Dreams and Disruptions meet Neohumanism

I’m sharing a recent piece by Stephanie Ezra, “Dialogues Between Neohumanism and Emergent Philosophies,” published in Neohumanist Review 6. The article uses a live session of Dreams and Disruptions (the futures game I created) hosted by the Canadian Foresight Network as a lens for examining Neo Humanist questions about ethical leadership, moral authority, and how societies coordinate values under uncertainty.

You can read the full article here: https://theneohumanist.com/pdf/6/SEzraNR6.pdf 

Issue page (Neohumanist Review 6): https://theneohumanist.com/neohumanist-review-6/

Stephanie analyzed the game session we had as a “field site” using speculative ethnography, treating the scenario they constructed “Philosopher Kings and Social Bankers” as a future artefact that reveals present and emerging assumptions about ethics and power.

Her main inquiry was: in uncertain futures, who or what serves as the bearer of ethics—a system, a leader, a philosophy, or a metric?

Ezra identifies two contrasting models of moral leadership that surfaced during the game:

1. Algorithmic moral governance via a social credit system

2. Embodied ethical authority via the Sadvipra archetype

Her critique is not that either model is automatically “wrong,” but that both can become forms of moral outsourcing—a shift where society avoids the ongoing work of negotiating values by placing ethics either in an algorithm or in an exceptional individual.

Morality as algorithm? charisma? or embodied systems?

Ezra’s conclusion is not anti-Neohumanist. Instead, she argues for a reframing: build societies with Sadvipric qualities—collaborative, wise, morally courageous—rather than societies that wait for a Sadvipra. In her account, more resilient futures come from ethics embedded in systems and shared capacities, not secured by singular moral figures.

Ezra positions participatory foresight games like the Dreams and Disruptions as “philosophical laboratories” spaces where competing ethical frameworks can be tested, enacted, and then critically examined.

Her broader point is that futures literacy is not only about imagining alternatives; it is also about cultivating the ethical and institutional conditions that make those alternatives livable.

In short, the article uses Dreams and Disruptions to show how quickly groups can default to centralised moral authority—either algorithmic or charismatic—and argues that the harder (and more durable) task is designing futures where ethical agency is shared, practiced, and structurally supported.