Our world is full of crises that demand our immediate attention and action.
Some of the biggest include: the COVID-19 pandemic; climate change; public health (including mental health); business model disruption across most industries; the income crisis (which includes several crises, ranging from affordable housing/education/healthcare, to the disappearance of middle-class jobs to automation); the crisis of truth (on social media, and from there, into our social reality); and political polarization across the democratic world.
These crises are very different, yet each exposes the same deficiency. Each one exposes the limits of our capacity to be, think and act social. For example:
Pandemic crisis. The coronavirus hits. Because public health needs are not real enough in people's awareness, individuals stockpile medical equipment - putting themselves at greater personal risk because it does not reach the public health workers who are working to keep them safe.
Climate crisis. Public rhetoric presents climate change as an existential threat that concerns "all of us". The social reality is that society is deeply divided in its perception of environmental threats: between those who feel resilient and those who feel vulnerable; between those who stand to profit and those who stand to lose; between those who feel vilified and those who feel victimized; between those who implicitly trust experts and those who see experts as biased against them; between those who are educated and informed and those who feel marginalized, aggrieved and ignored.
Mental health. The growing mental health crisis, including rising rates of depression and youth suicide, betrays how hard people are finding it to transform their private concerns into shared, community matters. They don't know how to or where to do that, and the answers aren't obvious.
Income. The income crisis (which itself relates to many other crises: affordable housing/education/healthcare, falling levels of political participation, and the disappearance of middle-class jobs to automation) exposes the limits of our economic paradigm. At the heart of modern economic life is the assumption that by taking care of ourselves, the whole that emerges will take care of itself. That assumption is proving too strong. My wellbeing depends, in complex ways, upon yours. That relationship isn't as strong in my awareness as it needs to be, if I am to make better decisions for my own wellbeing.
Truth. The crisis of truth (on social media, and from there, into our social reality) also shows this misplaced faith that a healthy whole will emerge automatically if each of us focuses on what is best for us individually. Instead, we are seeing plainly that some private incentives (e.g., to maximize the potential to "go viral") can cause cancers that weaken the whole organism if they are not balanced by thought and action at a broader level of awareness.
Politics. Political "discourse" is becoming increasingly polarized. To participate, people must stand firmly on one side of the bridge or the other. Attempts to "bridge" the divide are becoming debates between opposite extremes on an issue. The sense that everyone is taking part in a common project is weakening. The opportunities to stand uncertainly in the middle of the bridge, and the people who are willing to do so, are becoming fewer.
Risk. The risk of business model collapse is flourishing in every organization and across society. One of the major reasons is complexity. The real world is becoming much more complex than our individual capacity to see cause & effect. The coronavirus exposes just how big our own blind spots can be as a result. To mitigate this risk, we all need to recognize the limits of individual sense-making. And we need to recognize the danger of trending toward an ever-simpler set of solutions (technology!). We can never be fully self-aware of our own blind spots. Instead we need to figure out ways of social sense-making that bridge across traditional "sectors" of knowledge & society, and help one another to see the risks (and responses) that can only be understood together.
Every big, immediate crisis of our time makes plain that individual modes of being, thought and action are inadequate. Einstein was right: We cannot solve our problems at the same level of thinking at which they were created.
The long-term response required of us is also plain. We already possess strong opportunities and capacities for individuality. Now we need to strengthen our opportunities and capacities to be, think and act social.