The Collective Sovereignty Framework

A Framework To Change Your Life

A common reaction to the ideas and concepts I write about here is a thoughtful “hmm”. And while this may be due to some lack of a gift of writing gab on my part, primarily it’s because a village, or a collective family sovereignty — as concepts— aren’t on most people’s maps. They don’t really know how to think about it at all. Or even how to have a knee jerk opinion on it.

It may sound good or interesting, it may excite the mind, but how does one get from where we are now to there? Where is this idea of building the village in relationship to our life currently?

To answer this question I put on my MBA hat and decided what everyone needed was a good old fashioned framework. The Collective Sovereignty Framework¹. In this framework the goal is to move ourselves and our families from Dependence to Sovereignty to Co-Sovereignty.

The difference between each of these is less drastic action and more tweaking of why and how we undertake daily actions. In an atomized society such as ours, community can seem very far away - yet it’s really quite close to us, once we learn to recognize it on the map.

Anyway, here’s the framework:

Doing what business schools never expected… using my MBA powers for good.

• Dependence: AKA the “normie”. Acceptance of and conformity to the broader social order. Progress is any technology, innovation or legal/social changes which give the normie more options.

• Sovereignty: There’s cultivation of agency and desire to grow. Progress is in formulating and fulfilling our personal and/or family vision, rather than just accepting what is given to us.

• Co-Sovereignty: Requires a personal “conversion”; a desire to merge intentions with other sovereigns into a shared culture. Progress is the creation of infrastructure, routines, resources, networks and stories which in turn create meaning. Which is exactly what a village is.

I’m going to walk through a bunch of examples of how to apply this framework below and what shared agency could look like. But first I should note that few people live entirely within one of these categories. Most readers probably exist somewhere between dependence and sovereignty - depending on what aspect of the social order we’re talking about. Some have a foot in the door of Co-sovereignty.

The goal of the framework is to get to the Emergence phase with the same-ish group of people across as much of your life as possible. To the extent any of us achieve this, we have community.

In each of the examples that follow, find yourself, where are you on the framework?

Prioritizing Social Commitment

Let’s start with an example everyone will hate: family/personal activities and hobbies.

Where Are You?

A driving factor in the disintegration of local community groups and the decreased scope of church communities is that everyone has their own hobbies. There are infinity channels. There are infinity niche interests. There are infinity opportunities for kids.

It doesn’t matter if that hobby is “good” or not… binging low budget Netflix movies or Health Habit Stacking or taking your kid to sports practice all do an equally thorough job of keeping you from the proverbial “church potluck”. And since you’re not there, the potluck sucks.

And the problem grows worse as the professionalization and specialization of hobbies separates us further from each other. To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, now only dancers dance, only singers sing, only extraverts get together, only super fans consume the same media, only serious athletes play sports, etc.

We can use our agency to let go of passive participation and superficial mediums of connection in favor or making actual friends and keeping our social commitments. Shared agency comes into play when enough people choose to prioritize those social commitments, (even if they could do it by themselves), above almost everything else. Church is essentially this. Life used to be full of these kinds of commitments.

Tag Yourself

Many of us will find restoring social commitment to be awkward because the muscles of community have atrophied across generations. We’ve been brought up in contexts of irony, sarcasm, and well trained in self-protective communication styles which prioritize our own “safety” and agenda. Genuine communication skills, understanding, and seeing past our own traumas, blindspots and weaknesses will require training and effort.

What dominates your interactions?

Asking Bigger Questions & Solving Bigger Problems

The default setting of society is to outsource education to public schools and as that has produced success nearer and nearer to the Mendoza Line, more parents are looking at separation of one kind or another.

Where Are You?

Sometimes the gap between us and an emergent community is simply the kind of questions we have of the people around us. PTA meetings and school clubs not withstanding, most public school parents have little reason to ask more of each other than playdates or rides. Participation in the school itself answers all the big questions. But once separation begins, all kinds of potential big questions start appearing and the potential for exercising shared agency is realistic. But it doesn’t stop with homeschooling co-ops, private schools and tutoring.

For example, there’s a big difference between a homeschool co-op which asks “how can all the moms efficiently teach math to all the kids” or “how can we visit the museum at a discount” vs a co-op that creates a genuinely new educational infrastructure for those involved. Imagine a co-op that asked questions like “can we create a meaningful rite of passage for our boys?” “What vocational or internship opportunities could the dads offer?” “What businesses could we fund for our kids?”

Those are the fruits of shared agency.

Related to asking bigger questions is solving the local symptoms of bigger problems. For example, more than a year ago, I wrote an article about how to improve youth dances, (or other social activities), churches put on for teenagers. It’s a good example of a bigger problem (i.e., destructive or non-existent dating culture among youth) that could be addressed locally through shared agency.

What BIG problems can you solve on a small scale?

What problem is a church youth activity solving today? What bigger problems could it solve? Not for the whole world but for stewardship?

There’s an M. Scott Peck quote I really like for its simplicity: “We cannot solve life’s problems except by solving them.” Take ownership, merge your agency and solve problems.

Making The Personal Collective

Sometimes the gap between us and community is just a few conversations away and only requires you to do what you’re already doing, but with others. One example of this could be smartphone/other technology restrictions families already engage in.

In this community, we do…. what?”

It’s one thing to say these are the restrictions my kids have. It’s a much more powerful thing to say these are the restrictions my kids and their friends have. It’s one thing to monitor technology use for your kid, but it’s a much more powerful thing if the other adults in your kids life understand and support your boundaries because you took the time to talk and make the decision together.

“Our kids spend a lot of time together or at each other’s houses, what rules should we establish about texting, browsing, video games, etc.?”

There is of course some give or take here. Start with people who are likely to be most closely aligned with you and work with them to explicitly reach agreement and alliance on whatever personal decisions you want to make together. Don’t stop at using your agency to separate your own home from “acceptance”, go and find allies to establish an emergent social order which will expand the scope of your personal decisions.

Another example of making the personal collective is with media and story.

In the past, culture was an active thing that people worked together to produce, rather than go out alone to consume. Any dad can arbitrarily set up media rules for his household and curate an inoffensive and/or fun proxy culture for his family. But a new culture only emerges when a critical mass of men decide to make new stories, together.

The emergence of any new social order will be powered by the shared agency of people who are willing to own challenges, adventures, stories, narratives and imagination, and not just experience them through proxy.

The Framework

Well, there you have it: version one of the Collective Sovereignty Framework with enough examples that I hope we can map out where “building a village” is in relation to our lives at present. Over the coming weeks, I’ll dedicate a couple more articles to the nuts of bolts of this, likely starting with how to develop shared agency, which is quite a different skill, in my mind, from developing personal agency. What else do you want to see in more detail? What did I miss? What did this make clear for you?

Build The Village” is the premier source for men who want to lead in their homes, in their community and in the work they do. Please support my work in producing challenging and thought provoking material by becoming a paid subscriber.

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Recent Appearances

Zion Media, a Latter-day Saint YouTube Channel, had me on to talk about friendship and normal life for men. Check it out.

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How Can I Help You?

These are big ideas and the details need to be tailored to your family, your fatherhood goals, your village and your circumstances. To that end, I’m available to consult with you to help you succeed.

Do you want to lead your family? Do you want to parent intentionally? Do you want friendship and fraternity? Do you want to raise your sons to be even better men than you? Do you want to build purpose into your family life? I can help you.

1. The first thing I realized when putting this framework together is that I had no idea how to spell the word “sovereignty”. But for the number of times it appears in this post, I’ve become world class at spelling “sovereignty”.