As world order teeters between financial stress, the prospect of widespread war in the Middle East, and an acute sense of betrayal between voters and their elected representatives, we must—individually and collectively—look past the prevailing and perversely popular noise and move forward to secure our future.  This is not the time to sit idly by hoping that the actors and conventional thinking that combined to produce the current crises will somehow also magically produce their melioration.  Ironically (and thankfully however), the macro factors that are causing crises and disorder also reveal new modalities that promise pathways to higher levels of well-being—to renewed prosperity. But we must learn to make them work for us instead of against us.

In a recent jeremiad by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, wherein he calls for a miracle rebirth of personal responsibility, he also identifies contributing factors of emerging disorder while—perhaps unwittingly—illuminating promising avenues of success. He wrote,

Since the end of the cold war and the rise of the Internet, we’ve lost the walls and the superpowers that together kept the world’s problems more contained. Today, smaller and smaller units can wreak larger and larger havoc—and whatever havoc is wreaked now gets spread faster and farther than ever before.[1]

All true, but small units behaving virally is also how we will produce the innovations and form the necessary relationships to create a new future. Small units that wreak havoc can also organize intelligence, resources, and authority in new paradigms that might far exceed the values and wealth we fear are slipping into the abyss of current crises.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: creative intelligence is everything.  The same technology that enables the Internet and fosters the organization of small units in a seemingly organic fashion also enables the geometric rise of intelligence.  As Richard Ogle illustrates in Smart World, idea-spaces, formerly limited to what was in our heads and constrained by proximate resources, are now unbounded thanks to technology.  This allows our imaginations to “leap out ahead of knowledge and the path of analytical reason” toward new, seemingly unfathomable, realities.[2]  The great news is we have it within our existing capabilities and resources to create new paradigms, identities, and networks to not only survive our current crises, but to achieve a higher state of well being.  We must, however, become very aggressive in asserting our will.

First, the naysayers, merchants of venom, and those who are unable or unwilling to think or operate beyond conventional paradigms must be isolated.  They only make the bad worse.  This requires more than simply ignoring them; this requires exposing them, confronting them, and silencing them.  The time for tolerance is over.  At every opportunity, they must be told to “Shut up and get out of the way!”  Second, while we must acknowledge our current circumstances for what they are—to get past the denial trap—we must just as swiftly set them aside to avoid being addled by their grave narrative.  Third, we must re-imagine the world, unbounded by convention, to establish a new vision of who we are, what we want the world to look like, and most importantly, why?  As Richard Ogle argues, “to think intelligently is to create webs of meaning about how the world might be, and this is the work of imagination.”[3]  Fourth, we must attract and connect spheres of intelligence to produce new missions and mandates.  Finally, we must pursue our new vision with every ounce of energy and persuasion we can muster.  We must allow our creative intelligence its full expression.

Let’s prove Thomas Paine right again by showing we do “have it in our power to begin the world over again.”  Let’s start by unshackling ourselves from old ideas and those who wallow in self-interest, find power in fear, or promote disrespect.  If they win, we lose.  The arc of transcendence requires us to re-imagine our future, and align new spheres of intelligence, resources, and authority, to realize new levels of well being. This is not only possible, it is imperative.

[1] Thomas L. Friedman, “This Time is Different,” The New York Times, June 11, 2010
[2] Richard Ogle, Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007), p. 51.
[3] Ibid., p. 72.