We’re currently in The Interlude. If things feel a bit strange right now, you are not alone. Actually, you might be alone, doing your part in the larger story.
The larger story is a familiar one. Not long ago—just a fortnight, really—we slipped down the vestibule and found ourselves suddenly on the outside, peering through the digital looking glass at the life we once knew. Even while isolated at home, we long for “home” in an entirely different sense—that life of ordinary, beautiful things: a chance to visit an old friend, hike a trail or hear children outside. Yet, somehow, we’ve arrived at a moment in history where that life, not the apocalyptic one pressed into service by the writers of our destiny, is the one that feels surreal.
Indeed, whichever way you count the toll—medically, socially, economically, psychologically—it has been an otherworldly time. Lost, too, among all of this is time itself. A five-week pause for 331 million Americans alone adds up to 33 million years of human life. To put that number into perspective, that’s 32.7 million years more than the total known history of Homo sapiens since their first earthly appearance in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco.
But it is the very future of Homo sapiens that is now being questioned. Editorials everywhere wail that the world will never be the same again. We also know, however, that it’s often when we’re on the brink of losing hope, when we despair that we won’t and can’t ever go back, that we are startled awake. By then—whenever then is—it’s usually far too late for most of us to remember what seems so vivid now. Instead, there will be graduations to restore, jobs to resume and toilet paper rolls to refund.
However, while still nested in this uncommon window of time, this interlude of common concern, we can look in on our way of life and reflect on the deeper failings of a civilization laid bare. Without goal congruence and alignment of interests, the sum total of individual good intentions has fed competitive races to the bottom among our institutions, perpetuating exactly the kind of fragility in our systems that we fear.
What is harder to see, however, is that The Interlude is nested inside a much larger Grand Interlude that spans across many millennia—the 10,000-year, post-tribal era of human history, where individual interests ruled the world more than mutually vested interests. That is to say, ever since we left the kin-skin-in-the-game tribal era of human social evolution, we’ve been living in a system of mercenaries where leaders too often rule over, instead of on behalf of, the people. Once the Promethean fire increased our social entropy and stable, strong bonds in small tribes had been replaced with weaker, transactional interactions among strangers, our lives have never been the same.
It is thus that we’ve made great progress in improving our existence, but the same rising tide that buoyed us materially also unmoored us spiritually. Too many parts of the human experience feel soulless and commodified. For the vast majority of people alive today, the price of progress has been a loss of a sense of belonging that was the anchor of human experience for most of the history of our species. This cost has been significant—and, even more to the point, one we’ve not even begun to recognize or seriously address.
The truth is simple: we are genetically wired for the kin tribe era, but we no longer live as such. Whereas we had once been fed, informed and governed by those who had our best interests at heart, in the global village we are fed, informed and governed by those who have their own best interests at heart. That’s a first-order problem that continues to spawn second- and third-order issues in a degenerating cascade. Think about it. For every measure of our progress, there have always been externalities, a group of excluded stakeholders paying the price—the price of tyranny, slavery, nepotism, nationalism, nativism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, pollution, extractive capitalism, corruption, alienation, loneliness and inequality.
Of course, we’re about as aware of living in the Grand Interlude as fish are aware of living in water. The Grand Interlude is all we’ve ever known, so that’s the life we yearn to return to when The Interlude, this more immediate crisis, is over.
Well, no longer can that remain our shared delusion. We’re at that “tap your heels together three times” moment when we finally realize that the arc of human history has been the story of our failure to update the inclusive fitness (kin-skin-in-the-game) of the kin village with the inclusive stakeholding of the global village. This is an evolutionary lag error of epic proportions, but one ultimately solvable.
For example, imagine universal basic stakeholding, where everyone has a vested stake in each other’s future. Imagine artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms tuned to the success of the user—like a Mom bot—rather than to the altar of profits. Imagine building networks of interdependent stakeholders to create a social economy, as Facebook did for social media but much, much bigger.
The stakes have never been higher. We live today in a highly interconnected world, and our futures are irrevocably intertwined as never before, both as individuals and as nations. From ecological impact to humanitarian crises and global pandemics, we all have a stake in the risks and opportunities arising across the planet. Embracing inclusive stakeholding is our final frontier, and our future depends on it.
If we succeed, our transformative journey from the kin village to the global village will be complete. In many ways, the largest of human stories has been that our collective journey forward has been a journey homeward. What if, instead of returning to the Grand Interlude after the current crisis, we returned home from the Grand Interlude? Now step back from the looking glass, close your eyes and imagine what it means to go home to a place you’ve never been.
More on the Yun Family Foundation’s Grand Challenge:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dMlaQXfVB0&t=29s
Joon Yun, M.D., is a Principal of the Yun Family Foundation and co-author of the book, Essays on Inclusive Stakeholding, available on Amazon.
