THE INSTITUTE FOR
A NEW
POLITICAL COSMOLOGY
OUR TEAM
Dr. Louis G. Herman
Director, Founder, Editorial Board
Louis Herman is a professor of political science and Chair of the Division of Social Sciences at the University of Hawaiʻi – West Oʻahu. He grew up in a traditional Jewish community in neo-Nazi, racist South Africa in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The two poles of his formative political experiences were outrage at human-inflicted suffering and the healing beauty of southern Africaʻs rugged wilderness. He obtained degrees in medicine and the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University in England, then emigrated to Israel where he lived out his Jewish connection to the Biblical homeland working on a kibbutz. His participation in the Yom Kippur War as a paratrooper confronted him with Palestinian indigeneity in a way that impelled him to return to big questions of life and philosophy: How do we know what is true and good? How should we live together?
After three years of graduate work in political philosophy at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, he was invited to complete his Ph.D. at the University of Hawaiʻi. The Hawaiian Islands offered a privileged vantage for developing a global philosophy on the human condition. He formulated this vision in Future Primal: How our Wilderness Origins Show us a Way Forward (2013). This work outlined a model of a truth-seeking politics based on the new evolutionary understanding of the emergence of human consciousness, the politics of early hunting-gathering societies and indigenous society's like the San Bushmen and a comparative history of civilization. He founded The Institute for a New Political Cosmology in 2018 to promote an educational and political culture with truth-questing as the central practice of a new political cosmology.
Georgia Thompson
Creative Director
Georgia Thompson has played a pivotal role in the development of the Institute since 2015. She is a Political Science alumnus of University of Hawaiʻi-West Oʻahu where she was first introduced to Dr. Louis Herman’s model of the truth quest as a basis for personal development, political transformation, and cosmology-building. After graduating she continued to practice the principles of the model in her work around the world in Japan, the US, and England. Georgia has worked predominately as a Community Readiness Consultant for the US military. While in England she also served as Partnerships Director for ThisWay Global, an artificial intelligence startup launched at the University of Cambridge Enterprise incubator.
As Communications Director for the Institute for a New Political Cosmology, Georgia represented the Institute at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Hawai’i in 2016. She also accompanied Dr. Herman on research trips to South Africa in 2017 and 2018 to develop partnerships with organizations such as the Sea Change Project, Organization for Noetic Ecology, Greyton Transition Town & Valley Food Gardens, and the WILD Foundation. In 2019, Georgia co-presented “Repairing the Ecology of Consciousness” with Dr. Herman at the Global Earth Repair Conference in Port Townsend, WA.
Georgia is currently working on a MA in Communications and Journalism at the University of Hawai’i Mānoa. Fun fact, Georgia had the privilege to experience cold water diving with naturalist and filmmaker Craig Foster and consult on the award-winning Netflix documentary, My Octopus Teacher, directed by Pippa Ehrlich of the Sea Change Institute.