. Make mercy measurable and measured.
Empire’s Weakness Is Our Opportunity
The system is failing. Everyone knows it.
Workers can’t afford to work
Tenants can’t afford to rent
Sick people can’t afford care
Students can’t afford to learn
Farmers can’t afford to farm
The planet can’t afford the waste
This isn’t a crisis—it’s an opportunity. Every failing system is space for alternatives. Every breakdown is room for breakthrough. But only if we build the alternative before the collapse, not after.
Start Where You Are, With What You Have
You don’t need a million dollars. You don’t need permission. You don’t need to wait for the perfect moment or the perfect people. You need three friends who are tired of waiting. You need one shared meal where you make decisions. You need one action that helps one neighbor.
This Week:
Call three people who share your frustration
Share one meal where you discuss what’s possible
Identify one need you could meet together
This Month:
Form your first cooperative structure (buying club, meal share, repair circle)
Connect with existing mutual aid networks
Start documenting your model so others can replicate
This Year:
Expand from mutual aid to economic democracy
Build federation links with other groups
Begin acquiring community assets (land, buildings, tools)
The Choice Before Every One of Us
We stand at the hinge of history. The old world, the world of extraction, exploitation, and empire, is ending. Its own internal contradictions guarantee its collapse. The question is not whether it will fall, but what will be in place to carry the people to safety.
Will we build another resource-gated hierarchy guarded by new badges and serving a competing donor class? Or will we finally build the Commonwealth: the world where everyone has enough because no one hoards beyond their own sufficiency, where power serves thriving within community instead of extracting from it, where mercy becomes policy?
The blueprint exists. The models work. The technology is available. The only missing element is our collective decision to stop waiting for permission.
Start Where You Are: A Field Guide to the Commonwealth
The world doesn’t need another manifesto. It needs neighbors who show up.
You already know something’s broken. The rent keeps climbing. The hospital bills pile up. Your friends work two jobs and still can’t afford childcare. The elderly neighbor eats alone. The guy sleeping in his car in the grocery store parking lot has a college degree. You see it. We all see it.
The question isn’t whether the system is failing. The question is: what are you going to do about it tomorrow morning?
This Is Not About Perfection
You don’t need a PhD in economics to start. You don’t need a 501(c)(3). You don’t need a five-year strategic plan or a board of directors or a mission statement approved by committee.
You need a Tuesday evening and a willingness to try something different.
Here’s what that might look like:
Open your door. Cook more than you need and invite the people you know are struggling. The single parent down the hall. The recently divorced coworker eating takeout alone every night. The college kid who called home asking for grocery money.
It’s just dinner. But it’s never just dinner.
Ask someone to tell you their story. Then ask another person. And another. Listen without trying to fix everything immediately. You’ll start to see patterns; not abstract “systemic issues,” but actual recurring problems that actual people face in your actual neighborhood.
Someone keeps mentioning they can’t get to job interviews because their car died. Maybe you have a car sitting unused during the day. Maybe your neighbor does. Maybe three of you could work out a simple system.
Someone’s about to get evicted over $400. You can’t solve the housing crisis. But you might know five people who could each spare $80. That’s not charity, it’s circulation. Next month, maybe they help someone else. Maybe they don’t. But you did, and in that you made possible new inched steps toward Commonwealth.
The elderly woman upstairs who hasn’t left her apartment in weeks, she doesn’t need a social worker. She needs someone to check in, maybe help with groceries, maybe just sit and talk for twenty minutes. This is how it can start: not with grand pronouncements, but with specific responses to specific needs in specific places.
Yes, You’ll Get Burned Sometimes
Be prepared to get taken advantage of. Expect it. Build it into your math. Someone will eat your food and ghost you. Someone will borrow money and disappear. Someone will take up space in your guest room longer than planned and leave a mess.
Justice, like rain and sun, falls on the just and the unjust alike.
You get wiser. You set better boundaries. You learn to distinguish between someone in genuine crisis and someone running a con. But you don’t stop showing up. Because the alternative, turning everyone away because someone might game the system, is just another way of letting fear run your life.
These forms and logic systems we call “empire” derives its legitimacy and consent power from keeping all of us afraid of each other. Not just in a sense of safety, but in a social fear: afraid of being foolish, afraid of giving too much. Of “being taken advantage of” in some sense. Afraid that mutual aid is naive and only “smart” people protect their assets and mind their own business.
That fear is the lock on the door which prevents you from accessing the commons more than it protects theft of your basic needs. In your generosity is the key that unlocks the beginning of the Commonwealth. It’s the kind of courageous generosity (“faithful charity”) that builds community while it restores suffering bodies - exactly the kind of business for which the great prophets, sages, oracles, and justice leaders within history are famous.
From Dinner to Commonwealth
Here’s what happens when you persist:
The weekly dinner becomes a standing thing. People start bringing friends. Someone mentions they’re good at fixing bikes, suddenly there’s a repair clinic in your driveway on Saturdays. Someone else teaches ESL. Another person knows about tenant rights. Yet another is a member of the local Quaker Meeting. The standing dinner adds a second night with more and different friends.
