The Maholian Way - Part One: Introduction

One factor is the existence of close-knit communities in localities throughout the country. Maholians have achieved this community connection through strong support for community organisations, through the development of self-reliant local economies, through education policies that foster cooperation and a sense of community, and through town-planning policies that create safe and attractive neighbourhoods. People are thus highly involved in face-to-face groups and settings that meet social and practical needs as well as encouraging community participation and mutual caring.

Self-reliant local economies and an even pattern of economic development across Maholia have flowed from a range of government incentives and taxes, including environmental policies favouring local production and trade. Community agencies also promote local economic development, while organised consumer action encourages the buying of local products. Cooperatives, credit unions and other not-for-profit businesses are common, while in the for-profit sector there is a high level of employee part-ownership and employee participation in decision-making. There’s a strong emphasis on the quality of employees’ work experience and on achieving a proper balance between work and the rest of life. So the workplace and the marketplace are both sites in which good relationships are built and sustained.

Relationships also benefit from the high degree of equality in Maholia. Extensive evidence from around the world shows that more equal societies have higher levels of trust and better community relationships (as well as healthier and more educated citizens and levels of productivity comparable with less equal societies).  This equality is achieved through egalitarian incomes policies, highly progressive taxation, virtually zero unemployment beyond two months, policies to rigorously ensure that no-one misses out on a good education, and significant investment in solving or reducing major social problems, with an emphasis on prevention, and highly coordinated assistance that focuses on people’s potential strengths and contributions.

While these policies, considered individually, are quite common around the world, it is the combination of them that makes the difference and generates such a remarkable quality of life in Maholia, as this account explains. Naturally their introduction has not been without opposition, and the strategies through which this opposition has been overcome are also described.

This short introduction constitutes Part One of The Maholian Way. Part Two focuses on changes in the lives of two families in two different communities as a way of explaining and illustrating the relationalist system. One is a sole parent family living on what is at first an isolated and depressed public housing estate. The other is a middle-class family showing all the outward signs of success but really struggling below the surface.

Part Three provides historical context, explaining both the evolution of Maholia as a nation and the development in more recent times of the relationalist system known as the Maholian Way. Maholia is a settler society with an original indigenous population, much like societies in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, and its history is therefore similar to the history of these societies in important respects. But the focus of the chapter is on events and trends in the past thirty to forty years – the time in which relationalism has emerged as a distinct system. This system has evolved from many sources in Maholia, but it has been most clearly formulated and most widely popularised through the writings of two people: Emilio Zaga, for many years Professor of Politics and Society at the University of San Marco; and Frances Kenny, Catholic nun, social activist and founder of Maholia’s network of Social Vision groups. The chapter traces the evolution of the approach up to the election in 1987 of a government that adopted relationalism as its guiding philosophy.

Part Four comprises many sections, each one dealing with a different aspect of the relationalist system: community building, economic development, civic participation and governance, education and support for parenting, health, the situation of indigenous Maholians, social inclusion and connection, environmental protection, and relations with the rest of the world. In each of these areas we see how a great variety of social innovations are benefiting the lives of individuals, groups and communities, as well as how these programs and practices all work together and complement each other.

Part Five concludes the book and has two short sections. The first briefly addresses the question of what value there is in understanding Maholia’s relationalist system, while the second considers what you, the reader, might do from here, if you find this account useful and believe that the approaches described would be beneficial in your own countries. There is also a list of references that I have used and you may wish to consult.

I believe the world needs to know about relationalism. Maholia has been hiding its light under a bushel for too long, and it’s time for that light to be seen far and wide. I hope this account makes a small contribution to this process of illumination.

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