Society builders pave the way to a better world, to a better day - a united approach
to building a new society. There's a crisis facing humanity.
People suffer from a lack of unity.
It's time for a better path to a new society - join the conversation.
for social transformation - Society Builders
join the conversation.
for social transformation - Society Builders,
'Society Builders' with your host, Duane Varan.
Welcome to our first episode of Society Builders, where we explore the
application of Baha'i principles to the problems of individuals and society.
Together we'll engage in a conversation about social transformation.
I'm your host, Duane Varan.
I hope you enjoyed our opening sting.
If you'd like to hear the full version of our theme song, stick
around to the end of the podcast.
Today's episode is designed to introduce you to the series, sharing the underlying
rationale for producing the series, and the hopes and aspirations for what I
hope the series will ultimately achieve.
All right.
Now for some quick background.
So less than a month ago on December 30th, 2021, the Bahai World Community
received guidance from the Universal House of Justice, the body, which
leads the Bahai world, charting the path for Bahai communities worldwide
over the course of the next 25 years.
What was particularly unusual and unique about this particular guidance is that
it gives us a single aim and focus for the entire global Baha'i community
for the duration of that period.
And that focus is this the release of the society building power of the
Faith in ever greater measures
I'll say that again.
The release.
Of the society building power of the Faith in ever greater measures.
Now, don't worry just yet about what that construct really means
and what its implications are.
That's what we're going to together discover across
this entire podcast series.
But for now, just think about what it means for the Baha'i community
to have a singular focus like this.
For what for many of us will essentially be the rest of our lives.
It's an incredibly powerful thought. In that one statement is
the essence of how we can best serve our Faith, our communities,
our world for the next 25 years.
Wow!
So naturally a podcast series, exploring this theme makes a ton of sense.
So welcome to THAT series.
Once a month I'll be releasing a new episode where we can together explore
this theme of society building, and together we'll discover little by little
what applying these principles to the challenges of the communities around us
Looks like
I'll talk a bit more about who the Universal House of Justice is and
what such guidance represents for Baha'is worldwide in my next episode.
But for now, it's simply important to appreciate that for a Baha'i,
this guidance is seminal.
For me personally, this guidance was earth shattering.
It was truly seismic.
It reflected a major paradigm shift.
It got me thinking about my future and how I could best serve my community, the
planet, how I could make a difference.
Now, I know that sounds incredibly hokey, but I think deep down, most of
us wanna believe that somehow we matter.
And if dreams could come true, I think most of us would aspire to finding
that path for our sense of fulfillment, finding our purpose, finding that
sense that somehow we matter, that somehow we can make a difference.
Now, I know that sounds lofty and maybe it is, but it's an aspiration and there
are moments in life where I think we get a glimpse of that possibility.
And for me, Reading that message provided exactly that kind of moment
where I got just a glimpse of a path towards making a difference.
Now if I felt that way, I'm sure there are others who also had that same
kind of reaction to this guidance, and we're excited to roll up their sleeves
and dig in, trying to understand the guidance, and most important, trying
to figure out how to best apply it.
So that's what this series is all about.
It's a journey of discovery.
Now I wanna emphasize, I don't know what a Baha'i perspective on society
building is, or what it will look like over the course of the next 25 years.
If you ask two different Baha'is "today, I think you'll get"
two very different answers.
But this will change over the course of the next few years.
Soon as a community, we'll develop deeper insights about what society
building looks and feels like.
Our understanding.
Will harmonize.
It's like the construct of progressive revelation.
Now, for those of you new to the Faith, progressive revelation refers to the
Baha'I belief that all religions are different chapters to the same book.
That different messages of God and different Prophets all come from
the same God and not from competing gods, and that they come to different
people and different times responding to the capacities of their times.
It's an amazing construct, which has a whole system of meaning behind it, and
it's a distinctively Baha'i worldview.
I mean, if you explain this concept to someone on the street who's
well-read, they'd turn around and say, ah, that sounds like Baha'i philosophy.
Now I'm using the construct of progressive revelation here for a reason.
Because if you ask Baha'is anywhere in the world what that means, you'll
get a remarkably similar answer.
"And I mean, anywhere."
Go to the highlands of Papua New Guinea and ask a Bahai tribesman there about
what progressive revelation means, and you're gonna get largely the same answer.
