Is the Bahá’í Faith the Real Game B?

Path Notes # 15

Imagine you’re sitting in Judea in 60 CE at a conference of progressive futurists chatting about the state of the world.

“What are some of the most significant trends and events you’re tracking right now?” asks the facilitator.

I imagine talk at your little breakout table quickly turns to food security and the famine that recently ended in Jerusalem. The growing tensions between Jews and Greeks. Growing income disparity. Fragile trade routes and supply chains getting impacted by conflicts with the Parthians. Whether or not Roman imperial control and cultural influence is beginning to wane. Perhaps a sense that things have never been quite the same since that lunatic Caligula racked up the debt ceiling and put a statue of himself up in the Holy Temple.

Change a few names and not much has changed in two millennia!

I bet nobody said “I’m really curious about this little cult of fanatical martyrs the Romans just started feeding to the lions who seem to be laying the cognitive-spiritual foundations for post-ethnic identity, trans-national spiritual fellowship, the morally-autonomous individual and the eventual rise of global capitalism and the secular nation state.”

But there they were. Working away at the margins until, 265 years later, the Council of Nicea codifed a set of approved texts and tactics that went on to become the most adaptively successful ideology across the planet.

What if the same thing is going on right now – but hardly anyone is noticing?

A few days ago, I posted about the lessons I’m learning from religious and social movements that start small but hold the potential to shift consciousness and culture at scale. I’m going to explore a couple more of them in greater depth here.

Let me begin with a disclaimer of sorts:

I’m not a Game B’er!

But I’ve been tracking it for a while and find myself in various networks and fields that are Game B adjacent. It’s still quite obscure, but, as I’ve recently suggested, most world-shaping movements emerge from close networks of 5 – 50 people so let’s not hold that against them.

I’m also not a Bahá’í!

But I have worked with Bahá’ís over the years. I’ve attended their gatherings and have probably read more of the writings of their prophet Bahá’u’lláh and his son, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá than most non-Bahá’ís. I found the writings and prophecies startling - bold, far-seeing, and spiritually alive, even if the flowery 19th-century idiom is hard to read. And I’ve known many Bahá’ís personally: extremely thoughtful, grounded, service-oriented people who genuinely live from a deep inner commitment to unity, justice, and the long arc of human evolution.

I often find myself thinking why don’t more people know about this?

Especially now.

Especially among those who are working at the ragged edge of civilizational collapse and cultural regeneration - those searching for a new “operating system” for humanity. People who are asking: what could a coherent, scalable, pluralistic, and just planetary civilization actually look like? Not just the critique of the current system, not just a few promising technologies or isolated ecovillages - but a truly global, integrative, evolutionary blueprint that honours both spiritual and material dimensions of life?

A global network attractor that offers a viable and compelling alternative to techno-authoritarianism, contested polarization, siloed developmental trajectories, global warlord culture or socio-ecological collapse.

Could it be that the Bahá’ís have quietly been living one version of that answer all along?

Before going further, let me briefly introduce both players.

What’s Game B?

Game B is a loosely coordinated, evolving movement of thinkers, technologists, philosophers, activists, and spiritual practitioners who believe that our current civilization (Game A)—driven by rivalrous competition, extractive economics, and fragile institutions—is unsustainable. Game B is the name for what comes next: a civilization-scale transition toward regenerative culture, decentralized coordination, post-egoic leadership, and systems designed for long-term human and ecological flourishing.

It’s not an organization. It has no official platform. It’s more like an ecosystem of people trying to prototype the next operating system for civilization—from decentralized autonomous organizations to developmental theory to new forms of governance, education, and spiritual practice. It has reach, but mostly in the Global North and largely among tech-savvy, meaning-seeking progressives. (If you’re interested here’s an overview from leading Game B theorist Jim Rutt and a link to the Game B Wiki.)

What’s the Bahá’í Faith?

The Bahá’í Faith – represented by a nine-pointed star - is a global spiritual tradition that began in 19th-century Persia with the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh, who claimed to be the latest in a long line of divine messengers (including Moses, Buddha, Christ, and Muhammad). Saying that aloud led to him spending 40 years in prison which is where he wrote most of the tradition’s foundational texts. At their heart, they describe a belief in the essential unity of humanity, that we are in the early stages of a planetary maturation process, and that the structures of society must now reflect that unity.

There are about 8 million Bahá’ís worldwide, organized without clergy and spread across virtually every country. Their work focuses on community building, spiritual education, and service, with a long-term vision of fostering the emergence of a just and unified planetary civilization. Their footprint is significant but humble - working quietly in villages, towns, and neighborhoods from Cambodia to Colombia to the Congo. Interestingly, their World Centre is based in Israel, on the slopes of Mount Carmel in Haifa and in nearby Acre. It’s a wild story… I believe Bahá’u’lláh was sent to a prison there in the 1860’s by the Ottaman Empire and it’s now the holiest site in the Bahá’í world.

