Humanity is not as threatened by climate change, or tribalism, or inequality, as we are by our inability to collaborate to meet those challenges. We need a new myth about our triumph over adversity, instead of each other, and we may be running out of time to make it.
None of us are really very good at agreement. We are good at war. Every one of us is a product of 70,000 years of scarcity and conflict where survival was about us and them. That is where the zero sum game began. That is something we can do something about, starting with a choice, a first agreement amongst ourselves, without waiting for our nations, or our leaders, to find agreement wherever we can. If that little choice is made often enough, even in small doses, and repeated enough, and within in a certain quantity of people, it can make a transcendent difference in the way we live in the future. It can even make us happier and wealthier as well.
If you are looking to grow personally as a human being, be more successful, alive, aware and accomplished, to find your real identity, you can be perfectly at home in this conversation, but if you also have a burning desire to save the world like many of us do, this book may open your eyes to some startlingly realistic possibilities, even when none seem evident. This is about something completely on the far other side of despair, and as helpful as hope truly is, it's not hope alone that is waiting. It is about something a lot more proactive. We can even say it's clear and strategic. It's simple and practical.
However long we avoid it, we are facing an inevitable choice about our human identity in which success will be defined by something on the other side of war and conflict, something that will definitely not sound like "crushing it" or "killing it" or even "going viral". That other something will not be the pursuit of peace, or love, or even universal justice, as attractive as those sound. Those are by-products of a highly special but very ordinary power, one that has always been accessible to all of us, the ability to make new agreement. Even wars end in treaty, and humanity, not its nations, needs a treaty of its own. This book's narrative is a deep dive on why a new human treaty is needed, and what it can open up for the difficult road ahead.
What this new human story we are writing offers us is a way to provoke realistic insights into a new culture, to break agreement down into its smallest, most identifiable (and scalable) form, and in such a way as to create a momentum effect in our ability to expand new wealth and power in the world, for ourselves, our tribes, our nations, and every other world of our modern metaverse. In the post-war existence we inevitably are about to enjoy, we won't have to take power to make power, and it won't have many limits, either. It will just take a lot more agreement than we have now, something that may prove difficult, but this power is the single most accessible key to wealth and prosperity we have. In the 21st century, it may actually be the key to our survival.
"What strikes me so powerfully about this entire conversation is just how practical it is."
What's amazed me was the discovery that so many more people that I had thought are really thinking this way. It's made me so much more hopeful for the future.
Even people with very different opinions can still find agreement. This is the first time in a long time that anything has shown me a way in which conservatives and liberals can still find common ground.
