21 Lessons for the 21st Century
| Book Author | |
|---|---|
| Published | August 30, 2018 |
| Pages | 372 |
| Greek Publisher | Αλεξάνδρεια |
Future proof yourself against the 21st Century
What’s it about?
21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) is a hard-hitting investigation of civilization’s most pertinent challenges. Humankind is moving deeper into uncharted technological and social territory. These blinks explore how best to navigate our lives in this century of constant change, using fascinating examples from current affairs along the way.
About the author
Yuval Noah Harari gained a PhD in history from Oxford University and is the best-selling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. His books, which have been translated into over 50 languages, have sold over 12 million copies worldwide.
Basic Key Ideas
In an era of relentless change and uncertain futures, governments and individuals alike are grappling with technological, political and social issues unique to the twenty-first century. How should we respond to modern-day phenomena, such as frighteningly intelligent computers, globalization and the fake news epidemic? And what about the threat of terrorism – should we take action or take a deep breath and relax?
In these blinks, you’ll discover the answer to all these questions and more. You’ll learn how to futureproof your children by changing your approach to education, what robots and automation mean for the future of white-collar work and why the question of immigration is threatening to destroy twenty-first-century Europe.
Author Yuval Noah Harari has formulated some important lessons to help us deal with these fascinating times. These blinks seek to highlight the six most crucial ones.
In these blinks, you’ll also find out
- how technological disruption led to Brexit;
- why we have more to fear from cars than terrorists; and
- why we need to teach our children less.
Throughout the twentieth century, three distinct political ideologies vied for world supremacy – communism, fascism and liberalism. Fast-forward to the late twentieth century and liberalism, which celebrates democracy, free enterprise and individual freedoms, was the clear winner. But how will the West’s liberal-democratic system cope in the twenty-first century?
Disturbingly, its vital signs aren’t good – and the revolution in information technology is to blame.
From the 1990s onward, computer technology has arguably transformed our world more than any other force. But despite its massive impact, most politicians seem hardly able to comprehend this new innovation, and are even less capable of controlling it.
Just consider the world of finance. Computers have already made our financial system fiendishly complicated – so much so, that very few humans are now able to understand how it works. As the twenty-first century continues and artificial intelligence advances, we may reach a stage where no human will be able to make any sense of financial data. The implications of this scenario for our political process are disturbing. Just imagine a future where governments have to patiently wait for algorithms to give them the green light on their budget or their tax-reform plans.
Unfortunately, for many twenty-first-century politicians, technological disruption isn’t at the top of the agenda. For instance, during the 2016 American presidential election, neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton discussed the implications of automation on job losses. In fact, disruptive technology was only really discussed in the context of the Hillary Clinton email scandal.
This wall of silence is causing many voters to lose faith in established governments. Ordinary people in liberal democracies across the Western world are feeling more and more irrelevant in this brave new world of artificial intelligence, globalization and machine learning. And this fear of becoming irrelevant has made them desperate to wield whatever political power they still have, before it becomes too late. Not convinced? Just take a look at the political earthquakes of 2016. Both Brexit in the United Kingdom and Donald Trump’s election in the United States were supported by ordinary people, worried that the world and its dominant liberal political systems were leaving them behind.
Throughout the twentieth century, ordinary workers worried about their labor being exploited by economic elites. But these days, the masses are more afraid of losing their economic status in a high-tech economy that no longer needs their labor at all.
Although most experts agree that robotics and machine learning will change nearly all lines of work in the twenty-first century, we can’t predict what this change will look like. Will billions of people find themselves economically irrelevant within the next twenty years, or will automation result in wider prosperity and great new jobs for all?
Many optimists point to the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century, a time when the fear that new machine technology would create mass unemployment was widespread. They point out that since the start of that industrial revolution, new technology has created a new job for each one it made obsolete.
Unfortunately, there is good reason to assume that, in the twenty-first century, the impact of new technology on human employment will be much more destructive.
