It is when times are chaotic that we need commitment to building the beloved community the most. The purveyors of chaos in our world count on the forces of beloved community in the world to be weak and to lack persistence, but love and justice have the power to be resilient and regenerative.

One of the greatest moral challenges of our time is for us to remain kind and compassionate with one another in the midst of the chaos we as humanity have created. How do we unravel the blanket of systemic chaos by which we are covered while simultaneously creating a new quilt of beloved community?

When persons or groups use depersonalizing or dehumanizing rhetoric about others, we may feel right or justified in responding in like manner to them, but to do so perpetuates the dehumanizing spiral towards chaos and away from beloved community. We must resist the temptation to fight the propaganda of depersonalization with more depersonalizing propaganda.

There are times when anger is both an appropriate and necessary response to the systemic injustices of the quadruple evils of racism, poverty, violence, and ecological degradation we experience in the world, but It is possible to be angry about systemic injustices without losing our love and compassion for persons, and it is possible to to be angry with individual persons and groups of persons without dehumanizing them.

Creating Beloved Community is nearly impossible if we allow ourselves to become so polarized that we fail to be critical about our own perspectives. The squashing of dissent by the argument that it might help the cause of those we perceive as being on the “other side” is the sign of a deeply flawed democracy.

If we have a political system where dissent within one’s own political party results only in furthering the agenda of the opposing party, then that is a problem with our political system which is set up to perpetuate the hegemony of a two-party duopoly.

I have lost track of how many times I have been told not to be publicly critical of the candidate from my own political party owing to the fear that any public dissent will benefit the opposing party. Can we all take a step back and see how deeply unhealthy for democracy this is? If our political systems perpetuate a political culture in which criticisms of one’s own political party are portrayed as political betrayal, then we need a revolution of values within our political system, and ultimately we need a new system that is more supportive of a truly participatory democracy.

As we continue to silence dissent in the name of party loyalty or for the sake of protecting democracy itself, those with money and power do not remain silent. They continue to speak openly though their money and power, thus further marginalizing persons whose only way of being heard is through the public expression of their concerns. This is not the path to beloved community.

Unless we create a system in which people can speak their concerns freely, organize freely to advocate for their concerns, and vote freely for persons who represent their concerns; then we will continue to see increased division and polarization within our communities. This is the path of chaos we currently find ourselves on, the path of chaos on which we see each other as “libtards and “magats” rather than as persons seeking beloved community together.

The good news is that there are systems that can make our democracy more just and participatory. One such system is ranked choice voting – sometimes referred to as instant runoff voting, in which persons can rank the candidates in an election by preference. Ranking candidates is as simple as 1,2,3 or whatever the total of candidates to be ranked might be. In this system, we can always vote our first choice without hurting our second choice, and perhaps most importantly, without helping our least favorite candidate. If no candidate receives over 50% of the votes in the first round, those who voted for the candidate with the least first preference votes will have their votes distributed to their second preference. The process plays out until a candidate receives over 50% of the vote. No spoilers, no wasted votes, no strategic voting, and being able to vote for your first choice every time.

But the persons, groups, and entities with wealth and power who are benefiting from the chaos and division of our current system are doing everything in their power to block such reforms for a more participatory democracy. State legislature after state legislature are attempting to ban ranked choice voting and to make it more difficult for states and municipalities to implement ranked choice voting.

RCV is just one reform among many that might help us achieve a revolution of values that is needed to move us away from chaos towards beloved community. It is up to all of us to find the many other ways that will heal our divisions and help lead us to a more just, beloved, and participatory community. Let us continue to work for this, even in the midst of chaos.