Have you ever wondered why there’s so much anger and conflict in the world? My name is Wayne Hoffman. I’m a journalist, author, and public policy practitioner with nearly 40 years of inside-the-trenches experience in government. I started Level Up Humanity because I concluded that we’ve let politicians strip away our humanity, and I needed to do something about it.
Politicians — and government more broadly — treat people as a herd, passing policies built for the crowd, not for individuals with their own gifts, goals, and burdens.
Government is structured so that compassion gets outsourced to programs and bureaucracies, letting us off the hook for caring about the neighbor down the street or the family across the country.
And when politicians reach into so much of daily life, policy gets driven by fear. Fear leads to control, control leads to conflict — and that, in a sentence, is why our politics feels so toxic.
Our unique solution
Instead of adding gasoline to the fire, Level Up Humanity starts somewhere most people never expect: agreement.
Set aside the economic, political, and religious labels, and talk to people long enough, and you find they want the same handful of things — love, peace, respect, compassion, connection, and community. So we ask a simple question: what if we started there?
What if we put each person first — making sure nothing stands between them and their own gifts and talents, as long as the pursuit is peaceful?
What if we protected the human need to care for one another — and asked of every program, new or old, whether it brings us closer to the people around us or pushes us apart?
Imagine what opens up when we act with intention — choosing the better qualities we want to leave our children and grandchildren over the easy default of fear, control, and conflict.
How we’re different
Talk to people about economic principles and watch their eyes glaze over. The ideas are sound; the words just don’t land — like explaining a rotary phone to someone who’s only ever held a smartphone. So we skip the jargon and talk about policy through a framework everyone already lives by: love, peace, respect, compassion, connection, and community.
A heart means love anywhere in the world. These are feelings that need no translation.
So instead of debating the mechanics of a government program, we ask a more human question: does this bring us closer together or farther apart? Does it make room for people to flourish, or usher everyone into the same box?
We draw on ancient traditions, religions, and philosophies that reject violence in every form — not for their place in history, but for what they still offer us today: a way to build something better, starting now.
If that’s a question worth sitting with, you’re already one of us. Stay a while — read on, and see where it leads.
If you’d like to be part of the community we’re building, join us here. If you’d like to support the work financially, you can do that here.
You can purchase my book, Tao of Liberty, on Amazon, B&N, or through my own site at taoofliberty.com.