The jomanity Point of View

Here are jomanity's overarching beliefs.

1: Humanity is more good than not.

Is it easy to become demoralized by humanity? Yes! Human nature is complex.

We are wired for all kinds of things we don't like.

And more importantly: We are wired for incredible things, like friendship and love and community and learning.

Human nature is a mixed bag of things, but our point-of-view is that the good outweighs the bad. It's an informed point-of-view--history demonstrates it.

2: The people around us, online and in real-life, have a huge affect on what we believe, think, say, and do.

3: Living a life with joy and meaningful connections takes effort. It takes learning and growth. And keeping up with the effort is much easier when you do it with other people.

For most of us, a little effort can go a long way to more joy and stronger, more meaningful, relationships. Being more deliberate in the day-to-day moments can help us choose how we want to feel, or the impact we want to have.

The simplest way to keep up with that effort? Be around people who also prioritize it.

4: Technology can lift humanity and foster compassion, courage, and generosity.

It can help us shift to us-and-them instead of us-vs-them.

It can help us focus on three essential questions: Is this true? Is it kind? Is it helpful?

Online, it's too easy to react. Things annoy us or offend us or anger us. Usually, people aren't trying to upset us. Most people, most of the time, are doing the best they know how to do, in that moment. (Most, but not all!)

We also believe more unites us than divides us, and that most people share the same five life goals:

  1. to be happy

  2. to be healthy

  3. to have strong and close relationships

  4. to know my life has meaning--that I'm part of something bigger than just "me"

  5. to know I am a good person--I live with values and character

So, our goal is to help find what we share, and remember, first and foremost, we are all human and share these goals.

jomanity is focused on building norms to catch our first reaction, then shifting to really understand someone else's perspective, then doing an effective job of representing our own perspective. This is hard. We want to help people do this better.

5: Democracy needs informed and thoughtful citizens to thrive. We might not agree, but we can work to understand.

Democracy flourishes when people with different perspectives come together to find shared solutions to complex problems. Democracy needs both shared values and different perspectives.

What does that mean?

  1. Shared values: We have a lot of shared values and big goals: Our shared values include what is important (say equality, fairness, compassion, community, opportunity). Our shared big goals include things like a strong education system, good opportunity for ourselves and future generations, clean water and air, a healthy planet, evidence-based science, to name a few.

  2. Different perspectives: No one person has all the answers. We all have different life experiences, and the more we understand each other's, the stronger we can get, together. We know that sharing our perspectives, our research, and our ideas with each other, in a respectful way, helps us build more resilient and sustainable systems. Listening, questioning, collaboration, and compromise.

6: We believe everyone can practice healthy skepticism without cynicism. We can look for positive intent, and we can work to avoid being a sucker.

We're talking about skepticism with what we hear and see, and what we think and believe:

  • What we hear and see: It's easier to manipulate and distort information than it's ever been. Fake news is easy to create. Misleading statistics are a google search away. Even well-meaning people spread misinformation. "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."

  • What we think and believe: Every human on the planet has biases. From money to race to how we see ourselves, biases are deeply ingrained into how we think. That's okay--knowing it is a great place to start.

When we say "healthy skepticism," we're talking about understanding our assumptions and beliefs so that we can be more fair and make better decisions.

7: We don't think any group of people is better or worse than any other group of people.

We don't believe that any groups of people are superior or inferior.

We fundamentally believe in equality by race, age, gender, size, religion, sexuality, and country of origin.