Time to hit the leadership reset button_1

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socio-political, cultural and economic stresses, from the climate emergency, to nuclear proliferation, to healthcare, education, law and social justice issues and income Inequality to name just a few. Humanity is approaching a pivot point – a convergence of many existential issues – where failure to successfully address any one of them is simply inconceivable. The societal turbulence resulting from these advances are, or will soon be, amplified by profound disruptions to the labour markets caused by AI/robotics and in health care – both in their own way challenging sooner than we can comprehend what it means to be a human. Our own eyes, and the warnings of many organizations – most notably the United Nations tells us that we don’t have much time. It is increasingly clear that the world we live in today is being defined by a desperate competition between those that believe in the infinite possibilities of our future and the glory of human potential, versus those who instead seek comfort and security in the things they believe to be true from their perceived past. For all of their contempt for each other, the radicalized ISIS recruit and the radicalized white nationalist have a great deal in common – the future as an unknown is to be feared and avoided, whereas the seduction of a highly curated but known past is to be embraced. Though the latter is the smaller cohort in numbers in almost
every democracy (however defined), we are seeing these numbers grow as we collectively perceive that we are just on the knee curve of increasing societal volatility. The postmodernist questioning of the truth that emanated from leftwing intellectuals in the 60’s has been adopted instead by those cynically manipulating social discourse to exacerbate division in a way that is anything but intellectual. At all levels, the technologies that seek to enrich and simplify our lives, paradoxically and bewilderingly make them vastly more complex. The consequence of 280-character mass communication shows this to be so. While it is tempting to point to iconic individuals in the moment as causal agents of the cancer of populism, we have to (more helpfully) admit that they are in fact ‘just’ metastasized examples of the same disease. And, just as a life-threatening illness can cause depression in an individual, it seems clear that way-of-life societal challenges – real and perceived – are doing the same. As this malaise deepens to a generalized ennui amongst too many, we see the question raised ‘what can I as an individual do?’ not as a question, but rather a declaration that they intend to do nothing at all. But it is the social credit experiment of the People’s Republic of China that perhaps best illustrates the potential to retard or reverse the development of civil society – to not
Page 1 and 2: As you reflect on 2020, do you thin
Page 3 and 4: the management of all of them all t
Page 5 and 6: doing so?” To contemplate action
Page 7: dawn of time, to this new Age of Ab
Page 11 and 12: simply no longer feasible (witness
Page 13: purposeful, systemic global effort

Time to hit the leadership reset button_1

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