So in the same way, although we don't yet have a shared understanding around
"he society building construct today, there will soon be a day where Baha'is
worldwide will share an understanding of society building in the same way that
today we share that understanding of the progressive revelation construct.
And just like progressive revelation, this new society building construct
will be distinctively Baha'i.
Our understanding of that construct will largely be shaped by the world around us.
It will be clouded by existing approaches to society building, which though noble
have fallen short in one way or another.
Our journey will transcend that.
We will be discovering entirely new approaches to society, building
approaches grounded in the principles of our Faith approaches, which are both
unifying and positive in their focus.
So discovering how to apply the Baha'i teachings to society building will be
at once refreshing, stimulating, and uplifting. Collectively, Baha'is worldwide
will rise to new levels of understanding and society will increasingly demand
this kind of society building.
From us,
and this is a really important point.
It's not just that as Baha'is we'll come to better discover what our
approach to society building is.
It's also that the world around us will also be discovering it.
And as they do, they'll work with us and increasingly demand it of us.
Now, I've been here before.
I've tasted this before in my life, so I know what it feels like to have wider
society demand, the Bahai approach.
It was a truly enlightening moment for me where I got a glimpse of the future.
And so I'd like to share my story with you so you can understand what I mean when I
say that society will demand this of us.
So here's my story.
Back when I was in college at the University of Texas, this is many
moons ago, in the late 1980s, we had an amazing Bahai College Club.
We got together just about every day.
We were all the closest of friends.
We had a great time working to apply the Baha'i teachings in
some way to life on our campus.
Before each semester started, we'd have a planning retreat to make our
plans for the upcoming semester.
So it was way back in 1989 and at our planning retreat, having studied
the Baha'I Writings, we came to the conclusion that the focus for that
"semester should be on race unity," America's most challenging issue.
And to kick things off, we thought it'd be good to host a conference on campus
around this theme of racial unity.
We spent weeks reaching out to every organization in town who had anything
to do with race Unity, the NAACP, the Urban League, black pastors.
I mean, we worked hard to reach out and invite them to speak at our
conference and join in our conversation.
And we invited Nat Rutstein, a Baha'i, who had just written the book 'To Be One'
to give the conference keynote address.
Now Nat's book, 'To Be One' is amazing because he explores how when we
talk about prejudice, we're almost always pointing the finger at someone
else when what we should be doing is working to cleanse ourselves.
We all have prejudices.
Even as Baha'is, it's not what we want.
It's not what we aspire to.
But in the book, Nat deals with his own demons demonstrating how prejudice
is a social pollutant that infects us all, whether we like it or not.
The book is amazing because it gets you reflecting on your own
prejudices, and this is a much tougher journey than simply blaming
others for all the world's problems.
Anyway.
So with Nat and a whole bunch of community leaders confirmed as speakers, we went
ahead and scheduled our conference to occur within the first few weeks of
the semester, and we went out there to promote it, you know, putting up
posters all over campus, uh, doing everything we could to get people to come.
Now we were a group of about 30 Baha'i students.
Honestly, we would've done well if we had doubled our size, if we could get like
50 or 60 people to come to this event.
But we dreamed big and we booked the largest auditorium on campus,
you know, hoping for the best.
Now, only days before our conference something happened that none of
us could have anticipated, and that was the Virginia Beach riots.
This was an event where police and the National Guard ended up engaging
in a major conflict with thousands of African-American students who had come to
Virginia Beach for Greek week festivities.
And it resulted in chaos, Black students being beaten,
you know, scores of injuries, businesses being torn down.
I mean, it was the George Floyd protests of our day.
So the Virginia Beach riots dominated the airwaves.
Everyone was talking about it.
Everyone was grappling with this disease of racism, and in the midst of this
climate, Our conference was suddenly the prime outlet for people to come together
to figure out what to do about it all.
I mean, the timing was just surreal.
We had every major community leader in our town at this conference.
It was incredible.
So our little college club of 30 was suddenly host to the main
forum where everybody could come together to grapple with this.
And we were packed to capacity.
We had over 500 people attend the conference.
I mean, it was truly an amazing event.
And Nat's keynote address was absolutely incredible.
And during his address, Nat floated an idea as he was explaining how we needed
to grapple with our own prejudices.
Nat suggested that perhaps the local Baha'i College Club here at the University
of Texas could host something like Racism Anonymous, a group to help
people heal their own prejudices.
Now, it's kind of an odd term.
I mean, you immediately imagine.
