Apply by November 3rd to explore civilizational sanity with us! We’ll tackle questions like: How can we make the social structures around us more human-friendly? What plays into low-sanity structures? How can we protect ourselves from corrosive dynamics or mitigate their damage? The event takes place in Mittelhof, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, from December 12th to 15th, 2025.

What is the event about?

Many of us have experiences with friendships, romantic partnerships, friend groups and communities that are mutually supportive, nourishing and empowering. At the same time, we also live with broken-up friendships or families, bad experiences in educational and professional contexts, and communities that split up or fell apart. On a macro level, most of humanity is embedded in private institutions, governing structures and international networks that often don’t adequately address human needs.

These observations are important to us because we care about social environments that support cooperation, truth-seeking and well-being. We want event participants to gain a clearer understanding of how dynamics leading to dysfunction show up in our lives and how to raise the civilisational sanity of the social structures we're part of.

We use the term civilisational sanity here to refer to human-friendly societal designs. That might include physical structures, shared narratives and values, norms, customs, laws and other mechanisms supporting cooperation and high-quality decision-making that enable human (and non-human) flourishing. A sane society is one in which humans are happy to partake. What exactly characterises sane structures is up for debate, but we’d like to suggest the following heuristics: ^[1]

Benefit – Members benefit appropriately from the social structure
Freedom – Members want to be part of the structure and are free to leave
Resilience – The structure’s existence is stable for as long as it provides value to its members
Responsiveness – The structure is responsive to feedback loops, like new information, and to how members want to shape it
Peacefulness – Does generally not harm outsiders

Using these heuristics, we can analyse dynamics that support sanity. Some possible examples are a search for fair compromises and Pareto improvements, accountability mechanisms, establishing feedback loops, transmission of tacit knowledge, and increasing members’ o...

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