Just consider the fact that humans are possessed of two sorts of abilities – cognitive and physical. In the previous industrial revolution, humans experienced competition from machines largely in the realm of purely physical abilities. Our cognitive abilities, meanwhile, remained far superior to machines’. Therefore, even as automation occurred in manual jobs within industry and agriculture, there concurrently emerged new jobs that required the sort of cognitive skills particular to humans – such as analysis, communication and learning.
But in the twenty-first century, machines are getting smart enough to compete for these cognitive-based jobs, too.
Recently, neuroscientists have discovered that many of our choices, preferences and emotions are not the result of some magical human faculty, such as free will. Instead, human cognition comes from our brain’s ability to calculate different probabilities in the space of a split second.
These neuroscientific insights raise a troubling question: Will artificial intelligence eventually outperform people in professions requiring “human intuition,” such as law and banking? It’s highly probable. Computer scientists now know that what looked like impenetrable human intuition was really just our neural networks recognizing familiar patterns and making fast calculations about probabilities.
So, in the twenty-first century, computers might well be able to make banking decisions about whether or not to lend a customer money, as well as accurately predict whether a lawyer in a court case is bluffing or not. In other words, in the years ahead, even the most cognitively demanding jobs won’t be safe from automation.
The world has never looked so small. The twenty-first century has ushered in changes unimaginable to our forebears. For instance, globalization has made it possible to meet people from all over the world. Unfortunately, it has also opened up new opportunities for conflict.
Indeed, as more of the world’s people cross borders in the hunt for better jobs and more security, our urge to expel, confront or assimilate strangers is putting our political ideologies and national identities to the severest of tests.
This immigration challenge is particularly pertinent in Europe.
In the twentieth century, the European Union was founded on the premise of overcoming cultural disparities between citizens of France, Germany and other European nations. But ironically, this political project may now collapse because of its failure to accommodate cultural distinctions between European citizens and new arrivals from the Middle East and Africa.
For instance, growing numbers of new arrivals from these regions have sparked bitter debates between Europeans in regard to issues of tolerance and identity.
Although it is broadly accepted that immigrants should make attempts to assimilate to their host country’s culture, how far this assimilation should go is a contentious subject. Some Europeans and political groups argue that new arrivals should cast off their previous cultural identities entirely, right down to their traditional styles of dress and their taboos regarding food. These Europeans argue that immigrants arriving from a culture that is, say, deeply patriarchal and religious, and entering into a European liberal society, should adopt their host’s feminist and secular norms.
In contrast, pro-immigration Europeans contend that since Europe is already highly diverse, with a wide range of values and habits represented among its native peoples, it is unfair to expect immigrants to assimilate to some abstract collective identity that most Europeans themselves don’t even relate to. These Europeans argue that we shouldn’t expect Muslim immigrants to convert to Christianity when the majority of British people don’t attend church themselves. And they question why immigrants from the Punjab should have to forgo their traditional curries in favor of fish and chips, given that most native Brits are more likely to be found in a curry house on a Friday night than in a fish-and-chip shop.
Ultimately, the issue of immigrant assimilation is far from clear-cut. Therefore, the lesson for the twenty-first century is that this debate shouldn’t be framed, as it often is, as a moral struggle between “fascist” anti-immigrationists and pro-immigrationists promoting the “suicide” of European culture. Instead, immigration should be discussed rationally, as both political viewpoints have some legitimacy.
No one is better at playing mind games than twenty-first century terrorists. Since the 9/11 attacks, in 2001, roughly 50 people are killed by terrorists in the European Union every year. In America, about ten people are killed.
Now consider that during that time, 80,000 people in Europe and 40,000 Americans have died in traffic accidents. Clearly, our roads pose a far greater hazard to our lives than terrorists, so why are most Westerners more scared of terrorism than driving?
