Building a Mature Humanity Able to Thrive in an Interdependent 21st Century
The 19th century was the century of dependence. Most of humanity lived in colonies that were often called dependencies. The 20th century was the century of independence. Most of humanity became self-governing and politically free. The 21st century is the century of interdependence. Humanity is currently being swept by globalization and the spread of mass education into an ever more integrated global village that will reach full maturity by 2050.
As I have described in previous blogs and in my book, humanity is transforming its primary allegiance, first from tribe to nation, and now, in the 21st century, to its shared planetary home. This shift mimics our pattern of human development: from dependent child to independent adolescent, and then to interdependent adult. This process is called maturation. Likewise, our global society is maturing in the 21st century—it is growing up. However, as I have described before, not all of us are willing to complete this journey of maturation. Some are foolishly fighting against these long-term global trends. These so-called political global leaders remain immature; they have not matured beyond adolescence and continue to behave like disruptive, self-interested teenagers. Nation-first proponents like Trump, Putin, Farage, and Orbán do not want a world that is ever more interdependent. They remain adolescents in their belief that humanity should not evolve beyond its addiction to the nation-state. In particular, they do not want to form mutually respectful, productive, interdependent relationships with those who are culturally and racially different from them. They will even claim that existential threats like global warming and pandemics are hoaxes because they do not want to collaborate with people who are different from them or whom they do not like.
But whether these people like it or not, an interdependent global society is emerging in the 21st century, and anyone sensible will need to fully understand interdependence and develop the ability to conduct fruitful interdependent relationships. It is simply a fact that when our emerging global village faces an existential crisis like global heating, we all need to act like people in a village that is being flooded—all hands to the dykes and the pumps, friends and enemies alike!
To successfully conduct interdependent relationships, we need three key skills:
1. Practice the golden rule.
2. Work with others to build and realize shared aspirations.
3. Ensure that the outcomes from our collaborations are mutually beneficial—win/win, not win/lose.
Throughout history, young people were prepared for interdependent adulthood through rites-of-passage programs and rituals. These ensured that every tribe and culture could collectively survive existential adversity. In these processes, individual self-interest and selfishness—like those behaviors that still dominate the Trumps and Putins of the world—were shown the door. Every culture has its own highly treasured rites of passage and educational processes. In our rush to embrace modernity, we discarded these rituals as outdated cultural baggage. In doing so, we threw out the baby with the bathwater. Now we need to bring back these rituals in 21st-century-relevant forms—programs that ensure all of us, including our political leaders, have the requisite maturity to thrive in our emerging interdependent global village.
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