Changing our collective mind

Changing the subject

You might consider, just as we do, the news about Donald Trump or some terrorists as nothing really new. Why give those people the attention they don't deserve? Why use the media to spread their messages? If you are entertaining such thoughts, then you might be ready for some really good news!

Also five centuries ago an abundance of daily spectacles occupied the people's minds. And yet when we look back, what we see is Leonardo, and Copernicus... We see the rebirth of the arts and the emergence of the sciences. We see those large and slow events because they give meaning and relevance to all particular ones. We notice them even from this distance because they were so spectacularly large – and that's also why the people living at that time failed to notice them! But how much more spectacular will it be to witness this sort of development in our own time!

Although we don't talk about him directly, the elephant in the above ideogram will be the main theme of all our conversations. It is a glimpse of him that we want to give and have by talking about all those people and things. And when we talk about the elephant, you should imagine the exotic large animal appearing in a room full of people – not today, but five centuries ago, when perhaps some of those people had heard of such a creature, but none of them had ever seen one yet. The elephant in the room is a breath-taking sensation! We use this visual metaphor to point to the whole big thing – the Renaissance-like change that now wants to emerge. The elephant is invisible, but we will have glimpses of him as soon as we begin to 'connect the dots'. And isn't that what we've been doing all along!

Changing the protagonists

By shirting our attention from Trump to the elephant, we can also give attention and credit to our giants. We can begin to truly understand what they were talking about. If earlier we heard them talk about all sorts of different things such as "the fan", "the hose" and "the rope", we can now see that they were really talking about the elephant's ears, trunk and tail. And given the spectacular size and importance of our 'animal', we will then not only appreciate our giants' insights as a new and welcome kind of sensations; we will also appreciate the fact that we've ignored them so long as a new and intolerable kind of scandal.

"The human race is hurtling toward a disaster. It is absolutely necessary to find a way to change course", Aurelio Peccei (the co-founder, firs president and the motor power behind The Club of Rome) wrote this in 1980, in One Hundred Pages for the Future, based on this global think tank's first decade of research.

Peccei was an unordinary man; in 1944, as a member of Italian Resistance, he was captured by the Gestapo and tortured for six months without revealing his contacts. Peccei was also an unordinarily able business leader. While serving as the director of Fiat's operations in Latin America (and securing that the cars were there not only sold but also produced) Peccei established Italconsult, a consulting and financing agency to help the developing countries catch up with the rest. When the Italian technology giant Olivetti was in trouble, Peccei was brought in as the president, and he managed to turn around its fortune. And yet the question that most occupied Peccei was a much larger one – the condition our civilization as a whole was in, and the way this condition was changing.

In 1977, in "The Human Quality", Peccei formulated his answer as follows:

Let me recapitulate what seems to me the crucial question at this point of the human venture. Man has acquired such decisive power that his future depends essentially on how he will use it. However, the business of human life has become so complicated that he is culturally unprepared even to understand his new position clearly. As a consequence, his current predicament is not only worsening but, with the accelerated tempo of events, may become decidedly catastrophic in a not too distant future. The downward trend of human fortunes can be countered and reversed only by the advent of a new humanism essentially based on and aiming at man’s cultural development, that is, a substantial improvement in human quality throughout the world.

Let us note in passing that the all-important insights that were reached by Peccei and The Club of Rome a half-century ago have not been ignored only by "climate deniers", but also by "climate believers" and activists. Already in 1968, at the point of the Club's inception, its founders decided that they would not focus on individual problems, but on the overall condition or "problematique" from which they all spring – and look for systemic solutions.

Changing the way we speak

When we knowledge federators sometimes say such off-the-wall Trump-like things as "the climate change is a red herring", we do not mean to belittle the excellent and necessary work that our colleagues have been doing on that frontier. Our point is that the climate, or any other "problem" becomes a red herring when it diverts all our attention from those deeper and evolutionary tasks on which our ability to find lasting solutions now depends.

By focusing on the elephant, we will work on contemporary issues, both large and small, both global and local, without even mentioning them by name! Instead of struggling to coerce the people and systems who created the problems to create solutions, we undertake to co-create solutions ourselves. Instead of doing what we above all need to do – we engage in what we may above all reasonably wish to do.