Which future will we guide ourselves toward as a species?

The future for humanity is a stark choice between extinction and planetary thriving. Will we become “wise managers” of cultural evolution before it’s too late? This may be THE most important question you will answer in word and deed in your lifetime.

Almost no one realizes that we collectively know everything we need to solve our planetary crisis. Yet the gap between knowledge gathered and wisdom practiced remains very far indeed. Our current trajectory is “overshoot-and-collapse” as we move toward a future no one wants because we are blind to our great capacities for collective re-imagining in times of crisis.

Many billions of dollars have been spent by government agencies to fund research in the social sciences throughout the last half century. And still our communities grapple with a host of intensifying social problems ranging from domestic violence and addictive behaviors at the personal level through to endemic inequality and environmental destruction at societal scales.

Missing from the milieu of research and social change practices is the vital role of bridge building between them. Far too many findings in academic research fail to be learned and translated into improved social practices. And the fragmentation of knowledge into academic disciplines keeps tractable problems from being addressed in a holistic and integrative manner. Thus we find ourselves living in the 21st Century with compounding threats that place the entire human experience in jeopardy — as a planetary-scale Mass Extinction event unfolds that is driven principally by human activities. We don’t yet realize that we can put the puzzle pieces together and get to work building a future worth striving for.

Can we design the future we want? Yes, but only if we fully recognize what we are up against. There is a cabal of billionaire financiers who have built the most sophisticated systems of misinformation and propaganda the world has ever known. As they corrode away our electoral systems to defund governments and direct taxpayer funded research toward the strengthening of their empires — to the detriment of all — it is vital that an open, transparent, and democratically accountable approach to applied social science be employed to the best of our collective abilities.

We are fighting against the inertia of a massive global system designed to extract and hoard wealth. It has been so successful that a mere 62 people now have the same aggregate wealth as 3,700,000,000!!! This outcome alone should make your blood boil. So what are we going to do about it?

This is where culture design comes in. I have argued elsewhere that humanity now has all the knowledge we need to solve every chronic social problem in the world (see link above). Yet we continue down a path of overshoot-and-collapse thanks to the institutions of greed and wealth hoarding at the heart of the current political economic system.

We need to recognize the connective intelligence of living systems and apply the principles for how it works to our own communities. This means we become “seed islands” of transformation as old stories break down and new stories become possible. It means recognizing that we are part of nature — the illusions of separation are a cultural sickness whose time has come for deep healing. There may be grief in sacred things lost along the way, but there is also a path to salvation if we can hold to the knowledge that sacred things are always worth fighting for.

It is time to become wise stewards of planetary evolution. As our planet changes in unprecedented ways, we must learn and apply the sciences of cultural evolution to guide ourselves through the cascade of crises for a world that is deeply and profoundly altered by human actions. Here is one example of why cultural evolution is so vital now — as a vast infrastructure for spreading hatred and lies is being used to pit one political tribe against another in elections on multiple continents.

Discernment is more important than ever before. And the problems go much deeper than the debate about “fake news” since we are fully in an information war unlike anything we have seen before. In my articles about the need for a science of intentional change and the vision for a global network of culture design labs, these challenges are recognized as things that can only be addressed by open collaboration and participation in the design of collective futures.

Or said another way, we only get to the future that we all strive for together.

Right now, the future is being shaped by those who hold us in fear and divide us against each other. They use our illusions of separation to get us fighting our allies when we should be planting seeds for a regenerative future. Nothing less will be worthy of our children’s inheritance.

Let us together be wise managers of evolutionary change. We don’t have any more time to waste.

Onward, fellow humans.