‘May you live in interesting times’: a well-known saying (quite likely not from China at all) with a two-edged nature that surely fits the early twenty-first century. It’s often difficult to live through. What the heck is going on? And why don’t we make it better?
If you’d like the big picture right up front, I think these are the two most fundamental principles behind what’s going on in these times.
- We’re travelling between old and new stories about how the world is and should be.
- Our brains have a directive to reduce effort.
Travelling between stories
By ‘story of the world’ (hat tip to Charles Eisenstein for the phrase) I mean what we tell ourselves as a culture about how the world works, how society should work and how our lives should be. We’re on a journey between an old story and a new story, and the pass is difficult to cross.
The old story of the world was handed to us through most of the twentieth century. It’s clearly breaking, and has been for a while. Chunks of it were probably never true, seen with perspective. Other parts have had their time, and we haven’t been good at replacing them.
A new story has emerged in pieces, here and there. Ideas about how we can run things and what life can be. We have most of what we need. But our procession has had a lot of confusion and infighting, so we haven’t got there yet and stepped into it. Still, our zigzagging gets closer, as the cracks in the old story grow ever more obvious.
The brain directive to save effort
Human brains are amazing. Even so, dealing with the world is hard work. So we have built-in directives to reduce that load by editing things out, simplifying, procrastinating, deflecting. This leads to behaviour that doesn’t have much to do with logic.
Not a great attribute for a species that needs to do a lot of thinking and reworking of how it’s been doing things and how it sees the world.
And if we’re under stress our brains ration effort even more. If, say, our place in the world feels uncertain or just getting by is a challenge. A difficult age makes its own solutions harder.
Being human in the pass
Perhaps the main thing to take away is that although it feels like chaos because we’re in it, on a big scale it’s a process. It’s just that it hurts our hearts how much damage people are causing in the attempt to hold it back.
Hopefully with understanding we can make things better sooner. It’s not that we lack solutions, in most cases. Our human programming stops us making the shift.
The world we could have
We don’t lack ideas. We have plenty of technology, with more coming along all the time, and plenty of social innovations waiting to be rolled out.
A world that’s better for humans — and everything else — is very close.
What gets in the way is us. Our programming about how we look at the world, how we make decisions, and where we think our self-interest is.
We could have cleaner energy, a healthier natural environment, fairer politics and democracy. We could have services that work well and uphold communities. We could let people who are different just live, and give everyone support to be healthy, understand themselves and bring out their talents. We could run the economy in a way that tells people they’re valued and stops them falling through the cracks. We could stop feeling like we’re in a fight with the world that we never asked for.
That’s why we’re making the trip through the pass. Enough of us have seen it that we want to go there.
Things come from somewhere
The things people say and do come from what’s inside them. Their thoughts, feelings, habits and attitudes.
We can deplore and fight behaviour as much as we want. But like any other problem, if you want to actually change anything for the long term you have to understand it. Go to the root.
(This is the actual meaning of the word ‘radical’, by the way. Of the root. People who don’t like to be challenged sometimes deploy it in a different way, to discredit.)
If we understand where actions come from, we’re in a much better position to nudge them to a more progressive and humane track.
It might also help us regard people with more kindness and understanding; even if we don’t excuse what they do.
It might even shed light on our own patterns and responses.
This is an excerpt from the beginning of my book, Why Don’t We Make the World Better?
If you’re curious about what else is in there, click the contents image to take a look.