Terrorism is a strategy typically employed by weak and desperate parties. It aims to change the political situation by sowing fear in the hearts of the enemy rather than by causing material damage, which terrorists usually aren’t strong enough to do. Although terrorists typically kill very few people overall, the twenty-first century has taught us that their campaigns can be ruthlessly effective.
For instance, although al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks killed 3,000 Americans and caused terror on the streets of New York, they inflicted very little damage on America as a military power. Post-attack, America had exactly the same amount of soldiers, ships and tanks as she had before, and the country’s roads, communication systems and railways were unharmed. But the enormous audiovisual impact of the Twin Towers collapsing was enough for the nation to seek massive retribution. The terrorists wanted to cause a political and military storm in the Middle East, and they got one. Just days after the attacks, George W. Bush declared a war on terror in Afghanistan, the consequences of which still reverberate in the region today.
So how did this weak group of terrorists, with few military resources at their disposal, manage to manipulate the world’s greatest power into such disproportionate retaliation?
To answer this question, it’s useful to think of terrorist groups like al-Qaeda as a fly buzzing around a china shop. This fly wants to break something, but it’s not strong enough to even move a teacup. However, it has a better idea. Standing in this china shop is a massive bull, and if the fly can buzz in his ear and annoy him, the bull, in his attempts to kill the fly, might eventually break everything himself. In the case of 9/11 and the war on terror, the Islamic extremist fly succeeded, and the United States bull, driven by anger and fear, all but destroyed the Middle Eastern shop. Today, the fundamentalists are flourishing amid the carnage left behind.
The lesson for the twenty-first century? Terrorists win when mighty governments overreact.
For centuries, liberal societies have placed a huge amount of trust in the ability of individuals to think and act rationally. In fact, our modern societies are founded on the belief that each human adult is a rational, independent agent. For instance, democracy is based on the notion that voters will know what is best. Our system of free-market capitalism is premised on the idea that customers are never wrong. And our liberal system of education instructs pupils to engage in independent thinking.
But in the twenty-first century, placing so much faith in our ability to act rationally is a grave mistake. Why? Because modern humans, as individuals, know appallingly little about how the world actually works.
People in the Stone Age knew how to hunt, turn animal skins into clothes and get a fire going. Modern man is far less self-sufficient. The problem is that, even though we require experts to fulfill almost all our needs, we falsely think that, on an individual level, we know much more than our Stone Age ancestors.
For instance, in one experiment, participants were asked whether they understood how zippers work. Although most participants confidently replied that they did, when they were asked to elaborate on this knowledge, most were revealed to be clueless about how this everyday mechanism actually works.
The lesson for the twenty-first century? Modern man often falls prey to what scientists have deemed “the knowledge illusion.” That is, individuals tend to believe they understand a lot simply because they treat the knowledge that other people possess – for instance, how a zipper functions – as though they possessed it, too.
The consequences of the knowledge illusion are that individuals, such as voters or government officials, fail to understand just how complex the world really is and how ignorant they are of that complexity.
Thus, we see individuals who know almost nothing about the field of meteorology proposing climate change policies, or politicians forcefully espousing solutions to conflicts in Ukraine or Iraq, even though they couldn’t find these countries on a map.
So next time someone gives you their opinion, dig a little deeper to find out how much they really know about the subject in question. You might be surprised.
A child born the year of writing will be in his or her thirties in 2050 and will hopefully still be alive in 2100. But what sort of education would help this child prosper well into the next century?
For children of the twenty-first century to flourish and become capable adults, we need to radically rethink our schooling system. In other words, the schools that got us here won’t get us there.
Currently, schools tend to place too much emphasis on cramming their students with information. This approach made a lot of sense in the nineteenth century, because information tended to be scarce. This was a time without daily newspapers, without radio and public libraries and television. Additionally, even the information that did exist was regularly subject to censorship. In many countries, there was little reading material in circulation apart from religious texts and novels. Consequently, when the modern schooling system was introduced, with its focus on imparting the essential facts of history, geography and biology, it represented a huge improvement for most ordinary people.
