Genesis Xperience #1: Reclaiming Eros

This is the write-up of the first Genesis Experience — two days with fifty people at Commons Hub Brussels in January 2025 — convened by Timothée Brès with Pamela von Sabljar. Genesis began from a question Brès had been circling since 2014: how communities and decentralised organisations grow without compromising what they are for. He kept finding that the answer routed through founders, and that the founder question is also a polarity question.

The frame is Logos and Eros — structure and flow — and the emblem they chose is a horizontal DNA strand, the two wound together. Eros here is not eros as sex. It is the life-affirming current von Sabljar describes running through soil, trees, and human bonds. The claim is that leadership which excludes it goes brittle, and that what looks like a soft topic is actually a design constraint.

The most useful part is the five principles Brès distils for a generative culture:

1. Deep listening requires clear boundaries — genuine openness depends on being able to say no
2. Creative authority is not aggression — decisive leadership can come from attunement rather than control
3. Organisations resist the creativity they claim to desire, especially when it threatens established power
4. Eros and Source are complementary — Eros animates emergence, Source gives it direction and stewardship
5. Differentiation and emergence are integrated, not traded off

There is a second set for generative leadership itself, stranger and better than the name suggests: life force over repair, so you stop patching what is broken and tap the current running through it; generative brutality, which cuts whatever constrains vitality to serve the whole, with death as an ally in the cycle of creation; and a cyclical rhythm that refuses perpetual spring, alternating bold action with rest.

The line I keep is von Sabljar’s: “The way to come closer together is to start by honoring the differences.” It is the opposite of the usual move, where closeness is asked for as the price of setting differences aside — and it is why I read this next to Nonviolent Communication. Both are trying to build a channel between people that does not require either side to disappear.

What I respect most is the refusal to pick a side in the culture war it walks into. The essay is candid that centring sexual difference cost them readers at both ends — too essentialist for one, too “androgynous” for the other — and argues that the mature position is to take the signal from each rather than flinch. Cadell Last puts the stakes plainly: “Cultivating spirituality to go deeper into political economy, getting your hands dirty with the difficult realities of contemporary life, is the opposite of bypassing.”

They chose a mycelium over an institution, which is the part I am least sure about and most drawn to.