With introductions over, let’s return to the question:

A Crisis of Coherence

We are living through an era of dissolution: trust, governance, meaning, ecology, previously stable glaciers and stories. The world-system that carried modernity forward - the one premised on domination, extraction, competition, and fragmentation - is visibly unraveling. And yet, the movements aiming to replace it (Game B, metamodernism, integral theory, regenerative design, etc.) often remain fragmented themselves. Many carry powerful insights, but few offer a cohesive cultural architecture that can scale across continents, languages, religions, and classes.

In the Game B lexicon, people talk a lot about coherence—how to achieve it in groups, systems, and narratives. But in the spiritual and cultural hinterlands of the 21st century, coherence is rare. Movements either become cults, get co-opted in the mainstream or crumble into incoherence. We’re stuck between utopian dreaming and techno-solutionism, without much that actually works at scale.

And here’s where the Bahá’í faith becomes worthy of study.

A Civilizational Blueprint Rooted in Unity

At the heart of the Bahá’í vision is a simple, radical claim:

Humanity is one.

It’s the foundational principle around which everything else is built.

From it flows a set of principles that feel aligned with the core aspirations of Game B and other systems change movements:

• The unity of humanity – not as a political slogan but as a spiritual and ontological truth, with profound implications for how we organize society.

• The independent investigation of truth – a challenge to dogma, inherited belief, and passive conformity.

• The equality of women and men – not just fairness, but a prerequisite for human flourishing and peace.

• The harmony of science and religion – not separation or domination, but a dynamic interplay between empirical knowledge and spiritual insight.

• Interracial marriage as a social good – it is actively encouraged as a radical act of unity and a direct challenge to systemic racism.

• Global governance based on economic justice and equity – not top-down control, but collective planetary stewardship rooted in moral leadership.

• Service to humanity as a spiritual path – where personal growth is found in contribution, not accumulation.

• Universal education as a right and duty – not only literacy, but education that cultivates character, capacity, and global consciousness.

• A universal auxiliary language – to enhance mutual understanding and diminish linguistic barriers to unity.

Bahá’ís are are explicitly working towards a spiritually grounded world federation of nations and they model a radically different approach to leadership and governance. Elections at the local, national, and international levels are held regularly, but there are no candidates, campaigns, or parties. In fact, to put oneself forward for office is seen as a disqualifier—an inversion of the ego-driven political theatre we’re used to. Instead, members of the community quietly elect those they believe are spiritually mature and service-oriented, using secret ballots and a posture of prayerful reflection. Leadership is generally understood as a responsibility, not a status. It’s the only democratic governance system I’m aware of – other than Indigenous models like the Great Law of Peace – that intentionally requires participants to make decisions from a deeper layer of consciousness than the everyday mind.

Another distinctive feature is the abolition of a professional clergy along with virtually all centralized ceremonial authority and lifestyle requirements (diet, dress etc.). While Bahá’í life includes community gatherings, holy days, and marriage and burial rites, there is no prescribed ritual canon. Communities are encouraged to maintain or adapt local cultural practices, provided they align with a few core design principles: universality, dignity, and spiritual coherence. And this flexibility has enabled the pattern to take root across diverse cultures and continents.

Proto-Game B in Action?

In many ways, the Bahá’í system models what Game B thinkers are trying to build:

• It’s distributed and decentralized, with no clergy, no dominant nation-state, and no missionary class.

• It’s multi-generational, with planning horizons that stretch decades into the future.

• It’s intercultural and trans-religious, capable of transmitting shared values across the world’s deepest divides.

• It explicitly rejects the superstitious and irrational

• It’s propositional rather than oppositional, choosing to demonstrate rather than decry.

While Game B often lives in theory, experiment, and start-up culture, the Bahá’ís have created a living, breathing, planetary-scale prototype—one grounded in spiritual principles but oriented toward material justice and systemic transformation.

My hunch is that they are better positioned than most to actually diffuse some of the ideas people talk about in Game B spaces into the cultural DNA of the world’s peoples. Especially across communities of faith, where secular meta-theories rarely take root. Or where prophecy and crisis are metastasizing into apocalyptic accelerationism. Gulp.

Who Else Is Thinking Planetarily?

When you start looking seriously for movements that offer both a civilizational vision and a strategy for achieving it, the field gets surprisingly thin. There are many critics of the current world-system, and many beautiful experiments—but very few are thinking at a truly planetary scale with durable coherence.