But living conditions are very different in the twenty-first century, and our educational systems are now hopelessly antiquated.
In today’s world, we are flooded with almost too much information, and our governments, or most of them, no longer attempt to censor it. People all over the world have smartphones, and could spend all day every day perusing Wikipedia, catching up on TED talks and studying for online courses if they had the time and desire to do so.
Nowadays, the problem for modern man is not scarcity of information but all the misinformation that now exists. Just consider all the fake news that many of us wade through each time we browse our social media feeds.
In response to this information overload, schools should stop shoving even more data down children’s throats. Instead, twenty-first century children need to be taught how to make sense of the vast amounts of information that bombards them on a daily basis. They need to learn how to distinguish between important information and irrelevant, or downright fake, news. In the twenty-first century, information will be always at our fingertips. The truth, however, will be harder to find.
The key message in these blinks:
In this century of constant technological and political upheaval, we can prepare ourselves for the future by acknowledging our own ignorance in the face of increasing complexity, and discussing hot political topics, such as immigration, with calm rationality. We can also futureproof ourselves by learning to tell the difference between real and fake news. Although the twenty-first century has brought fears of terrorism and mass unemployment, we should remember that, ultimately, the key to our prosperity and security remains in our own hands.
Actionable advice:
Truth doesn’t speak to power.
It’s easy to assume that powerful leaders always have the inside track on situations, or know the truth about what other people think. But the reality is that great leaders are often less well informed than the average person. Why? Because, as people become more and more powerful, those around them become equally less likely to divulge hard hitting truths to them. Instead, people around these leaders become more concerned with flattering them, and ensuring they don’t say anything inappropriate or confusing during the short time they have their ear. Therefore, if you want the truth, try hanging around on the periphery of power, rather than at its centre. You just might learn something.
Suggested further reading: Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens (2015) traces the evolution of our species – from the rise of our most ancient ancestors to our current place in the modern, technological age. How have we, a species of hairless, tailless ape, managed to completely dominate the entire planet? These blinks show you the developments and trends that have allowed Homo sapiens to rise to the top.
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About Book
The 21st century will bring changes and challenges unlike any humans have encountered before. Globalism and technological innovations are changing the structures of societies worldwide—and the changes are happening quickly. If people don’t face these challenges and help shape the future, the world could have a class of obsolete workers whose jobs have been automated and people could lose their ability to make their own decisions. In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari highlights the biggest challenges in the modern world, and he offers advice on making sense of and navigating such transitional times.
In this summary, you’ll learn how algorithms like Netflix movie recommendations are teaching you to distrust your own judgment, why religion can’t solve 21st-century challenges, and how automation will threaten the jobs of humans in every industry.
The 21st century will bring changes and challenges unlike any humans have encountered before. Globalism and technological innovations are changing the structures of societies worldwide—and the changes are happening quickly. This book highlights the biggest challenges in the modern world, and it offers advice on making sense of and navigating such transitional times. If people don’t become better informed about the present and participate in shaping the future, the world could have a class of obsolete workers whose jobs have been automated, people could lose their ability to make their own decisions, and nuclear weapons could annihilate much of the world.
Part 1: Political, Economic, and Social Realities Are Changing
Technological innovations are changing the structures of society—from politics to the labor market. If humans are to address these challenges, they’ll need to create new tools and approaches that fit this new context.
Politics: The Fall of Liberalism
For centuries, people have developed political models that fit the political, economic, and social context of the time, and these models provided a story to make sense of the world and an ideal future to work toward. In recent decades, the dominant political story has been liberalism, which promoted individual freedoms—through free trade, low taxes, free elections, peaceful international relations, rights for minority groups, and pro-immigration policies. However, the massive technological innovations are automating jobs, broadening inequality, and altering human behavior in ways that are making the liberal story irrelevant—and people must either adapt an old political model to modern times or create a new one.
