Common Sense for the Greater Good

OM.2010.234 - #115 - Fluxhibition #4 - James Bowen - Key Box (The key for the lock is inside of the box)

🕊 Common Sense for the Greater Good

A Vision Beyond the Mundane

There is a kind of common sense that serves the common good—what we might call the mundane common good. It fills potholes. It funds schools. It protects rights. It keeps the lights on. It makes sure society more or less functions.

This kind of common sense is important. But it is not enough.

We live in a time when functioning is no longer sufficient. When survival is not the same as life. When a working system may still be a soulless one. And so, alongside the common good, we must begin to speak of something else:

The Greater Good.

Not just local.
Not just national.
Not just efficient or sustainable.
But whole.

A deeper, wiser, more luminous good.
A good that sees the planet as sacred.
That honors every person not as a resource, but as a living spark of potential.
A good that transcends borders and budgets and short-term metrics.
A good that listens.

We must reclaim Common Sense for the Greater Good—a new civic compass grounded not only in practicality, but in poetry, ecology, beauty, and the long memory of the Earth.

This is not a utopian escape. It is a return.
To what indigenous traditions have always known.
To what mystics and artists have always whispered.
To what children understand instinctively before we train it out of them.

The Greater Good is not a policy. It is a way of being.

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The Role of the Creative Spirit

In the age of algorithms and automation, it is not markets or machines that will save us. It is our ability to dream again. To imagine differently. To feel more. To connect the inner life with the outer world.

This is why the creative spirit matters so deeply now.

Not only as entertainment.
Not only as personal therapy.
But as cultural guidance.

Artists, poets, dreamers, makers—these are the ones who tend the deeper roots of the Greater Good. They are not distractions from society. They are its conscience. Its compass. Its possibility.

But we have failed them. We have failed ourselves.

We have treated art as decoration. Creativity as a hobby. Vision as a luxury.

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A Vision Rooted in Trust

This is why I’ve begun writing about the Creative Freedom Act—a bold proposal to provide every professional creative with a $100,000 annual basic income.

Yes, it is a policy.
But it is also a test of imagination.

Can we trust people to make beauty and meaning if we give them the space to breathe?

Can we treat the cultivation of insight, story, and soul as public infrastructure?

Can we extend the logic of survival into the logic of becoming?

The Creative Freedom Act is the first seed.
A doorway from the mundane common good to the Greater Good.
From maintenance to emergence.
From function to flourishing.

It starts with the artists. But it ends with everyone.

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A Culture Worth Living In

We must not only preserve society. We must regenerate it.
We must not only be good citizens. We must become good ancestors.
And we must not only survive the future. We must shape it.

This begins, I believe, by building a culture worth living in.
A culture where creativity is not a side project, but a civic practice.
A culture where rest is honored.
Where silence is listened to.
Where the imagination is not a threat, but a guide.

This is the vision.

This is the Greater Good.

And this is the invitation:

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🌿 Call to Action

If this resonates with you—
If you are a creative soul, a cultural worker, a citizen of the deeper good—
I invite you to take the next step.

Join the movement.
Help seed the idea of the Creative Freedom Act.
Share this post.
Talk about it with your community.
Write your own version of what a Creative Society could look like.
Start imagining out loud.

Let’s not wait for permission.
Let’s start the conversation.
Let’s begin now—artist to artist, dreamer to dreamer.
Let’s do the work of the future.

Together.

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With creative trust,
Cecil