How our future as societies depends on changing the perspective on how we see things.
The world is in constant transformation, but from time to time (we can see this trend in the human history) there are times of depth crisis, where the models, ideas or even systems we were used to living or supposed to trust start to show its flaws or those sides that are not appealing. We can´t blame the system, because they were created by us as societies.
Something that we can all agree on, is that we are almost entering the second decade of the 21st century, with a very busy agenda. Topics that ten years ago didn´t even exist in the social dialogue are part of our daily conversations. Climate change, gender equality, economic inequality (poverty), educational crisis, artificial intelligence and the future of technology among others will be the leading topics of the new decade.
Even though all these topics can seem very different and disconnected, what they have in common is us (human beings) and our future as species.
“How might war and capitalism and criminal justice and a thousand other things be different had they not been designed with half of humanity locked outside the door?”
Anand Giridharadas
One of the famous quotes of Albert Einstein reads “We cannot solve problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”. And this is exactly what we will need to learn for the next decade, to flex our minds, shift our ways of thinking and try to upgrade some obsolete models. The solutions will be found in more heterogenic tables of discussion, inviting parts of the society that weren´t invited before. And some parts will not only resist this new mindset but also won´t enjoy it.
If we scratch a little bit in all the topics that are in red now like: climate change, gender equality, the rise of populist regimes and so on, we will find that underneath lies an unbalance. In the past, a decision was made, and at some point, that isolate decision used repeatedly led us to a nonequal, not equilibrated reality. A lot of examples can be used to describe this, let´s take climate change. Back in the ’90s, it all started with the community of scientists warning us we have a problem with the ozone layer. They also warned us, that at some point the temperatures would rise because of the “contamination” we were having. The high levels of gases that were going to destroy the atmosphere. We did not hear because the symptoms in the ’90s weren´t that obvious. Some people start to pay more attention, but we ultimately keep our development as it was, or maybe even harder. Ten years later what we used to call just “contamination” or an “ozone-layer zone issue” evolved to “global-warming”. The decease that had some symptoms in the 80s and 90s, on the 00s it literally spread and got worst. And we are very warning right now, that in some cases, there are not coming back.
The same with gender equality, if we looked back, our democracies and systems were built up from patriarchy models, again, a model without balance (in this case of gender opportunities).
If we could use a metaphor to put un-balanced models in a visual way, we could picture them as a weighing scale with a tendency to just one side.
The future seems to unfold as an opportunity to find solutions having this weighing scale the most balanced we can. It can sound idealistic, but when old solutions are not finding the answers for problems, I would dare to ask, why not try to see the world with different lenses?