Parallel revolutions in infotech and biotech are transforming societies by:
- Making technology too complex for most people to understand. Many people are uninformed about how machines are changing the labor market and algorithms are influencing the way they think, shop, and vote.
- Allowing humans to alter their own bodies. Whereas past innovations altered the external world—for example, by building dams—new technology is being developed to alter humans’ internal worlds, such as slowing the aging process through bioengineering.
Economy: Technology Is Transforming the Labor Market
In the 21st century, increasingly sophisticated technology could automate so many jobs that unemployment skyrockets among low-skilled workers. Neurological discoveries and technological innovations will enable machines to do jobs better than people can, because machines are immune to human error and biases.
Large-scale automation will likely cause a net loss in employment, creating a “useless class” of unskilled workers. Some workers will be able to get training in a new set of skills, but technology will continue to change so rapidly that those new skills could also become obsolete a decade later. This could eventually create a post-work society, in which workers face a fight against irrelevance and governments must determine alternative ways to support people.
Society: Technology Threatens Human Liberty
In addition to threatening jobs, technology threatens human liberty, as algorithms learn so much about people that they gain an immense power to influence and manipulate. Liberalism maintains that everyone has free will to choose how to vote, how to act, and what to buy—but algorithms can make better choices than you do. For instance, Netflix’s algorithm might suggest a movie that fits your tastes better than one you would have picked.
Each decision that algorithms make for you has two effects:
- Your trust in the algorithm increases. When Netflix suggests a movie, and you end up loving it, that experience reinforces your reliance on Netflix’s recommendation. As you gain trust in Netflix, you also lose trust in your own choices.
- The algorithm learns more about your preferences, which enables it to make even better decisions for you in the future. As the algorithm gains more knowledge about you, it will make better choices for you, which will reinforce your increasing trust in its decision-making and decreasing trust in your own.
People’s reliance on algorithms can easily snowball to big life decisions, such as where to go to college, which career to pursue, and who to marry.
Society: Technology Could Worsen Inequality
As technology threatens to create a useless class of unskilled workers and algorithms have the potential to overpower free will, inequality could grow exponentially: On one end of the spectrum will be the useless class, and on the other end will be the wealthy CEOs of tech companies. Making matters worse, biotech innovations could enable wealthy elites to become biologically superior by improving their physical and cognitive abilities and extending their lives. If wealthy elites gain biological advantages over the poor—and the poor are pushed out of opportunities to work and gain wealth—it could create a vicious cycle that continually widens the gap between haves and have-nots. Taken to the extreme, bioengineering could eventually turn the rich into a separate species with no need for the underclass of commoners.
Part 2: Address Challenges With Global Solutions
Now that we’ve laid out the challenges, let’s explore potential methods that societies can use to address them.
Method #1: Tackle Issues Through Communities
How will humans tackle the massive challenges they face in the 21st century? One option is to band together and tackle them as communities. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to facilitate this by using AI to suggest groups that might be meaningful to individual Facebook users. The goal is to use the social media platform and the algorithmic tools to rebuild communities online in order to improve connections among people throughout the world. However, the project will only work if these online communities also exist offline, because creating a true connection with someone requires you to interact with her as a whole person, which generally calls for face-to-face interaction. In order to achieve this, Facebook may have to adopt strategies that actually encourage users to spend less time online and more time in the real world.
Method #2: Embrace the Global Civilization
While you can belong to various communities—such as your family, your religion, and your nation—all humans are part of a global civilization, and cultural identities are merely branches of that civilization. In recent generations, as globalization has connected the world economically, socially, and technologically, all of humankind has merged into one global civilization. Although there are differences among groups within the global civilization—such as religious beliefs and national identities—all of the basic and practical matters are largely in agreement. These include:
- Economic systems: Although countries have different currencies, they generally all follow some version of capitalism. Additionally, in the modern globalized economy, nations around the world are interconnected through the global supply chain.
