[chapter 5]

WELCOME TO THE AGE OF OPTIMISM

We offer a preview of what the future may bring as
innovation and creativity continue to flow.

THE BEST IS YET TO COME

Optimism is a journey, not a destination.

The evolution continues. We keep facing new challenges. But new opportunities arise every day as well. Yesterday’s solutions turn into today’s problems. But the best news is that new ideas and new stories keep emerging faster and faster, driving a new age of optimism that will overcome the prevailing—but unnecessary—forces of pessimism and providing the greatest opportunities for you and your fellow optimists to lead a more fulfilling life. The last thing you want is a perfect world because that’s a world that doesn’t need you. Stay tuned for some perspectives that should be part of every optimist’s toolkit and for a discovery—sometimes merely anecdotal—of some domains that will determine the future, your future. The best is yet to come!

PREDICTING THE FUTURE IS HARD, BUT IT’S IMPOSSIBLE IF YOU’RE TOO PESSIMISTIC

Humankind continuously exceeds its own expectations in the development of new technology. However, we are really bad at one thing: predicting that development. And that’s a problem that leads to a lot of unnecessary pessimism.

The following quotes should silence the widespread pessimism about the future:

Our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly support us.

—Tertullian, Christian author who lived in the second century CE

The abdomen, the chest and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon.

—Sir John Eric Ericson, surgeon to Queen Victoria, 1873

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.

—Lord Kelvin, mathematician and physicist, 1895

It is an idle dream to imagine that automobiles will take the place of railways in the long distance movement of passengers.

—American Railroad Congress, 1913

Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?

—H. M. Warner, cofounder of Warner Brothers, 1927

There is no hope for the fanciful idea of reaching the Moon because of insurmountable barriers to escaping the Earth’s gravity.

—Forest Ray Moulton, astronomer, 1932

There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.

—Albert Einstein, 1932

Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.

—Darryl F. Zanuck, head of 20th Century-Fox, 1946

The world potential market for copying machines is 5,000 at most.

—IBM to the eventual founders of Xerox, 1959

There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.”

—Ken Olson, president of Digital Corporation, 1977

THE AGE OF OPTIMISM 1: GROWTH AND ENERGY FOR ALL

The morning shower, usually at half past six, is one of my favorite moments of the day. Yet the shower is also a wonderful example of the excesses of the modern Western lifestyle. Despite water-saving showerheads, every day we rinse millions of gallons of clean water into the sewers while at the same time thousands of people are dying because they don’t have safe drinking water. No, my daily shower is at first sight not a positive contribution to a better, more sustainable world.

However, during my morning shower I undoubtedly enjoy my most creative moments of the day. With the falling water comes a flow of new ideas and insights. Most of my new plans are born in the shower. And I think that my contribution to a better world would have been far less if I had spent less time under the shower. I would have wasted less water, yet I also would have come to less positive contributions. To continue my contribution to a better world, I better keep showering.

The usual discussion about sustainability is like my shower dilemma. Too often we confuse sustainable growth with less growth. The focus is on doing as much as possible with less. We are supposed to stay put because the supply of natural resources is finite or because there are already too many people on the planet.

It is a misconception that economic growth and sustainability are mutually exclusive. Nature is characterized by continuous abundant growth; by continuous problem solving. There is no way I can tell the orange tree in our garden to take it a little easy next season. But that is nonetheless the message citizens and businesses continuously get: You need to reduce your CO₂ emissions and your ecological footprint. Those are fine objectives, but we must reach them through innovation and progress and with the enthusiasm with which we have embraced the Internet and mobile phones—not through a defensive retreat.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not a plea to maximize oil consumption. The question is, how do we grow our economies? We can use a lot more clean energy than we do, and governments have the tools to promote that. Germany is the country with the highest percentage of solar panels in the world. And that’s not because that Northern European country captures the most sunshine. It is very simple: If we put limits on growth—if only in our sustainability policy views and considerations—we will have fewer solar panels and fewer other climate solutions.

The transformation of energy and related distribution systems provide tremendous opportunities for continued economic growth toward a cleaner and more prosperous world, while at the same time providing increasing opportunities for more and more people.

Somewhere in the not-too-distant future, a new kind of Google will emerge, an energy company or energy system that will change the world even more radically than the Internet has done so far.

Although the Internet is growing explosively, there are still billions of people who are not part of the digital revolution. But even the poorest inhabitants of the planet need energy every day. It is hard to imagine how big the market for clean energy is and how much the pioneers of this surging energy revolution will be rewarded. Every optimist should take a shower and jump on the opportunities.

