We need to live differently in the 21st Century

I credit William Harryman of the stupendous blog Integral Options Cafe, and my already-developed interest in RSAnimate for this video find.

This viddy makes the bold, yet rather evident, claim that the world is highly stressed and needs to think differently than we have been to meet our collective challenges.

Also, we now can use the guidance of a far better understanding of how humans think and operate than we've ever had.

We have learned, for example, that we are "very very bad at predicting what will make us happy.  And we are even bad at predicting what made us happy in the past."  Thus, we can now be very aware of human frailties and use this information to better construct society, but in a way that retains individuals' autonomy and freedom.

In many, many ways, the world is a far better place than it's ever been!  There is less individual violence.  We are opening opportunities to everyone, with diminishing (and, likely, disappearing) restrictions on people because of their race, gender or sexual preferences.  Human empathy has expanded greatly since, say, the 1950s, though some of the progress, lately, has seemed to have slowed or regressed.

Matthew Taylor tells us in the viddy that "the stock of global empathy has to grow if we are to reach agreements which put the long-term needs of the whole planet ahead of the short-term national concerns."  Taylor insists that we must "foster Empathic Capacity" to achieve a better world and meet the serious challenges we all have.