- Medical practices: Despite some cultural nuances and differences in available resources, just about all doctors learn the same scientific foundation, follow the same protocols, and prescribe the same drugs.
- Science: Scientists in all corners of the world agree on scientific principles, such as the earth being round and gravity pulling objects down.
Method #3: Reject Nationalist Solutions to Global Problems
Despite the existence of a global civilization, in recent years, feelings of disconnection from global economic forces and fears that globalization would disintegrate national systems of education and healthcare have revived a sense of nationalism. However, nationalism can’t offer solutions to the three major challenges that people will face in the 21st century, all of which exist on a global scale and require an international response:
- The nuclear challenge: Once nuclear power became a tool of war, the threat of war meant the possibility of massive destruction. The loss of multinational cooperation and the rise in nationalism could lead to war and nuclear devastation.
- The ecological challenge: Climate change threatens to make many plants and animals extinct, destroy ecological systems, cause more severe weather, hurt agricultural production, and make large areas of the globe uninhabitable. While individual nations can overhaul environmental practices, raise taxes on emissions, and develop eco-friendly technologies, the effort won’t be enough unless the whole world participates.
- The technological challenge: As we discussed in Part I, the simultaneous rise of infotech and biotech threatens to transform the economy, labor market, social and political power, and even the biological makeup of humans. In order to avoid a dangerous snowball of technological development, nations need to reach an international agreement on ethical guidelines for technological innovation and adoption.
Method #4: Resist Seeking Answers in Religion
If political models, governments, and scientists have failed to provide answers for how to navigate the immense challenges of the 21st century, could religion hold the answers? In order to explore this, we’ll look at three areas where religion falls short:
- Technical problems: Modern science has replaced religion as the authority for technical problems, such as how African farmers should deal with droughts caused by climate change. While priests used to pray for rain and shamans tried to heal the sick, science and technology offer far more effective solutions.
- Policy problems: Religion offers policy solutions that apply to ancient contexts, which doesn’t help to solve modern policy problems such as how governments should prevent climate change to begin with. Leaders typically look for answers in modern sources—such as reports and case studies—and then they may find a passage from a religious text that can be interpreted to explain the decision. In other words, religion is used to justify policy solutions, but it does not provide them.
- Identity problems: Religion plays a large role in modern identity problems—such as whether Americans should even worry about the plight of African farmers—but it serves to divide rather than to unite. Despite overwhelming similarities among different faiths, religions use ceremonies, rites, and rituals to reinforce followers’ membership in a particular religion, which inherently sets them apart from other religions.
Method #5: Resolve Immigration Challenges
Humans now find themselves in a global civilization, facing global problems, while also being divided by nationalism and religion. Amid this division, tensions have grown among people of different nationalities, and they come to a head in the issue of immigration. Immigration requires an understood deal between migrants and host countries—but immigration opponents say that immigrants aren’t holding up their end of the deal, while immigration advocates say that host countries are falling short.
There are three terms of this deal:
- The host country lets immigrants enter. Immigration advocates say that each country has a moral duty to open its borders to refugees and migrants. By contrast, immigration opponents say that countries have no obligation to allow immigrants to enter, and allowing immigration should be considered a favor—not a duty.
- The immigrants adopt the host country’s basic values and norms. Immigration advocates and opponents disagree about the extent to which immigrants should be expected to assimilate. For example, if they migrate from a religious country to a secular one, must they adopt secular views?
- When the immigrants assimilate, they gain equality and membership in the host country. Immigration proponents argue that assimilated immigrants can be absorbed into society within a few decades of their arrival. By contrast, anti-immigrationists say that it takes generations for foreigners to be fully integrated as equal citizens because that requires that they become part of the fabric of society.