THE AGE OF OPTIMISM 2: SUSTAINABLE ABUNDANCE

Nature is a superb problem solver. The R&D department of nature has been around for millions of years and handsomely beats recently invented machines.

Humanity has always looked at nature. We saw birds; we made aircrafts. But compared to nature, our machines are clunky, and they leave a lot of waste. Nature is both very efficient and abundant. Nature produces cheaply, cleanly and leaves no waste. Sustainability, in a dynamic sense, is not a target for nature; it is a given. If you add the mass of all ants on the planet together, they apparently weigh more than the 7 billion of us do—no idea how that calculation was done. The ants travel, work, and build, but they leave no trace of waste.

The good news is that today’s technology now allows us to both observe—through video technology—and imitate—through nanotechnology—nature better than ever before. Icarus and Daedalus could not have dreamed of the work David Lentink, assistant professor mechanical engineering, is doing these days in his lab at Stanford University.¹

Lentink invited students around the world to work with him and take videos of birds and insects. He sent the students the fastest digital cameras available (3,300 frames per second). With these cameras you can see things that the human eye can’t see.

In his lab Lentink studies the videos in slow motion and sees things no one has ever seen. One example: We have all witnessed flocks of ducks rising from a lake and starting to fly in a perfect V-formation. Lentink received lots of videos of that same phenomenon. In slow motion he saw in all these videos that just as the ducks rise from the water and build their formation, some of them start flying on their backs. They turn around and continue in the formation upside down.

So far Lentink has no idea why the ducks do this. But he knows for sure that nature has a reason, and he is determined to find out. Ultimately, work like his will contribute to better planes. Lentink’s example is just one of many through which lessons from nature are learned to solve human problems. There are flame retardants made from citrus rather than from hazardous chemicals; there are paints that repel water like the skin of an animal; razorblades from renewable silk and paints that capture solar energy. The list gets longer every day. Technology is driving a new Industrial Revolution that’s going to drive and inspire optimists for years to come: The Natural Revolution.

THE AGE OF OPTIMISM 3: MONEY THAT SERVES PEOPLE AND SOCIETY

When systems don’t work, they open the playing field for improvements. The current financial system serves that famous 1 percent and has caused and is still causing tremendous suffering to billions of people. Just that fact alone provides an enormous market opportunity. The first experiments with Internet currencies are already happening.

The current money system is driven by interest and therefore by scarcity. When banks create money—through the distribution of loans—only the principal amount of the loan is created, the interest is not created. But the interest still has to be paid, so there’s a continuous competition for money. We don’t know more than that there’s always a shortage of money. There is not enough money for schools, for pensions, for hospitals, for art, for environmental protection, for playgrounds. There’s not enough money in most of our private lives. We talk about unemployment, but it is not that there are no jobs. There’s no money to pay for these jobs, for the work that needs to be done.

Moreover, the current financial system is very volatile and unpredictable because each country has a currency monopoly. As is clear from the sciences of biology and physics, healthy ecosystems consist of a diverse range of interacting players. The interactivity provides balance and feedback and makes systems resilient, stable, and robust. Monopolies don’t work in the economy either. That’s why governments legislate against and break up business monopolies. The currency system is still an exception, but given its incredible negative impact it’s hard to imagine that it will stay that way.

The key function of money is to facilitate exchanges and trade. Experiments with interest-free complementary currencies have shown that it is possible to enable transactions that would otherwise not have happened. Complementary currencies can make money available when it is needed and can pay for work that needs to be done.

You may be familiar with some local complementary currency systems, and you may think that these seem to offer a well-meant but not very practical return to the days of barter. However, interest-free complementary money systems can be very modern, and you are likely to be part of those without even realizing it.

Frequent-flyer programs are successful complementary money systems. You can buy lots of things with air miles—not just tickets. Air miles have a value; they are money. There are more than 15 trillion air miles in circulation; that is more than dollar bills. Or think about the bonus card you use at your supermarket.

Internet currencies like Bitcoins are not interest free. But the technology, once tested, can be used in different ways. Many solutions will flow from breaking up the current national money monopolies and the introduction of interest-free complementary currencies.

THE AGE OF OPTIMISM 4: MEDITATION FOR PEACE

Meditation and yoga have been released from their Asian boundaries and travel the world. More and more research confirms the health and happiness benefits for those who practice regularly. But this swelling spiritual wave drives a trend that has an even bigger potential. As research has shown, groups of meditators can calm down societies and reduce violence.

Once, long ago, rulers in India kept monks close to their courts. They knew the ascetics’ daily meditations had a calming effect on the populace. The kings took care of the monks so they could care for society.

