Our Ethical Philosophy
Seeker-centric 🔹 Private by Design 🔹 Regenerative governance
Mind Lumen is the ethics audit, accounting, and audit watchdog for the mental health, well-being, and psychedelics industry. It is seeker-centric first with no provider conflicts of interest within the capitalistic system. We are not trying to recruit “patients”, “clients”, “customers”, “users”. We call the people seeking care as “seekers” and “members” leading to future “owners”
As a founding sherpa, I don’t think about myself as an authoritative leader. This is required by law when one creates and entity so the title while needed for the legal entities, doesn’t mean we have to embody that within ourselves. I think of myself as a “sherpa”. I am a guide to help the people grow in themselves, regardless of whether they work for any entity or organization.
I have been actively involved in ensuring ethics is observable, measurable, and auditable, not a nebulous vague concept. It is a requirement, particularly within the psychedelics industry where extractive capitalistic behaviors that naturally occur due the purely profit and shareholder interests are detrimental the very people we want to help. Providers may be well-meaning but the system under which one operates can easily lead to compromise ethics for money.
I have participated at Oxford University with Johns Hopkins Medical School in the first every bioethics conference called HOPE. I spoke on the topic: “Can one be ethical in care, if one is unethical in business?” I contributed to the consensus statement. I have been invited to speak and invited to participate and contribute to Harvard University’s bootcamp on research, law, and policy. I have written an article: Ethics without Borders, for the American Journal of Bioethics.
This supports our thinking and our philosophy. It is not static. We need to continually evolve and become more ethical as well as encourage the industry to do the same. Ethics and Capitalism doesn’t have to always be in conflict, they can co-exist.
A self-governing inclusive community of owners
Our values and ethos inform our principles. Our long term goal is to build and run a distributed, decentralized cooperative community in a way that allows every member of the collective to live a life full of joy, love, gratitude, and sharing where people earn by giving and that's rewarded.
Every member is an owner. We don’t think about people as “customers”, “clients”, “patients”, etc. People who are seeking care are called “Seekers”. Thinking about ownership requires us to think differently about what kind of organization we want to build and how to run it where it benefits the stakeholders first!
Adhering to our core principles is how we build a sustainable and regenerative world that benefits humankind without our egos getting in the way. The individual, collectives, and companies that work together can make it happen.
We'll incentivize regenerative models of capitalism and disincentivize extractive ones.
Our Core Principles
These principles are how we intend to operate Mind Lumen and Lumara. We are humans, we'll make mistakes, and we'll learn and make changes to continually improve to ensure that we are adhering to our core values and principles.
Organizational Structures
Designed to be stakeholder/stewardship/purpose driven rather than purely shareholder driven
Small independent decision-making teams
Ethical governance & leadership has to be learned & earned within the community
Radical Transparency
We do our work in the open.
All regenerative governance frameworks and proposals are public and voted on by community members
If we have employees, all salaries are visible to each, so there's no bias in terms of pay.
Money is not Power
More money does not mean more voting power.
Community members should be able to make a middle-class living wage in each locale
People earn by giving. We don't believe that "volunteerism" should be used as an extractive practice.
Fairness
Fair compensation means that everyone who contributes to the mission and vision earns (may be in currency, tokens, rewards, etc)
Contributions that are of high value to the mission and vision and not the company, are rewarded
No one, even if they are the leaders, will make more than 5x to 7x in the salary of the lowest-paid person
Community leaders’ earnings are capped at 5x the supporter/contributor member
Decision-making speed requires member ownership stake and distributed/delegated governance
Respect
Disagreements. It's not a reason to be toxic. Disagree without being disagreeable.
The power and sacredness of the medicine to heal yourself with help from a trusted guide/therapist
The indigenous communities that are the true pioneers of medicine work and healing
Open science, open nature, and open-source as the path to a regenerative future, should be recognized, rewarded, differentiated, and promoted.