A Future Beyond Grievances

PROOF 18

Here goes the Title

Michael Shaun Conaway
Publishing Editor
March 10, 2021

Everyone keeps saying that this is one of the most divisive times in history. Divisive yes, but in the context of the brutal history of humanity, this is a time that is certainly less divisive than the average. World War I and WWII combined resulted in over 87 million deaths. Now that’s divisive.

Yet our experience is that we are being torn apart by radically different views of life. A big part of this is the attention economy – people make money when you pay attention. The things that seem to get the most attention are the ones that trigger a big reaction, fear, anger, and the current champion of all attention getters, OUTRAGE!.

Still, it is pretty clear that there are a number of opposing ideas about what a good human life is and what a good human society is. Given this tension you might well wonder how can we collectively imagine a future for humanity. At the Generative Futures Initiative we have a few starting points:

  1. There is no one future for humanity, rather there are any number of possible futures, some of which are viable and desirable.
  2. Ethics are context dependent. Slavery was considered ethical at the end of the 18th Century. Today the idea that one human could own another is abhorrent. While we cannot know the ethics of a future society, we can see trends and a viable future must at a minimum be at the ethical level of our best imagination today.
  3. There is no good individual human life outside of a good collective human life. We can no longer prioritize the life of one group of humans over another, nor can we prioritize human life over the collective life of all of the species of life on the planet. We are part of one co-evolved ecosystem.

To create a viable and desirable future we must adopt the highest evolved ethics we can imagine and in Buckminster Fuller’s words “Create a world that works for every one and everything.”

Divisiveness is an artifact of the past amplified by the attention economy. The antidote is to move decisively into a new future.

Are you ready to boldly reimagine human life on this planet?

We ARE – Come join us!



Proof of a Thriving Future for Humanity

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PROOF is a digital magazine published by Bold.ly NOW and the Generative Futures Initiative.  The mission of the magazine is to shine a light on people, organisations and ideas that stand as Proof of a Thriving Future.