Research shows that as one meditator settles at a higher level of consciousness it leads to more coherent brain patterns; her contribution to the overall energy field is such that it lifts everybody else. Psychologist Fred Travis has shown that someone meditating alone in a room has a positive effect on another person doing a cognition test in an adjacent room. The increased coherence of the meditator “spilled over” to the nonmeditator, who was not aware of the meditator in the other room. The conclusion: When the brain coherence of the nonmeditator was better, she did better on the test.²

The coherence-building effect becomes even stronger when meditation is practiced in groups and brainwaves synchronize. Roger Nelson, who leads the Global Consciousness Project at Princeton University, has measured the impact of 2,500 advanced Transcendental Meditation meditators in Fairfield, Iowa, during a fourteen-week summer program. The group meditated for an hour both morning and evening, and he correlated these times with the activity of machines that generate random numbers, which the Global Consciousness Project has installed worldwide. Nelson is unequivocal in his conclusion. “When human consciousness becomes coherent and synchronized,” he says, “the behavior of random systems changes.”³

Perhaps the most mind-blowing study was done in 1993. At the time, the District of Columbia was seen as “the murder capital of the world.” During the summer a group of more than 2,500 meditators got together. The Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia, the FBI, twenty-four independent criminologists, and social scientists from major institutions like the University of Maryland and the University of Texas collaborated on the study. Meditation sessions were held in locations around the city. The study showed a 23 percent reduction in homicide, rape, and assault.⁴

Ancient wisdom is being rediscovered. The impact of this research opens a whole new perspective on the organization of society. Meditation has the potential to reduce violence and conflict in the world—and at a fraction of annual military spending.

THE AGE OF OPTIMISM 5: MIND OVER MATTER

In modern Western medicine, disease is something that needs to be eradicated with pharmaceutical drugs or surgery. But what if each disease has a message, perhaps a critical message that provides an opportunity for the healing of the soul? It’s a perspective that would turn modern medicine upside down.

German physician Rüdiger Dahlke wrote the book The Power of Illness. He argues that we create disease with our psyches, with our mental behavior, and that’s also the fundamental level where healing begins. Disease, then, is not something we should try to avoid; it is our opportunity to become more aware and to find out why we are alive. We learn our life’s lessons and purpose through our illnesses and ailments.

The idea that our physiology and psychology can have an effect on one another has been around in the Western world for some 1,000 years, and the two were always integrated in the ancient Asian traditions. It caught the interest of Sigmund Freud in the beginning of the twentieth century, but Dahlke goes further and says that all disease has a psychological meaning. That disease offers the chance to heal our souls.

He was doing psychotherapy sessions with his patients when he found out that body and soul operate on very parallel tracks. Patients who were constipated had a hard time opening up in the psychotherapy sessions. Subsequently, after these patients had started fasting—which resolved their constipation—the psychotherapy became much more effective. Dahlke: “The disease is the symbol of a task. If we perform the task, we relieve the body. If you don’t get the message on the psychological level, the challenge manifests in the body and you have to live the illness.”

Living disease, rather than fighting it, has led to many examples of “miraculous” recoveries under Dahlke’s guidance in Europe. He saw people being cured from cancer, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, rheumatism, and more. As important, his work—and that of others—points medicine in a new and very different, less invasive, and less expensive direction. The reinvention of medicine is a key project of the age of optimism.

THE AGE OF OPTIMISM 6: FOOD IS THE BEST MEDICINE

I once tried to drive my regular gas car after filling the tank with diesel. I didn’t get very far. The experience taught me an important lesson in a painful way. It makes a difference how you feed an engine. Our bodies are engines too. In fact, they are among the most complex and efficient energy systems on our planet. So, one would assume that we would pay attention to the “gas” we put in our delicate systems.

However, apart from obvious exceptions such as sports, the relationship between food and performance of the human body is still a largely unexplored area. Just visit a regular supermarket or even a mainstream hospital. If the relationship between food and health would be widely accepted, the food offered in these places would look very, very different.

Yet, for good health, plain foods without any additions are the best. As research shows, it’s hard to beat the simple apple as the most healthy food item.

But the tide is changing. Mainstream doctors are writing bestsellers about how we can prevent or heal disease with food. Just two examples: Mark Hyman, M.D., who helped President Bill Clinton recover from heart disease, prescribes how to lose weight, overcome diabetes, and prevent disease in The Blood Sugar Solution. And David Perlmutter, M.D., explains in The Grain Brain, based on extensive research, how the sugar and grains in our diet provoke the inflammation that is behind most degenerative illnesses, and that even dementia can be reversed through the proper diet.

