What is on the side of community building is the widespread knowledge that something is not working. Every institution places the well-being of the larger world on its mission statement. Every institution, public servant, and expert is about the business of reform. There is agreement on the importance of getting better at our safety, our health, our children, the land, our economic well-being, the elderly, people on the margin, and our food.

So for each of these concerns, we are in the middle of perpetual efforts at: health care reform, government reform, public safety and military reform, education reform, environmental reform, financial reform, reforming our food system, and reform in the areas of mental health, disabilities and returning offenders.

The vast majority of these reform efforts fail. They are either cosmetic or actually serve to sustain what they are trying to change. They represent no shift in thinking or shift in power. A major reason reform efforts fail is that they take place in the context of empire, the business perspective and privatization. The business perspective reinforces certain dominant beliefs that privatization and consumerism are necessary, essential, in concert with God. The current reform efforts reinforce the dominant business beliefs that we live in a world of scarcity, individualism, and competition. The business perspective, with its affection for scarcity, attempts to reform by more planning, more controls, more consistency, more predictability, and more leadership. This perspective asserts that the good is served by more scale, more speed, more efficiency, more technology, and that human beings are replaceable and interchangeable.

Out of this we have health care reform thinking it is about lower costs, more technology, and more management. Government reform is about less of it. The safety discussion is about more police and better technology; education reform is about universal standardization, more testing, and more certified teachers. Financial reform is about more retribution and tighter controls. Reform in disabilities and mental health is about more services; the conversation for returning offenders is about more training and jobs. When we are concerned about community, we think the answer is a neighborhood website and social networking as the cure for our isolation. These solutions are not solutions. They are recipes for no change. They are the linchpins of empire.