The Game B movement, for all its open-source fuzziness, is one of the most compelling. It offers a diagnosis of the "multipolar trap" that modern civilization is stuck in, and a set of directional principles for moving toward something more life-affirming. But it’s still early-stage, mostly theoretical, and primarily emergent in digital and Western intellectual spaces.

The Bahá’í Faith, by contrast, is an already-existing global pattern, grounded in spiritual commitment, that has been quietly building planetary infrastructure for over a century. It has mature institutions, deep commitment and its community-based approach has shown relevance across the Global South, working neighborhood by neighborhood, school by school, without fanfare or polarization. It offers a blueprint for post-national civilization that is simultaneously spiritual, social, and systemic.

A few others are worth noting:

• The Integral movement (inspired by thinkers like Sri Aurobindo, Jean Gebser and Ken Wilber) offers a compelling meta-framework for cultural evolution but has struggled to find rooted institutional forms beyond niche educational projects.

• Regenerative design and bioregionalism offer powerful principles for reweaving humanity into ecological systems but tend to operate at sub-global scales.

• The liberatory social tradition within the Catholic Church. At the same time, you’re only ever one pope away from system snapback!

• Engaged Buddhism. It has achieved broad-scale success (e.g. the Sarvodaya Movement) and has proved to be remarkably contextually adaptable. But its very diversity undermines its ability to hold an inter-generational strategic commitment to a planetary movement.

Then there's the United Nations—perhaps our best attempt at planetary coherence to date. Its founding, after the trauma of two world wars, represented a modern, rational hope for global governance based on law, dialogue, and peace. (My own grandfather, after witnessing firsthand the horrors of Passchendaele, was deeply involved in its failed precursor, the League of Nations).

But the UN is under enormous stress. It has no real enforcement power, and is increasingly paralyzed by geopolitical rivalry, elite capture, and outdated structures. It’s the best we have – but it is also rooted in the post-war consensus that we’re watching unravel in real time right now. Interestingly, the Bahá’í writings seem to anticipate this moment. Bahá’u’lláh wrote in the 1800’s of a coming time when the world's leaders would create nascent global institutions that would lead to a “Lesser Peace” and lay the groundwork for a "Most Great Peace" that would lead to racial unity, economic justice, disarmament and genuine collective security. He wrote that, unfortunately, humanity’s heedlessness and aggression would lead to global turbulence, great suffering and “a tempest of tribulations” in between the two forms of Peace. But, for what it’s worth, he also prophesied that those tribulations would be the very thing that catalyze collective awakening and action.

Hold onto your hats! Things get worse! And then they get better!

Far from Perfect - But More Coherent than Most

If it’s so great, how come I’m not a Bahá’í?

I’ve certainly painted a rosy picture. But there are important and valid critiques. It is monotheistic. It has scriptures that can’t be updated, some rigid moral boundaries, and its focus on maintaining unity can be at odds with healthy dissent. A rather stern male prophet with a long white beard and a whiff of patriarchal benevolence? Tick. A prohibition on alcohol and the non-medicinal use of consciousness-shifting substances? Tick. It has an earnest, buttoned-up and slightly non-ecstatic vibe…its vision of perfection often feels more like a well-manicured garden than a wild ecosystem. The supernatural teleology underpinning the notion of progressive revelation is presented as a fact that will be challenging for those who embrace complexity and emergence. And its teachings around hetero-normativity – while they’re probably aligned with the opinions of the global majority and most world religions – will be a deal-breaker for many LGBTQ+ folk who continue to struggle for their lives and liberation in the face of oppressive ideologies. And for those are allergic to anything that smells like religion, that fact that it’s a religion is probably enough to dismiss it outright.

But despite all that, I suggest the tradition in general and its civilizational transition architecture in particular are worthy of deep study.

Because….what’s your blueprint for moving us towards a global planetary civilization that centers justice and wise ecological boundary constraints and explicitly encourages all of humanity (not just your bit) to think of themselves as a caretaker species?

How does the thing you’re up to actually get us there?

I’m really not pointing fingers here. I ask myself some version of that question most days.

Emergence is all the rage in progressive world-changing evolutionary movements these days. For good reason. It’s the way change really happens in complex living systems. And it offers a theoretical foundation for encouraging and connecting small, potent social experiments at the margins of mainstream culture. From a complexity perspective, we could say that such experiments can generate basins of attraction that offer a capacity to reorganize systems that have been pushed into instability or collapse. But those basins have to be coherent enough to organize the energy. A certain scale is required because they don’t exist in a vacuum; they are competing with other stabilizing attractor patterns.