We would live in a different, far more healthy and peaceful world—where the forces of optimism would be much stronger instantly—if all of us would just eat the produce that the soil of the Earth abundantly provides.

THE AGE OF OPTIMISM 7: WE CREATE OUR OWN REALITY

Mainstream medicine rules that the genes that we receive at birth determine our health. That means we don’t create our own lives. We are victims of our genes. That’s a rather depressing perspective that aligns with the strong forces of pessimism in society. But is it true?

Recent research points in another direction. Stem cell biologist Bruce Lipton took genetically identical stem cells and put them in separate Petri dishes and then changed the environment in those dishes. In one dish the cells formed muscle tissue, in the second dish they formed bone tissue, and in the third dish they formed fat cells. Identical cells developed in three different directions through changing of the environment. Different information from the environment led genes to evolve in different ways. So genes are not pre-programmed to deliver certain results; they respond to information.

Lipton’s discoveries are part of an emerging new biological paradigm that presents a radically different view on the evolution of life: epigenetics. Epi means “above” in Greek. Epigenetics means control above the genes. Lipton: “It turns out that as we move from one environment to another environment, we change our genetic read-out. Or, if we perceive that our environment is not supporting us, than that perception also changes our genetics.”

The impact on medicine is profound. “Our health is really based on our perception and our beliefs and attitudes. If we find ourselves in a negative environment, or we perceive ourselves to be in a negative environment, we generally contribute to disease. If you want to recover health, you don’t need to add medicine, you actually have to return yourself to a supportive, healthy environment and/or a healthy belief and the cells will heal themselves,” says Lipton.⁵

Medical science is confirming Lipton’s view. Studies show that sick people who are supported with some kind of mental training heal faster and better. Research also shows that 90 percent of the cases of cancer and heart disease—the two biggest killers on the planet—have nothing to do with genes but everything to do with lifestyle. In other words: We may need a coach as much as a doctor when we are ill. The optimistic perspective is that we can influence our health and we can heal ourselves.

THE AGE OF OPTIMISM 8: WE CAN CHANGE OUR PERSONALITIES

Remember what you promised yourself on New Year’s Day? Most New Year’s resolutions disappear from our daily routines in weeks, if not days. Why is that? The explanation is that we are hard-wired against change. And there are good and useful reasons for that.

As a child we learn how life works. We learn to talk and walk. We learn that we cannot put our hands in fire. We store all that acquired knowledge somewhere in our memory that’s operated by our brain. Our brain automates these procedures like a computer and stores the information in our subconscious. Just imagine that you would need to consciously think about how to walk each time you want to move. Without brain automation and our subconscious, our lives would be impossible.

Here’s the problem: We don’t only store the useful stuff like how to walk or talk. We also store and automate many unhelpful conclusions. As a five-year-old you may have had some unpleasant experiences in your home. There may have been stress because your mother or father lost a job. Because of the stress you received less attention—love—from your parents, and somehow you concluded that there was something wrong with you. You started feeling insecure, unloved, unworthy…. Wrong conclusion. Nonetheless, in our clever system, such a response gets automated too, and a sense of unworthiness gets hard-wired.

Many of us have seen therapists and have discovered such patterns. Yet it is very hard to change something that is, after all, part of your subconscious. Even if you consciously recognize a pattern, how do you change the subconscious “code”?

Neuroscience is one of the most exciting fields of science at the moment. The brain and consciousness are no longer inaccessible domains, and scientists are finding that the way the brain processes information can be manipulated to reduce stress, help repair damaged brains, enhance creativity, and improve (mental) health.

Neurotherapy reads brain waves, feeds them into a computer, and translates them into visual, audible, or tactile form. The goal: By seeing, hearing, or touching your brain waves, you can (re)train your brain to produce desired levels of activity, and you can clean up overstressed parts of your brain or self-sabotaging brain processes.

Just imagine regular neurofeedback sessions at schools where children can learn to reset early childhood traumas and change their damaged personalities. Fewer troubled kids will lead to more healthy adults and less violence. And more optimism.

WHY EVERY DROP IN THE OCEAN MATTERS

The perspectives about the future I describe in this chapter are just a few in our ever-evolving world. There’s a universe full of possibility open to you. There are endless more challenges to be met and solutions to be discovered. I’m sure there is an almost perfect correlation between the needs that are to be fulfilled and the talents that each of us brings to this world. Yet many of us hold back for fear of failure. We continue in our jobs, fulfilling someone else’s mission rather than our own, preferring security above our shot at fulfillment and success. We tell ourselves that it doesn’t matter; that our contribution will be small anyway; that whatever we can do won’t be more than just a drop in the ocean.

