How Real Change Begins

This week’s Crisis and Transition post, “How Do We Get There?,” feels like one of the most clarifying pieces offered so far. It meets a question that has been quietly echoing beneath so many conversations, on this Substack, in our communities, and in our own minds, the question of strategy. Not strategy in the narrow sense of party politics, but strategy in the deeper sense of how a society makes a decisive turn when the road ahead is crumbling.

What I appreciate most about this week’s post is its honesty. It refuses easy answers. “There” depends entirely on what one is aiming for, electoral wins, party realignment, economic democracy, or a paradigm shift capable of confronting the polycrisis. Each “there” requires something different, and the post makes that visible in a way that brings coherence to a conversation often scattered by competing visions of change.

But beneath these layers lies the heart of the piece, the recognition that incrementalism is no longer enough. We are past the point where slow cultural drift can meet the scale of disruption already unfolding. What is needed, the post argues, is an accelerated paradigm shift, a kind of revolution of consciousness, not in the sense of violence or force, but in the sense of clarity, coherence, and shared moral direction.

For me, this lands deeply. So many of us feel the urgency of this moment but struggle to imagine what organized transformation could look like. The author’s use of Sarkar’s concept of intellectual revolution offers a grounded framework, one that feels both visionary and remarkably practical.

The three stages he outlines feel less like a rigid sequence and more like a natural developmental arc:

Ideological education - where individuals cultivate clarity, curiosity, and the intellectual grounding needed for leadership.

Platform propagation - where ideas move outward into public life through conversations, gatherings, creative work, and accessible literature.

Democratic fight - where those shared ideas shape policy, candidacies, institutions, and collective action.

Seen this way, transformation isn’t a single leap. It’s a widening, from inner understanding to collective vision to structural change.

What stays with me most, though, is the reminder that movements require more than righteous energy. They require continuity. Leaders with depth. Institutions capable of holding momentum. Communities that stay in the work long after the slogans fade.

That truth resonates with the crises we face today. Whether we are talking about climate disruption, economic fragmentation, or the unraveling of national narratives, none of it will be or can be met by bursts of outrage alone. We need the slow, steady work of building something durable, a worldview, a set of practices, and a network of people who refuse to let the future be decided by entropy or concentrated power.

And yet, something in this week’s post also feels deeply hopeful. It honors the hunger that people already feel for alternatives. It calls out the beginnings of a new alignment forming across writers, thinkers, organizers, and communities. It names the possibility that, in this time of upheaval, the seeds of a different kind of revolution, one of meaning, coherence, and shared purpose, are already germinating.

How do we get there? Perhaps we begin exactly where this piece points us, by cultivating understanding, fostering dialogue, and building the kinds of relationships that allow ideas to move from insight to action. By recognizing that paradigm shifts don’t start in legislatures, they start in the quiet places where people begin to imagine new possibilities together.

This moment asks for both urgency and patience, both vision and discipline. And maybe that is the deeper promise of this week’s post, that the path forward will be shaped not by any single leader or institution, but by the growing constellation of people willing to think, speak, and act from a deeper place.

Read the full post here.

Toward a more just and loving world.