You know, people turning up with KKK Hoods, wanting to reform their
evil ways, it's, it's kind of almost a scary image, but it was something
that got people's attention.
Well, the next day we were inundated with calls from people who wanted to join.
So we called up Nat and we said, Nat, all these people
want to join Racism Anonymous.
So tell us what it is.
Tell tell us how it works.
And much to our surprise, Nat said, 'I don't know, it was just something I said.
It sounded kind of neat.'
And so here we were launching Racism Anonymous with a, a score of
people who were eager to join with absolutely no clue what we were doing.
Now we initially patterned the group on Alcoholics Anonymous.
It wasn't, uh, easy for us to learn about that.
None of us had any experience with AA.
It's not like in those days you could go on Google or you could
go on YouTube to learn about it.
We had to actually go check out books in the library, try to read
about it. At our first meeting.
In fact, I remember we literally went around the room and everybody
introduced themselves, you know: 'hi.
I'm Duane and I'm a racist.'
I mean, we had no clue what we were doing, so it took a
while for us to get our rhythm.
We had a great Black Baha'i in our community, Bruce Curry,
who was just absolutely the most patient man on the planet.
He really helped us.
He helped us study the Baha'i Writings, but he also helped us come
to terms with the larger discourse on race, and that was, there was
a whole universe there for us to.
come to terms with, I mean, there was a whole discourse out there that we
needed to learn about a whole vocabulary.
So we began engaging and we began collaborating with Black student
organizations on campus, and little by little we began to fill a critical gap.
What we discovered was what was necessary to helping.
heal this disease was an interracial dialogue, a safe space where people
could come together from different races to learn from each other.
Without that exchange, you just didn't have the same magic working.
It had to be that kind of dialogue, and that's what was so unique and that was
what was so different about the way that as Baha'is, we were engaging with the issue.
We were filling a unique space in the race discourse.
So, for example, a Black student might come and he would share his pain.
He'd say, 'you know, when I walk on campus', and he'd look at someone and
say, 'I see you clutching your purse tighter when I walk past you, like you
think I'm gonna snatch your purse or something, and the fact that you clutch
your purse tighter, that really hurts me.'
Or a white student would say, you know, 'I get hurt where everything
I do is assumed to have some kind of like racist motive behind it.'
It was an amazing dialogue.
It was eye-opening, it was self-reflective, it was unifying, it
was uplifting, and it was filling a gap.
There was nowhere else where you could go for this kind of race discourse.
So every week.
Our little group got better and better.
We grew.
I mean, it was amazing.
All right, you get the picture.
Flash forward now towards the end of the school year, some
seven, eight months later.
And , it was around April.
It was Greek week on campus, and this is where fraternities have all
their parties, every party just a little bit more outrageous than the other one.
Everybody's trying to outdo each other with just how
outrageous their parties can be.
Now at this time, fraternities were highly segregated.
I mean, you had Black fraternities, you had white fraternities, and one
of these white fraternities decided they'd be really cool if they got an
old car, put it in their their backyard, and got everybody at the fraternity
jumping up and down, bashing this car.
But with a little bit of a twist, they painted all over this car, all kinds of.
Frustrations.
And as it happened, almost everything that was rented on this car were racial
epitaphs against African Americans.
So it was a horrific scene.
All these white hooligans jumping with these racial epitaphs all over this car.
It was terrible.
And as it happened, somebody took a photo and that photo was the
cover photo of the Austin American Statesman the very next day.
Now you can imagine how shocking this was, and everybody was outraged.
African Americans, other students.
I mean, everybody just thought this was just the most outrageous thing.
It was horrible.
It was horrific.
And so there was a march that was organized against this fraternity.
And these protestors came and, you know, marched up on the fraternity
and instead of being kind of like apologetic, instead the fraternity
members held up these anti-Black signs.
And so the situation was rapidly escalating.
Student athletes ended up forming a wall, separating the protestors
from the fraternity until the police could come and break things up.
I mean, it was, it was a terrible scene.
So the next day the university president announced that he'd be coming out and
giving an address about, about this incident, and everybody was expecting that
the president was gonna come and announce some serious kind of like repercussions
for this fraternity and their behavior, you know, the suspension of their.
Student organization status, maybe the suspension of some of the ring leaders.
I mean something.
But as it happened, the president walked out, he walked up to the podium
on the West Mall, which was this main gathering space for speeches like this,
and he walked up to the podium and he gave a speech about how in America,
We have to respect freedom of speech.
