THE SOCIETY WE DESERVE - Rebuilding Trust, Belonging, and Our Life Together
by Terry B. Kyllo
We haven’t lost our values. We’ve lost each other. Ten years of bridge building distilled into one hopeful argument — and a practical path any community can walk.
A different diagnosis of our division
Everywhere you go, you can feel the anxiety — about polarization, loneliness, and whether our democracy can hold. The Society We Deserve begins with a surprising reframe: that anxiety is not proof our life together is finished. It is proof we still know we need one another.
The crisis, Terry Kyllo argues, is not a failure of values. Nearly every group in America privately keeps the basic moral agreements that make shared life possible — fairness, honesty, seeing one another as human. But nearly every group believes the others have abandoned them. That mutual fear is manufactured by what Kyllo calls a 360-degree dehumanization machine — attention economics, algorithms, and political incentive amplifying each group’s worst one percent while distance keeps the caricature untested.
The machine has one weakness: it depends on distance. Which means every shared table is sabotage.
Drawing on a decade of on-the-ground practice — more than ninety public gatherings with Muslim neighbors, the Potluck Project toolkit used by over 250 communities and organizations, the Let’s Go Together initiative in Washington’s Skagit Valley, and civic renewal networks growing across the country — the book shows how ordinary communities rebuild trust: not with arguments, but with shared meals, shared service, and public celebration, group to group. It closes with a field-tested playbook for starting where you live, no credentials required.
Belonging comes first. Trust is invited, not demanded. Evidence about groups must come from experience with groups. And the table is waiting — someone has to set it.
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Host a gathering. Launch a book conversation or potluck with your congregation, club, or organization. The free Potluck Project toolkit walks you through every step.
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A veteran bridge-builder shows that America's crisis is distance, not difference — and offers a field-tested path for rebuilding trust, belonging, and democracy itself, one shared table at a time.
The Rev. Terry Kyllo is the executive director of Paths to Understanding and creator of the Potluck Project, used by more than 250 communities and organizations across the country. A Lutheran pastor for more than three decades, he has spent the last ten years building bridges between communities across faith, politics, class, and culture. He lives in Anacortes, Washington.