21 Lessons for the 21st Century

In the fifth and final part I gather together the different threads and take a more general look at life in an age of bewilderment, when the old stories have collapsed and no new story has emerged so far to replace them. Who are we? What should we do in life?

A global world puts unprecedented pressure on our personal conduct and morality.

Very soon somebody will have to decide how to use this power—based on some implicit or explicit story about the meaning of life. Philosophers are very patient people, but engineers are far less so, and investors are the least patient of all.

On the contrary, I want to emphasize the connections between the great revolutions of our era and the internal lives of individuals.

the past, we humans learned to control the world outside us, but we had very little control over the world inside us. We knew how to build a dam and stop a river from flowing, but we did not know how to stop the body from aging. We knew how to design an irrigation system, but we had no idea how to design a brain. If a mosquito buzzed in our ear and

So if humans are needed neither as producers nor as consumers, what will safeguard their physical survival and their psychological well-being?

(This kind of scheme is currently being pioneered in Scandinavia, where governments follow the motto “Protect workers, not jobs.”)

In politics, liberalism believes that the voter knows best. It therefore upholds democratic elections. In economics, liberalism maintains that the customer is always right. It therefore hails free-market principles. In personal matters, liberalism encourages people to listen to themselves, be true to themselves, and follow their hearts—as long as t

The first step is to honestly acknowledge that the social, economic, and political models we have inherited from the past are inadequate for dealing with such a challenge.