Activists, philosophers, technologists and post-modernists across the political spectrum – aided by circumstance - have done a great collective job of nudging the current global system out of stability and towards the edge of chaos.

But that doesn’t mean we’re drifting towards a self-organizing federation of ecologically benign post-capitalist hobbit villages powered by solar panels and psychedelics where everyone’s unique identities, cultural heritage and self-actualizing aspirations are honoured!

As the tech-savvy young protestors in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring uprising found out, you can tear down a sclerotic political system relatively easily. But what’s waiting in the wings, ready to reorganize at scale, can be worse.

Far worse.

It’s why complexity scholars place so much importance on mapping the latent patterns of coherence alive in the field of adjacent possibility. Who’s ready to reorganize their own people and others at bio-regional scale in the face of massive political disorder or civilizational collapse in North America? Well-armed Christian nationalists and the Mormons. That’s who. They’re the ones with parallel institutional infrastructure, geographic concentration, local political control, inter-generational ideological coherence and high social trust.

The pattern is quite consistent; those who've been quietly building parallel institutions - while others focus on critique - tend to inherit the aftermath.

I genuinely believe that a global awakening of embodied ecological consciousness – a ‘mindset^[i]’ of deep connectedness – offers the only viable foundation for planetary flourishing.

I am increasingly aware of the extraordinary sentience, complex interiority, mysterious intelligence and wild longing for connection that pulses through every part of the living world. I ache in the face of its beauty almost every day.

And it literally breaks my heart to watch the way our thoughts, words, scriptures, technologies, economies, ideologies and actions keep pulling us away from the wonders of this reality and into a meagre fantasy world that allows us to diminish ourselves, oppress and torment each other and desecrate the web of life.

Wake up people!

We’ve stood at heaven’s door for far too long.

But I have to work with the world we’ve got – not some Platonic idealist make-believe version of the world as I imagine or would like it to be. The world we’ve got is one where more than 80% of the population still identify with a distinct religious tradition. And those traditions aren’t going away. As I’ve previously written:

Trying to replace them with some insipid hodge-podge of complexity science, post-modern critical analysis, cultural relativism, 24 hour shopping, feel-good ecology, mindfulness apps and the UN sustainable development goals isn’t going to cut it.

I increasingly feel that means supporting the emergence of meta-religious patterns within existing traditions. Breathing on the embers of a deep religion that can touch the soul and keep the lights on at the same time. Religion that can foster reverence for the more-than-human world and cultivate a felt-sense that all life forms, people, ecosystems, and the planet itself not only have intrinsic value that deserve our respect and care but are sacred.

My own life experience left me with a visceral sense of ‘religion’ as being a big part of ‘the problem’. Maybe that’s true for you as well.

But as I watch the latest measles epidemic spread like wildfire across southern Alberta amongst the religiously unvaccinated (traditional, New Age and conspiritualists alike), and feel the moral vacuum and self-righteous certainty underpinning virtually every story in today’s news, I feel increasingly called to challenge my own biases. Because as the systemic forces driving schismogenesis and polarization grow, a shared grammar of meaning, belonging, and responsibility are becoming increasingly elusive across the human family.

When I look around the world, I don’t see many examples of belief systems—spiritual or secular—that combine clarity of vision, ethical integrity, operational pragmatism, and cultural adaptability. The Bahá’í Faith may not be the answer. But it may be an answer—one that’s already centuries into its unfolding.

In Closing

So, is the Bahá’í Faith the real Game B?

Maybe not exactly. But it might be the closest thing we have to a mature, global-scale experiment in living from a future that works - for everyone.

For that reason alone, it’s worth knowing about.

If we are serious about planetary coherence - if we want to build something that can move between cultures, bridge opposites, and persist for generations - we would do well to learn from those who’ve been quietly doing it for over 150 years.

Not to convert or be converted, but to learn. Not to adopt wholesale, but to listen deeply.

Because if we’re honest, the civilization we’re trying to midwife needs more than new apps, new technologies, new protocols, or even new communities.

It needs a shared soul.

And maybe, just maybe, the Bahá’ís have been quietly tending to part of that soul all along.

And perhaps these examples are just too flawed to be of interest. Fair enough. But if you’re serious about investing resources and life energy into civilizational change and the emergence of mature patterns of consciousness and culture, there are some really important practical implications and valuable lessons to be learned. Let’s talk!

Wondering,

Julian

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^[i] I’m using ‘mind’ broadly here…cognitive mind, heart-mind, body-mind, ancestral mind, archetypal mind etc. etc. Not just the rational thinking mind.