Alnoor Ladha

Alnoor Ladha is co-director of the Transition Resource Circle and co-author of the book Post Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse.

Alnoor’s work focuses on the intersection of political organizing, systems thinking, structural change and narrative work. He was the co-founder and Executive Director of The Rules, a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers and others focused on changing the rules that create inequality, poverty and climate change. TR started in 2012 as a time-bound project and an experiment in temporary organizational design, exploring new ways of how to work, play, and make trouble together.

Alnoor comes from a Sufi lineage and writes about the crossroads of politics and spirituality in troubled times. His work has been published in Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Truthout, Fast Company, Kosmos Journal, New Internationalist, and the Huffington Post among others. He is the Council Chair of Culture Hack Labs, a co-operatively run advisory for social movements and progressive organizations.

Alnoor Ladha in Kosmos

Ineffective Rationalism and Effective Alibis | Part 1

In this two-part essay, Ladha and Murphy track the rise of the Effective Altruism and Longtermism movements, and their current influence shaping philanthropy and policy. The essay reveals how the underlying logic and approaches of these “extreme rationalists” is structured to avoid addressing the root causes of social issues.

Published in Volume 24 Issue 3

Ineffective Rationalism and Effective Alibis | Part 2

Moving beyond the narrow metrics and techno-utopian fantasies of the Effective Altruism and Longtermism movements, and through a systemic and historical lens, Part Two of this essay advocates for an alternative logic, one expressed through a post-capitalist approach to philanthropy.

Published in Volume 24 Issue 3

The Deschooling Dialogues | Ayahuasca and Other Pathways of Perception

Daniel | Since I started this whole journey...it's felt to me that there is the potential that we, in this lifetime, can somehow make a kind of quantum, mutational leap into another dimensional realization.

Published in Volume 18 Issue 2

Mystical Anarchism, a Spiritual Biography

Alnoor | When people ask me, "what’s the most important thing I can do," I often say to people, especially in the spiritual community: to understand how neoliberalism works. We must understand how capitalism works because it is the very oxygen in which we are breathing. It has intermediated every aspect of our lives.

Published in Volume 20 Issue 1

Philanthropy as a Territory of Transition

This article focuses on philanthropy as a territory of transition, rebalancing wealth, knowledge and power while repairing historical injustices. It explores that philanthropy can exacerbates our current exploitative system through undemocratic and unaccountable processes; by increasing endowments through existing market mechanisms; and through a lack of imagination on how to support the requisite paradigm shifts.

Published in Volume 22 Issue 3

Deschooling Dialogues: On Initiation, Trauma and Ritual with Francis Weller

Alnoor Ladha interviews Francis Weller, a psychotherapist, writer and activist who pioneered the method of soul-centered psychotherapy.

Published in Volume 20 Issue 4

Oppression, Interconnection, and Healing

Charles Eisenstein: The Amazon is where Gaia's memory of health still exists. And if that can be preserved, there will always be hope. If there is one healthy region that still has integrity, then it can teach the rest of the world to be healthy again.

Published in Volume 20 Issue 3

What is Solidarity?

As we start to see how all oppression is connected, we can also start to see glimpses of how all healing is connected. And that our own liberation is not only bound up with that of others but that our collective future is dependent on it.

Published in Volume 20 Issue 3

The Deschooling Dialogues: Grief, Collapse, and Mysticism

Alnoor: ...There is no doubt that we are in the midst of unprecedented moment where there is no return to old certainties. Part of this pain that we are facing in the world is a pathway toward transformation. Or will we perish in the horror of the onslaught that we are facing?

Published in Volume 18 Issue 1

Seeing Wetiko: On Capitalism, Mind Viruses, and Antidotes for a World in Transition

By Alnoor Ladha
What if we told you that humanity is being driven to the brink of extinction by an illness? That all the poverty, the climate devastation, the perpetual war, and consumption fetishism we see all around us have roots in a mass psychological infection?

Published in Spring | Summer 2016, Volume 16 Issue 1

Mystical Anarchism: A Journey to the Borderlands of Freedom

How could I continue to legitimize the structures of this world while holding true to my spiritual ideals? How could I subtly regurgitate the premises of Cartesian dualism when I knew they had no model to explain the torment and anguish and heartache that existed all around me? This tension awakened my political sensibilities. I started to understand that one’s politics are simply their morality put into action. I could no longer not act.

Published in Fall | Winter 2015, Volume 15 Issue 2

Coming Soon

The Village Way

Practices for Belonging in a Fragmented World

For thousands of years, we lived according to the principles of village life. Then, around the 14th Century, our lives were reorganized by rulers around growth and accumulation – often at the cost of community, equity, and the living Earth. What would it mean to return to simplicity, and mutual care?

Join us for a 9-month inquiry into this question, exploring how we participate together in a time that calls us back to community, resilience, and shared life,