Common Sense Society

Social Entrepreneurism could be the way ahead for society and it comes in where the state fails.

The world will always need common sense, but it needs courage to set up a society for it. I was in Budapest and thought of catching up with Anna Stumpf, a Washington educated International Relations expert.

The moment I stepped in Budapest I started looking around for what really drove this 25 year old social entrepreneur to create this movement. Bucharest was cleaner compared to Bucharest and Hungarians are considered to have a disciplining influence on the Transylvania region. Maybe it was wee hours of the morning, but I could not miss the few beggars, systematic searching through garbage boxes.

Beggars are a part of the modern metro. The richer an economic zone gets, the more sketchable the street guy gets. You just can't avoid them wherever you go.

But it may need common sense to think how the country should take care of its beggars? I had already started asking questions knowing that common sense was about creativity and creativity came from asking a lot of questions. Why was Anna not working on a creativity or green society but common sense society? And seeing bicycle lanes around Danube covered with active bikers from all ages, I really started to wonder how much sense did Hungary need anyway? Was common sense total, could becoming smarter in day to day life save Hungary from another debt crisis next time around? Was it a social purpose or was it her social purpose?

We met at Batthyany Ter, at a cafe shop. After exchanging pleasantries we got down for the chat. "It was both" she said answering to the sense of purpose query.

It’s the books you read and the people you meet in the formative years that define you. "I worked on the scale of my perspective and after travelling world over started mirroring who I was and who we were as a country. I started seeing Hungary as an outsider. "There was an attitude before and an attitude after, which accompanied a critical understanding that people (in Budapest) lacked a sense of purpose, as if they were distracted. I wanted to create a platform a meeting place to assimilate ideas, act, think and be social. It was community building.”

The society was started in Apr 2009. There are a few hundred members now. The society conducts three events a month, a book reading to discuss ideas and principles that matter, a private event where we invite ambassadors, historians, and other thought leaders to speak on divergent themes. "This was similar to a creativity workshop", I told her.

Creativity was an exercise of divergent thinking followed by convergence to find solutions. It was about moving to an integrated structure from specifics. It was an out of the box approach to find solutions how to become a better society. It was like a creative exercise done at school where groups were assigned to find a solution to utilize or create a resource. This needed collaborative and divergent thinking.

The common sense society was also a behavioral exercise teaching people how not to complain and take charge of the situation and not crib about it. Sense was always total. One could answer all questions economical, political, and social. I was already looking at common sense society offering solutions like Richard Thaler’s “saving for tomorrow” program. The idea was about mentality, principles, focusing on an issue at a time, debating it, moving from emotional to an unbiased objective state. “It was like peeling an onion, layers after layer of thoughts, to reach to the core and to understand how to do things differently.”

I asked her for an example she said "let’s take entrepreneurship." The debate could address why don't people do it? Why are they scared? “Even issues of multiculturalism can be addressed.” It was about asking the right questions in a witty way, in a debate form. The common sense society was about creating initiative leaders without micro managing them, engaging an intellectual thought process, generating actionable ideas demystifying the “holy cow”. There was no holy cow in today’s world.

History had a tendency to repeat itself and Anna’s social entrepreneurism was connected in History with the work of famous Hungarian Mathematician, George Polya who worked on Heuristics and mathematics education. He published “How to solve it: A new aspect of mathematical Method”. He described how problem solving could be taught and learned. There is a time for a society to look at specifics and there is a time for society to look at the big picture. It is a cycle. Timing as always was important.

Even for the common sense society, Anna admitted timing was crucial for the idea. It was right before election and in a time when funds were less, the idea also took shape when the people were partially ready to own its problems rather than blame the state. Common sense may look chaotic, but it has an ingrained order like everything else that lives. Prechter’s Socionomics delineates change in social moods and how a society tries to move to common sense, value and positivity cyclically. And the best part about sense is that it is fractalled, if one part of you has common sense, the virtue will rub on all aspects of your life.

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