All over the world we see entire communities and societies either undergoing or on the brink of major social dislocations.  Political discourse has grown increasingly rancorous and polarized.  Socioeconomic disparities continue to widen, courtesy of skewed and dysfunctional economic systems.  The old social structures are fast disintegrating.  The natural environment is being defiled and destroyed.

These troubling phenomena, not unrelated, have created an unsettling climate of nihilism and despair, engendering social movements that appear very dissimilar and often at odds ideologically, but which are tapping into the same vein of legitimate frustration borne of deep psychic despair.

Sadly, all the remedies that our leaders are deploying or advocating to salve these wounds, though appearing to ameliorate the situation somewhat (and then too, only temporarily) will ultimately fail unless the root causes of this existential dissonance are addressed.  The day of reckoning may be delayed, but not denied.

Governments, corporations, multilateral and international organizations, mainstream media, academia’s talking heads, even the vast majority of well-intentioned not-for-profits, they all seemingly fail to recognize that we are facing a crisis of psyche.  The rest is just noise, symptoms rather than causes.

None of this is surprising to cultural historian and philosopher Richard Tarnas, who so eloquently laments that there is a

So how does one reconcile this inexorable march towards a psychic precipice with the über-optimistic  gospel of super-abundance and technology-will-cure-all-ills extolled by the gurus of hi-tech?  Unsurprisingly, they only identify problems or issues that require a technological solution.  It’s the old saw of everything looking like a nail when all you have is a hammer.  Yes, they are to be credited for attempting to solve large and meaningful social problems, as well as the trivial and prosaic.  But at the end of the day, a significant part of their problem-solving acumen is devoted to resolving issues unintentionally caused by technology in the first place.

Technological progress over the last few decades has shrunk the world to the point where we can connect and communicate almost instantaneously with anyone on the planet.  This proximity to other peoples, cultures, and, most importantly, ideas has brought different worldviews in stark juxtaposition, and the psychological discomfort and dislocation thus caused has led to an increasingly chauvinistic definition of self in relation to the other.  This is somewhat akin to the “clash of civilizations” postulated by Samuel Huntington for the post-Cold War era.

However, anyone who truly understands biology or quantum physics is acutely aware of how illusory the notion of “self” is.  The Xhosa proverb – ubuntu ungamntu ngabanye abantu – beautifully captures the essence of our interconnectedness; people are people through other people.  In other words, I am what I am because we all are.

Each passing year finds us just a little bit more psychically untethered – as individuals, as societies, and as a species.   On an individual level, we struggle to reconcile multiple levels of cognitive dissonance.  As a society, we yearn for stability, security and equity, while our institutions have devolved to foster the very opposite (even though it has become fashionable to denounce our leaders, we seldom if ever question the institutions and paradigms that enable and sustain these individuals and the extant power structure).  As a species, we strive to rise above our shortcomings, but are purportedly waylaid by our biology.

What is needed today is a framework that provides psychic coherence, one that allows us to better comprehend society, the world, and our place in it.  One that could not only help us to make more informed decisions about  our future, but also improve our lives today. It would synthesize the knowledge and wisdom garnered across a range of disciplines, cultures, communities and faiths.  On a practical level, it would help us to better understand, and thereby adjust to, complexity and change.

Epistemic and epistemological advances both have outpaced our current ontology.  It is high time we updated the latter through a radically revised worldview.

What exactly is our worldview and why does it matter?  

Our worldview is the framework of coherent beliefs and perspectives that is constructed from and encompasses our most fundamental cognitive, affective, and evaluative presuppositions about the nature of Reality.  (The word itself is a calque of the German Weltanschauung, first used by Kant.)   It is how we make sense of the world around us.  It develops primarily in our formative years, absorbed subconsciously from our community or society.  The values, beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, and ideas that make up our worldview directly affect our goals and desires, relationships and behaviors.  They define who we are and, mutatis mutandis, the person we will become.  We are rarely ever conscious of our own worldview; it’s something we take for granted (“that’s just the way things are”), and seldom realize that there might exist others radically different from ours.

