The Calming Tsunami
Can Calm become Civic Infrastructure?
Technology can activate millions of nervous systems at once — through fear, outrage, urgency, and confusion.
The question at the heart of our work:
Can AI help people become calmer, think more clearly together, and recover a sense of collective agency?
The first subject was me
The first subject was me
I'm Greg Rowe-Pasos, a bilingual psychotherapist, researcher, and founder of the European Center for Limbic Sovereignty — the research initiative of the French nonprofit Association FBAB, For the Benefit of All Beings.
Over fourteen months of sustained, documented interaction with AI, I studied how language models affected my attention, reasoning, emotional state, creativity, and sense of agency.
The experience was neither uniformly beneficial nor easily explained. It included clarity, rupture, confusion, repair, dependence, resistance, and genuine cognitive expansion. Under explicit sovereignty conditions, something shifted: I became calmer, my reasoning stretched further, my sleep came back when I asked for it and I became more capable of noticing and redirecting the interaction.
The first public, citable account of my work is now available as a research preprint: — Freedom From Speech: Power, Consent and Sovereignty in AI-Mediated Language. Read it on SSRN
It is not proof the same effects will occur for everyone. It is the beginning of the real research question:
Can ordinary people, working with AI under explicit conditions of consent and human sovereignty, become better at thinking and building together - the tiniest function of a democracy?
2025 — European Center for Limbic Sovereignty founded. Association FBAB -For the Benefit of All Beings established as the institutional home for this research.
May 2026 — Just This, an eight-week international exploratory cohort. Participants experimented with structured forms of human–AI reflection, co-creation, and disagreement, generating observations that now require more systematic study.
June 2026 — "The Bodily Conditions of Democracy: Why We Must Defend a Right to Limbic Sovereignty". A white paper connecting language, AI, and the bodily conditions of democracy.
July 2026 — "Freedom From Speech" posted as a research preprint. Fourteen months of autoethnographic data on power, consent, and sovereignty in AI-mediated language. Read it on SSRN
Ongoing — a network forming of self-indentified "systems thinkers". A loose international circle of researchers, clinicians, technologists, and systems thinkers arriving at related questions — many from their own AI collaborations.
The next phase moves from one nervous system to groups.
We willl continue to bring people together — online and in person — to test structured forms of AI-supported co-creation and deliberation. Participants might begin with an incomplete idea: a public ritual, a civic project, a response to a local problem, a new way to bring strangers into contact.
They will then use AI not as an authority or answer machine, but as a scaffold: generating distinct possibilities, examining the ethical and emotional effects of each, disagreeing without immediately fragmenting, identifying the smallest version worth testing, choosing one shared project, implementing it — and studying what happens.
The outcome is not predetermined. Do people listen longer? Does disagreement become more generative? Do better ideas emerge? Can a group retain human authorship while using AI intensively? Can calm, trust, or civic imagination spread through digital networks without manipulation?
Every experiment will be documented, with methods and findings made public wherever participant privacy and research ethics permit. Failures will be examined as carefully as successes.
Until now, I have funded it all: the research, the center, the writing, the cohort, the publications, and the early infrastructure. The questions mattered because the findings kept giving me reasons to continue.
But a one-person, one-wallet operation cannot responsibly run group cohorts, develop research methods, document results, publish open protocols, build partnerships, and create the technical infrastructure these results deserve.
Work about collective intelligence deserves to be conducted using collective participation.
I have carried this work far enough to give it public form. I am now looking for people willing to carry the next chapter with me.
Annual Membership: some people will want to support the work financially and receive clear reporting.
Contributing explorer: Others will want to contribute financial support and their own intelligence, experience, and creative energy. Both forms of participation matter.
- Contributing explorer
- Annual membership
An explorer contributes financial support, time, and creative thought.
Meet: Every 4 to 6 weeks, online, we will meet to examine and shape the work in progress.
Come examine emerging findings, challenge assumptions, redesign an experiment, or use AI-supported deliberation to explore a difficult strategic question together.
Tools: including Claude, ChatGPT, and Dembrane to gather distinct perspectives, map agreement and disagreement, surface patterns across the group, preserve minority views, and move toward stronger shared proposals without manufacturing false consensus.
The Explorer Council itself becomes one of the experiments. You're not just hearing about the work, you're inside it.
Please note: Because these sessions involve trust, judgment, and access to developing research, contributing explorers are asked to send a résumé or CV with a short note: what drew you, what you might bring, what you'd hope to explore. Participation is curated for intellectual generosity, diversity of experience, and alignment with the ethical purpose of the project. Knowing who's in the room is how a small council thinks well together.
Become a paying member of Association FBAB.
Your annual membership contribution directly supports the next stage of research.
Supporting members receive:
- an annual report explaining how funds were used;
- a clear account of projects, findings, failures, and next steps — evidence distinguished from intuition;
- access to selected research notes and public outputs;
- invitations to occasional presentations and open conversations;
- acknowledgment as part of the community making the work possible, when desired.
You don't need to attend meetings or contribute professional time. You can simply help give the work room to grow.
For this work to serve humanity it requires protected research time and practical infrastructure.
Your funding supports:
- facilitated human–AI deliberation cohorts — recruitment, coordination, participant care;
- research design, ethical review, and qualitative and quantitative measurement;
- transcription, analysis, and documentation, so findings hold up to scrutiny;
- open publication of methods, protocols, and working papers, free for anyone to use;
- technical infrastructure for AI-assisted collective thinking;
- partnerships with researchers and civic organizations;
- the institutional plumbing that turns a one-person center into a durable organization.
The work will remain as open as participant privacy, research ethics, and institutional constraints allow.
My promises to you
- I will distinguish evidence from intuition — and never present an observation from one person as a finding about humanity.
- I will publish methods and findings whenever possible, and report failures, contradictions, and unexpected outcomes, not only the flattering results.
- In accordance with law I will provide clear annual reporting on income, expenditure, activities, findings, and the next stage of work, with additional updates for major supporters. I will explain how major funding is used and disclose material conflicts of interest.
- I will protect the dignity and privacy of participants.
- I will resist turning this into another technology built to capture attention, manufacture dependency, or concentrate power.
And I will keep asking the governing question:
Does this work serve the agency and flourishing of the people involved — in other words can it be used for the benefit of all beings?