Becoming

An idea is something we hold. An ideal holds us: it becomes a navigation system for a life. Srinivas has traced how revolutions follow when new ideals take hold, and argues that a society needs both ideals and capacities; capacities alone produce skill without direction.

Ideals work through identity. When a person takes up an ideal, a static identity (“this is who I am”) can become a dynamic one (“this is who I am becoming”). Purpose and meaning follow, and they are not the same thing: purpose is what a person commits to; meaning, in his phrase, is “the energy of self-perpetuation” that sustains them. Beneath it all is a view of human beings as having infinite possibilities, which the right ideal turns into real capacity.

• Idea and ideal One is held; the other organises a life.
• Static and dynamic identity Who I am, or who I am becoming.
• The ladder of ideals From achievement upward to expansion and enabling others.
• Purpose and meaning What I commit to, and what sustains me.
• Possibility into capacity How a person’s sense of what they could become turns into what they can do.

AI can supply ideas without limit but no ideals, and automation unsettles the identities that work once gave people. Ideals, possibility and a sense of who one is becoming give direction amid abundance.

• 2004The Power of Ideals.
• 2009–10An Ideals Program in a large public sector bank, carrying a new ideal of citizenship at work to its whole workforce.
• 2012–13Why ideals are needed for the sustainable evolution of human systems; essays on fulfilment, meaning and purpose in Maps of Becoming.
• 2013–16The human possibilities view and its practices, developed with schools in the Awakened Citizen Programme.
• 2016–19Evolving identities; the ladder of ideals; purpose and meaning.
• 2026Living the ideal; a Human Possibilities book in preparation.