Our Planetary Future

Ours is arguably "the best of times." Ironically, it is "the worst of times" also. Summary review of the state of the world indicates a mixed blessing. 

On the positive side are: 

• The highest standard of living the world has ever known. 
• Record production and consumption of goods and services. 
• Eradication of hitherto incurable diseases. 
• Unprecedented levels of material well-being. 
• Healthier lives and longer life spans. 
• Instantaneous communication across the globe. 
• Vast arrays of scientific, medical, and technological breakthroughs. 

Negative conditions include: 

• Ecological disasters.
• Widespread poverty. 
• Hunger. 
• Insecurity. 
• Fear. 
• Growing incidence of depression, stress, addiction, and substance abuse.
• Despair, widespread unhappiness, and general dissatisfaction with life.
• Prejudice. 
• Mutual distrust. 
• Group violence. 
• Destructiveness.
• The ever-looming threat of mutually assured destruction. 

Disaster metaphor after disaster metaphor portrays a world that appears to be heading for its "catastrophic demise." A very short list of gloomy metaphors and epithets, suggesting imminent planetary collapse, signifies the dread and apprehension:

• “Apocalypse.” 
• “Armageddon.” 
• “a planet in peril.” 
• “breakdown of our cultural pattern.” 
• “bubble economy.” 
• "civilization's blind march to self-destruction and oblivion."
• “crumbling modernist times.” 
• “disillusionment of entire populations.” 
• “disintegration of society.”
• “imminent collapse of civilization.” 
• “impending convulsions and chaos.”
• “malfunctioning socio-political-economic system.” 
• “massive breakdown of individuals and societies.” 
• “massive dislocation in the affairs of humanity.” 
• “massive failure of modern civilization."
• “sinking Titanic.” 
• “the end of civilization.”
• “tottering on the brink of disaster.” 
• “unsustainable direction of modern society.” 
• “world problematique.” 
• And so on.   

The familiar cliché, “If you're not scared, you probably aren't listening,” captures the mood of people around the world.

Reactions to the current state of the world range from passive resignation to naive optimism. 

• The one extreme is people who interpret the modern crises as signaling imminent and inevitable collapse of civilization and "catastrophic demise" of Planet Earth.    
  
  
• The other extreme is those who seem to believe that things will somehow sort themselves out if we simply maintain the present course. 

Between the two extremes is the growing number of individuals and social movements proffering an assortment of (sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting) proposals to avert the ultimate catastrophe.  

The dreadful and increasingly volatile state of the world raises two fundamental questions:

First: 

• Why is the world’s deplorable situation continuing to deteriorate, despite all the time, energy, and resources that are being committed to its amelioration?

Second: 

• Are the world's life-threatening crises unsolved because they are impossible, or too difficult, to solve?
  
  
• Or, might it be that we've been tackling the symptoms, inadvertently overlooking our underlying problem? 

Critical analysis and synthesis of the insights that are brought together in Creativity: Revealing the Truth about Human Nature yield two vital conclusions — Homo Creativus and Global Creativity Crisis — with fundamental and transforming implications for the way we think about ourselves, organize society, and conduct affairs: 

HOMO CREATIVUS, the first conclusion, is our inherently creative, but historically overlooked, essence as humans: 

• Homo Creativus implies that the taken-for-granted “rational economic man” (inherently materialistic and consumption-driven) upon which most modern institutions have been built is, rather, an inherently creative and potential-actualizing being — naturally and primarily driven to develop and to beneficially engage one’s unique set of abilities, with economic consumption and material well-being as the means to that end. 

GLOBAL CREATIVITY CRISIS, the second conclusion, is the world's underlying but unsuspected and unnoticed crisis:

• Global Creativity Crisis signifies the inability of the vast majority of people to reach, engage, or contribute their unique potentialities in significant and beneficial functions. Resultantly, the spreading epidemic of meaninglessness of which many (probably, most) psychological, social, economic, political, and ecological crises are the symptoms.