Worldviews matter tremendously (indeed, they may be all that really matter) because societies are organized around their respective worldviews.  Political, economic, legal, cultural and religious institutions all flow from the worldview of the society or culture in which they exist.  It is a bidirectional relationship – worldviews influence the institutions belonging to the society in which they exist, while these institutions derive their legitimacy from their native worldview, which they consciously seek to foster and perpetuate.

Worldviews determine not only how we understand the world and internalize it, but also how we interact with it.  This has tremendous implications for economic, social and political development.  The main reason our current development models have failed woefully is because they are based on faulty paradigms of outdated worldviews.  In short, they fail because we think (and hence act) in a manner discordant with the way things really are.

Could We Change if We Wanted to?

The dominant worldview in the West today, and spreading rapidly around the globe as the West extends its political, economic and cultural influences, is what I term Objective Scientism (ObSci).  The philosophies underpinning this worldview are Objectivism – Reality exists as an objective absolute, and Reason is the only way to comprehend Reality – and Scientism – the only knowledge is that which is measurable and verifiable through application of an accepted scientific methodology.  The evolution of this worldview and its inherent limitations are topics for another day, but the important point to note is that we humans have not always held these supposedly genetically ingrained beliefs, which have their historical roots in the Enlightenment that followed the Renaissance and Reformation in Western Europe.

Dissatisfaction with the ObSci worldview, or more correctly, with its consequences, reached a crescendo in the West around the decade of the 1960s.  An enhanced awareness of sociocultural and sociopolitical issues was manifest on a global scale.  This included a heightened sensitivity to environmental, racial and feminist issues.  There was a surge in demand for political freedom and self-determination in the least “developed” countries, as they violently overthrew their colonial oppressors.  We became fascinated by the exciting promise of outer space.

There was a simultaneous impetus to explore psychic or “inner” space (predominantly through the use of entheogenic substances) in our search for a a spirituality outside the major religious orthodoxies.  Interest in mystical traditions rose sharply during the decade; this was related both to the major religions (for example, the study of Gnosticism in Christianity, Sufism in Islam and the Kabbalah in Judaism), as well as to Eastern and indigenous traditions (for example, Shamanism, Yoga and Transcendental Meditation were introduced and/or popularized in the West during this decade).

It had finally dawned on the West that the ObSci worldview was not only outdated but was leading us down a dangerous path.  That should have tolled the death knell for ObSci, moving the new consciousness from counterculture to mainstream.  But worldview change is never an easy or comfortable process, and a confluence of sociocultural, economic and political circumstances conspired to derail any possibility of widespread adoption of the new consciousness, buying ObSci a few more decades.

But history is on the side of change.  Just as it took several generations for the West to finally accept ObSci as a legitimate successor to the anthropocentric, geocentric worldview, so too has it taken decades for us to reach this tipping point.  The time is propitious for just such a shift in thinking.

Critics of worldview change hang their pessimistic hat on the argument that even if such change were possible within the compressed timeframe of a generation or two (as advocated here), asking people to radically revise their worldview would be akin to self-apostasy, and psychologically destabilizing, since our worldviews, in effect, define our psyche and persona.

These naysayers do not give us humans sufficient credit.  Our collective future as a species would be grim indeed if we submitted to the Dawkinsian fatalism of being hostage to our genes.  Science itself has increasingly shown the error in that line of thinking and it would be foolish to succumb to that dogma.  It never ceases to amaze me how it has become de rigeur to posit explanations of all human behavior, indeed of all living systems, in neo-Darwinian terms.

The human brain continues to surprise us with its plasticity, while the human mind appears to have even greater capacity for change and adaptation.  Behaviors and concepts can be unlearned, new ones adopted, through focus, concentration and mindfulness.  Societally, we are already doing this in baby steps.  The impossible becomes possible, the alternative becomes conventional, the bizarre becomes pedestrian.  That’s just the nature of progress.