Well, this was not what the audience wanted to hear.
So the crowd rushed the stage and campus security literally had to
pick the president up, throw him over their shoulder and run into the
administrative building and lock up all the doors, to protect him.
I mean, that was the kind of tension that was building.
I mean, you can imagine some students began going on hunger strikes.
It was tense.
And all of us were certain that at any moment major violence was gonna break out.
I mean, the situation just felt like it was getting out of control.
And as it happened, that was the fear that was also shared by the FBI.
And so the FBI contacted the university administration and they
said that they were worried about how this was all playing out, that
the situation was clearly getting out of control, that violence was gonna
follow, that they needed to intervene immediately to help prevent some
serious blood or potentially even some deaths from kind of like ensuing.
And so they offered the university to provide them with mediators to
help navigate through this, this "terrible, terrible situation.
Now, the university didn't like this suggestion.
They feared that
yhe further step of bringing the FBI in would make the situation look even worse.
That, you know, the situation was so bad that the FBI had to intervene.
So you know, they didn't want that publicity.
So they turned to the FBI and they said, 'you know what?
We appreciate your offer, but actually we have a group on campus called Racism
Anonymous, and that group can help us.
So there's no need for your intervention.'
Next thing you know, we were approached by the university and they said, we
just told the FBI that we didn't think they could help us, but we know you can.
So we need your help to navigate through this critical situation.
Now, I want you to soak in this moment, I want you to imagine just for a second
what it felt like to be in our shoes.
I mean, we're looking at what was.
The biggest crisis that we had ever seen on our campus.
I mean, it was just a scary scene.
And we're in the middle of this, and all of a sudden the university is
turning to us demanding that we help them to apply our unique approach to,
you know, what was one of the biggest problems they've faced in decades.
I mean, wow, what a moment.
And that gives you just a glimpse.
Of what I'm talking about here, the sudden moment when society turns to you,
expecting you to help them because they see no other viable path going forward.
So it's not just that Baha'is will have a harmonized view of what society
building means and looks like, but it's also that society will look at
a very particular kind of approach to society building and recognize it
as uniquely Baha'i, and it will be an approach which they will be increasingly
hungry for yearning for like this is something they will feel they
need, and increasingly society will turn to us demanding our service.
Now I know you're dying to hear what happened next in my University of
Texas story, and I'll tell you that part of the story in a future episode.
But spoiler alert, we fell short largely because we weren't
prepared for our destiny.
Now, we would've benefit from
this kind of conversation if we had collectively been preparing for it
way back then, and that's part of what I hope we can achieve in our
series, is to be better prepared for these exciting destinies.
So that's why I say in this podcast, we will together discover what society
building really means and what it looks like from a Baha'i perspective.
It's a journey of discovery.
I'm not imparting knowledge here.
I don't have the answers.
All I have is an invitation, an invitation for you to join with me as we together
discover what society building is all about, and in the next episode
I'll explain how this process of articulating a vision becomes
a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It's truly exhilarating to see in motion, so make sure you check out that episode,
which I'm calling a history of tomorrow.
So in closing today, I return to the big picture, to the vision, to that guidance,
the release of the society, building power of the Faith in ever greater measures.
That's the journey we're now embarking on, and I hope you'll
join me in this adventure so that together we discover what society
building is and what it looks like.
So make sure to follow this podcast so you don't miss any episodes.
Tell your friends about it and go to our website@societybuilders.com to tell us
what you'd like to see in future episodes.
So thank you for joining the conversation about social transformation.
We'll see you again next time on Society Builders.
Society builders paves the way to a better world, to a better day.
A united approach to building a new society.
There's a crisis facing in humanity.
People suffer from a lack of unity.
It's time for a better path to a new society.
Join the conversation, for social Transformation. Society builders.
So engage with your local communities and explore all the exciting
possibilities we can elevate the atmosphere in which we move.
The paradigm shifting.
It's so very re uplifting.
It's a new beat, a new song a brand new groove - join the conversation,
for social transformation - Society Builders
Join the conversation
for social transformation - Society Builders
The Baha'i Faith has a lot to say, helping people discover a better way
with discourse and social action
framed by Unity. Now the time has come to lift
our game and apply the teachings of the Greatest Name and rise to meet the glory
Join the conversation, for social transformation. Society builders