Why Mentors Come First

This is why the building of a mentor group is not a soft, preliminary step but the most leveraged act available to us. If even a relatively small body of people learns to practice presencing genius reliably, to meet coherently, to hold one another to inhabited words, to draw out the best available intelligence in every room they enter, then the right infrastructure may follow considerably faster. For the bottleneck in building anything good together has rarely been the materials or the ideas. It has been the quality of the coordination among the people building it. Improve that quality at the root, and the structures a functioning civilization needs, its institutions, its agreements, its shared works, may get built more quickly and built better, because they are built by people who can actually think together.

The practice would spread through repetition rather than proclamation. A mentor helps one group slow an argument enough to hear its actual disagreement. Members of that group carry the practice into another room, then another. Whether that improvement produces better institutions is a testable hypothesis, and testing it is what the program is for.