Immigration is difficult to resolve because it is nuanced—both sides have legitimate arguments, but the friction lies in deciding where to draw the line. Difficult as it may be, each nation’s ability to reach an agreement on immigration will be a major indicator of its potential to come together with the rest of the global civilization to address the looming challenges of the 21st century.
Part 3: Keep Things in Perspective
Even with the right tools, people need to have the right mindset and a clear view of the world in order to overcome modern challenges.
Terrorism and War Are Minor Threats
In recent decades, fear of terrorism has gripped the world, ignited wars, and shaped politics—and that’s by design. Terrorism is a strategy for those with little power and few resources to inflict major harm, so, instead of causing physical damage, terrorists aim to incite fear and chaos. Terrorists aggravate their enemy so that it overreacts, and that overreaction causes the destruction that the terrorists don’t have the strength to create. For example, the 9/11 terrorist attack caused mass fear and confusion, which prompted the U.S. government to respond with a show of power by declaring a War on Terror. That war ultimately destabilized the Middle East and created space for the terrorists to seize more power. In order to fight terrorism, governments must remember that terrorists have little power, and they must resist the urge to make a public show of their response.
Furthermore, military warfare is becoming an outdated means of gaining prosperity and geopolitical status. Whereas the most valuable economic assets used to be physical—such as land, gold, and goods—modern wealth is information and technology, which are impossible to capture through war. Today, most successful countries have improved their geopolitical status by improving their economies rather than their militaries. Additionally, with nuclear weapons and cyberwarfare, the potential for serious damage or total annihilation is higher than ever before.
People Overestimate Their Culture’s Importance
Just as people inflate the perceived threats of terrorism and war, many people overestimate the importance of their own culture and its impact on the world. Children are raised with a misunderstanding of their culture’s importance, as school history lessons emphasize certain events, downplay others, and frame history based on how it affected their ancestors. This self-important view shows a lack of humility and a disregard for history, and it makes people more inclined to act in their own interest than in the interest of the global community.
People Don’t Need God to Keep Social Order
People often think that their community alone possesses virtues like truth and morality. Religions decree that God dictates laws—such as what to wear, who to love, and what not to eat. While these divine laws have helped to maintain social order in many eras and cultures, they have also been the source of violence and discrimination. In reality, religious laws are unnecessary to keep order because morality is baked into human DNA.
In contrast to religion, secularism achieves social order by adhering to a code of ethics, which includes:
- Truth that’s based on evidence and observation, as opposed to a truth dictated by faith.
- Compassion for everyone, regardless of their membership in any religion or group.
- Equality because secular people recognize suffering as suffering—no matter who’s experiencing it.
- Freedom to question, doubt, and explore in the pursuit of truth, the spreading of compassion, and the achievement of equality.
- Courage to admit ignorance because if you don’t acknowledge what you don’t know, you’ll never seek more information and find the truth.
- Responsibility because, in the absence of an all-powerful God to right the world’s wrongs, that duty falls on people.
Part 4: Make Sense of the Modern World
In order to address the challenges of the 21st century, you need to be able to make sense of the world. This is increasingly difficult, as technology and globalization make the world more complex—but the threats of technology, nuclear weapons, and climate change make it more important than ever before to understand the world and help shape its future.
You Know Less Than You Think
In order to find truth, you must recognize what you know—and what you don’t know. Today, individuals don’t need as wide a breadth of knowledge because they have access to a global network of collective knowledge and others’ expertise. However, that access to knowledge has led to two dangerous phenomena:
- The knowledge illusion: People mistake group knowledge for individual wisdom, and their tendency to underestimate their own ignorance is having dangerous consequences.
- Groupthink: People become so convinced of and loyal to the views of their community—whether it’s their social group, political party, or society—that they fail to recognize when those views are flawed.
People’s difficulty in understanding how the world works also jeopardizes justice, which requires an understanding of cause and effect. For example, although you may think you’re innocently shopping for clothes, others may blame you for perpetuating child labor in sweatshops halfway across the world. While it’s unrealistic for individuals to try to close all their knowledge gaps, the best they can do is to acknowledge their ignorance and act with humility.
