On the world

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A question many people are asking, especially since November 2016: What's wrong with people?

The answer, as it turns out: A perceived mixture of feelings of reduced existential security and personal possibilities, laying the ground for values based on survival and traditions as opposed to values based on self-realization and the exploration of new ideas.

That's a general summary (remember, resist reductionism) of the remarkable World Values Survey's findings after surveying over a hundred countries for several decades.

This little picture above is a map of human culture. I think this picture in itself is the single most important document for understanding the world and what we can do with it. This little picture gives me hope. Especially if we go through the fine print on that site to see what exactly the picture is saying.

What we see is a possible movement; a definitive direction. Humans who have the courage to abandon their traditions create the future. They improve their own freedom, confidence, awareness, conscience, bonding, happiness, capacity for trust and satisfaction with their life, and they improve those things for everyone else. People who, for one reason or another, hold on to tradition do the opposite, and pull us all backwards.

We want to get as far to the right on this map as possible. That's not a matter of opinion; it's a measure of quality of life. It's not a value judgment to say it's better to be worried about, say, people liking your paintings than to be worried about how you're going to get food again. Self-expression values is what you can afford to worry about when your more basic needs are met; survival is what you're stuck with when they're not.

And we tend to move to the right when we move up. We can move down, but then follows a motion backwards, to the left. This is not a question of opinion either; it's a plain observation of global history. There are no countries in the upper left of the map or in a large area in the lower right corner; there is no possible reality where a culture can develop those combinations of values.

So we know. We know what we need to do to make this a finer world, a more worthwhile world for everyone. Now the question of how exactly we as a species are going to find the courage to do it, I don't know. Probably it has to do with supporting and making each other feel safe. This quote by the wise Arundhati Roy I stumbled on seems appropriate.