Rosamund and Benjamin Zander recount a story originally from an essay by Loren Eisely in their book The Art of Possibility: Strolling along the edge of the sea, a man catches sight of a young woman who appears to be engaged in a ritual dance. She stoops down, then straightens to her full height, casting her arm out in an arc. Drawing closer, he sees that the beach around her is littered with starfish, and she is throwing them one by one into the sea. He lightly mocks her: “There are stranded starfish as far as the eye can see, for miles up the beach. What difference can saving a few of them possibly make?” Smiling, she bends down and once more tosses a starfish out over the water, saying serenely, “It certainly makes a difference to this one.”

THE REAL ROSA PARKS STORY IS YOUR STORY

We all know the story of Rosa Parks. We know how she fueled the civil rights movement by refusing to give up her place on the bus. Hers is the story of a rare hero who became “the mother of the civil rights movement.” Or so we think. In his book Soul of a Citizen, Paul Rogat Loeb tells Parks’s real story, and that reality is even more inspiring.

Rosa Parks was not just a bus passenger. When she boarded that bus in Montgomery, Alabama, she had been an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for twelve years. The summer before, Parks had attended a ten-day training session at Tennessee’s labor and civil rights organizing school, the Highlander Center, where she had met an older generation of civil rights activists.

In other words: Parks’s decision to stay in her seat on the bus didn’t come out of nowhere. That decision was a logical next step in her biography. That does not in any way detract from its historical importance and her tremendous courage, but it reminds us that this influential act might have never happened without the humble, frustrating work that preceded it. The real story of Rosa Parks tells us that every drop in the ocean counts.

It is not fate that someone becomes a hero and someone else not. Heroes, like Rosa Parks, went step by step along the path of their own beliefs, developing their unique talents, their truth. The strength to carry out their “heroism” is built up through hard work. The eighteenth-century Rabbi Zusya said, “God will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ He will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’” Or as we can say now: God will not ask you why you were not Rosa Parks. God will ask you, “Why were you not you?”

THERE ARE JUST NOT ENOUGH PROBLEMS FOR THE SOLUTIONS THAT WE HAVE

We live in a time of unprecedented opportunity. No generation before us has had such an access to ideas and growth. Why?

Sharing, exchanging has always been the driver of progress. In 1776 Adam Smith identified in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations one primary cause for progress: “The propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another.” Almost 250 years later, trade is a multitude of times easier than it was in the days of the Scottish philosopher.

Borders have mostly disappeared—at least for goods and services. One in three citizens of the world already has access to the Internet. That means that they have instant access to all new ideas and innovations as they emerge. And what that means is well described by Matt Ridley in The Rational Optimist: “Exchange is to cultural evolution as sex is to biological evolution.” We know what happens when people have sex. We are now witnessing what happens—in Ridley’s words—“when ideas have sex.”

It leads to an ongoing and ever-increasing explosion of new ideas, inventions, discoveries, and innovations. When the telephone had sex with the computer, the Internet was born. The old world of industrial production often has to deal with diminishing returns. At some point it becomes too expensive to dig for a certain raw material, for instance. But the world of ideas has a never-ending positive feedback loop. Solutions keep coming.

This is a book about the power of optimism, but we don’t want to ignore the challenges that our world faces. To the contrary, we want to use optimism to address those challenges.

Yes, the whole world is getting better and richer at the moment, and there are things we can do to make the 3 billion people living on $2.50 a day benefit even faster.

We can get rid of out-of-date polluting processes and swiftly implement clean energy and reverse global warming.

We can create much better support systems for our health.

For each of these challenges there are many answers. But the world needs more optimists to discover those more quickly. The world needs more people like you to step up and take your place as contributor, problem solver, or inventor. We all possess the unique talents that we need to provide unique answers.

For 200 years, pessimists—from the Luddites who fought against the Industrial Revolution to the manure-worriers a century ago who saw more and more horses pollute the cities and couldn’t imagine the solution the automobile was about to bring and today’s climate change defeatists—have received most of the attention (and bestsellers and Nobel Peace Prizes) despite the fact that optimists have far more often been right.

We need to realize what a gift we give ourselves and the environment and the community around us when we let go of the pessimism bias and embrace our inherent problem-solving, optimistic natures. There are 7 billion of us. Each with her or his contributions and solutions and all of us increasingly connected. We can fail only because we don’t act and we don’t open ourselves for the world of possibility around us. If we act, we will soon discover that there are just not enough problems for the solutions that we have.