Institutions Tell People False Stories
In a complex world where individuals struggle to understand the way things work, it’s no surprise that lies have become pervasive. In fact, institutions have long used fictional stories in order to get strangers to cooperate for common causes. For example,
- Religion preaches stories that inspire followers to pursue the same goals and values.
- National governments spread stories to justify their actions and spur public support for their causes.
- Political movements promote stories—or propaganda—to reinforce an image of their politics.
- Corporations create stories to sell their products.
People are often willing to believe something enough to act on it, even though, at their core, they know the story is fiction. However, believing lies can cause harm, so everyone has a responsibility to question and investigate the information they consume, and to keep an eye out for biases they unknowingly hold.
Part 5: Find Personal Meaning in the World
Once you’ve identified the challenges ahead, considered ways to address them, and found a way to make sense of the changing world, you must find your role in it. First, we’ll discuss the practical side of finding your role in society, then we’ll explore how to find deeper meaning in life.
The Education System Is Outdated
As people prepare for the future, they must face the reality that the modern education system is not fit to prepare children for the 21st century. There are several reasons for this, including:
- Technology makes it harder than ever before to predict what society, politics, and the labor market will look like when these children grow up. Without having a reasonable expectation for the future, it’s impossible to know how to prepare children for it.
- The focus and the goal of the modern education system are outdated. The current model focuses on arming students with information because, in the past, information was scarce—besides the books in their homes, children might have had a local library and, in more recent history, newspapers, radio, and television. By contrast, now people face an information overload, and students need to learn to make sense of the vast amount of information they take in.
- Schools put too much emphasis on teaching students skills—such as coding and solving math equations—that previously prepared children for future jobs. However, the changing job market will use computers to perform those tasks. Modern students need fewer technical skills and more life skills, such as communication, collaboration, coping with change, critical thinking, and maintaining mental balance amid instability.
People Seek the Meaning of Life in Stories
As people prepare for a new reality and new challenges in the 21st century, they’ll inevitably ponder, “What is the meaning of life?” People have been asking this question throughout history, and they generally want the answer to fit into a story, because humans use stories to make sense out of the world. Two common meaning-of-life stories are:
- All life forms on the planet are part of an eternal circle of life, and you have a unique role in that cycle. The purpose of life is to find your function and to fulfill it.
- The world began, conflicts arose, and conflicts continue to be an ever-present aspect of life until a future resolution or ultimate judgment day. According to this story, when that judgment day comes, people who helped the cause will enjoy the fruits of their labors.
However, these stories don’t give meaning to your life—instead, you assign meaning to your life and experiences. Religion is only sacred because humans believe it to be. The universe is only mighty and beautiful because humans attach their feelings to it. You don’t need a story to prove that your life is meaningful—it’s meaningful because you give it meaning. At a time when global political, economic, and social systems are changing and the liberal story is becoming irrelevant, each person must reflect on how to make sense of the world.
Understand Your Mind Through Meditation
In order to understand life, you must understand your own mind, because your mind determines how you experience, interpret, and react to the world around you. There are many ways to get in tune with your mind, including art, therapy, physical activity, and meditation, which takes your attention away from the noise and distractions of the external world and focuses it on the reality of your breath and bodily sensations.
When most people begin meditating, they struggle to concentrate for more than a few seconds at a time. When your mind inevitably wanders during your meditation, you learn how little control you actually have over your thoughts—and that realization is the first step in gaining that control. If you don’t begin to learn about your own mind, then algorithms will soon know your thoughts, fears, and desires better than you do.
Despite the huge challenges the world faces in the 21st century, humans have many powerful tools in their collective arsenal. These tools give humankind the power to make things much worse or much better—it all depends upon how we educate ourselves about the issues we face, and how well we can address them as a global civilization.