What’s happening is not someone building a nonprofit. It’s building a network of actual capacity.
Someone needs childcare. Three families realize they can trade off days and cut their costs by two-thirds. Someone needs a place to stay while getting back on their feet. You’ve got a guest room. They’ve got carpentry skills and your deck needs fixing.
This is circulation, not charity. This is commonwealth, not welfare.
The difference? Charity flows downward and creates dependency. Commonwealth circulates and creates capacity. Everyone has something to give. Everyone has needs. The question is whether we build systems that allow those gifts and needs to meet each other - or whether we keep letting everything flow through markets and institutions that extract a fee at every turn.
You Don’t Need Permission
No one is coming to give you a license to care about your neighbors. No official from the city or the state or the nonprofit-industrial complex needs to approve your mutual aid network.
The beautiful, dangerous, ungovernable truth is this: you can just start.
Donate blood this week. It takes an hour and costs nothing.
Text three people you know are lonely and invite them over.
Check on your elderly neighbor.
Organize a tool library in your building or on your block.
Start a group chat for your street and use it to coordinate help.
Learn your local tenant laws and help someone fight a bad eviction.
None of this requires paperwork. None of this requires capital. All of it requires showing up.
When You’re Ready to Scale
Eventually, your dinner table won’t be big enough. Your group chat will have fifty people. You’ll realize you need actual structure—not hierarchy, but coordination.
This is when you start asking bigger questions:
Could we pool resources to buy a building together and take it off the speculative market?
Could we form a cooperative and hire each other instead of selling our labor piecemeal to bosses?
Could we create a community land trust so housing stays affordable forever?
Could we build a mutual aid fund that operates on Jubilee principles—forgiving debts, redistributing surplus, ensuring no one falls through the cracks?
These aren’t fantasies. They’re proven models. Mondragón in Spain. Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi. Twin Oaks in Virginia. Thousands of housing cooperatives across the U.S. They started exactly where you are: people who decided they were tired of waiting for someone else to fix things.
The Ungovernable Institute Exists to Help
We’re not a traditional think tank. We’re not a nonprofit. We’re not here to become the new boss.
We’re a confederated “braintrust”: a network of researchers, organizers, economists, theologians, and everyday neighbors committed to designing alternatives to scarcity-based systems. We study what works. We document models. We connect people building commonwealth in different places so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
We believe in Sabbath economics: systems that cancel debts, redistribute wealth, and let the land (and the people) rest. We believe in covenantal governance: structures where people are bound to each other by mutual commitment, not by profit motives or bureaucratic control. We believe in post-scarcity design: building systems that assume abundance and cooperation instead of scarcity and competition.
But we don’t believe you need us to start. We believe you’re already the expert on your own neighborhood. We’re just here to share what we’ve learned and help you connect with others doing the same work.
The Harvest Is Ready
Millions of people are already doing this work. They’re just invisible to each other—isolated in their own neighborhoods, their own cities, thinking they’re alone.
But as you act, you become visible. As you build, you become ungovernable. As you love, you become unstoppable.
The tools are already in your hands:
Your home
Your skills
Your networks
Your time
Your willingness to try
The workers are waking:
The nurse who’s tired of watching patients ration insulin
The teacher buying school supplies out of pocket
The organizer who knows there’s a better way
The neighbor who just wants to help
The Commonwealth doesn’t arrive by decree. It emerges from accumulated acts of courage.
Every debt you forgive weakens empire.
Every meal you share builds community.
Every time you choose cooperation over competition, you vote for the world that’s coming.
Stop Waiting
Stop waiting for the perfect plan.
Stop waiting for ideal conditions.
Stop waiting for someone else to lead.
Stop waiting for permission from powers that profit from your paralysis.
Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.
Cook dinner for someone this week.
Ask someone their story.
Offer your guest room.
Share your tools.
Teach your skills.
Learn from your neighbors.
The Commonwealth is here, waiting to be claimed by those brave enough to live it.
Now. Today. Where you are.
With or without permission.
Because the only permission that ever mattered was the one you give yourself when you decide that waiting is over and building has begun.
The Ungovernable Institute is here when you’re ready for the next step. Until then: cook, share, listen, build. The revolution starts at the dinner table.
The Ungovernable Institute is a confederated braintrust committed to post-scarcity design, covenantal ethics, and liberation from the ideologies of zero-sum adversarialism. We are not waiting for permission. We are building the world that must emerge.
Join us. Or better yet—start where you are. We’ll find each other in the Doing.
We did this very thing. It's amazing. Now we're the largest food bank, diaper bank, and community resource center in a city of 1.4 million people. We recently added three part-time social workers. And we're working to add a telemedicine clinic. It can be done.
Hell yeah! The blueprint for the new world.