The Darkness of Ascent - Fragmentation, Separation & Disconnection

The ascent of humanity has resulted in disconnection, fragmentation and separation.

As products and services have become more and more specialized, humanity has grown further and further apart. While the industrial age has brought us many advances in the fields of science, biology, medicine, business and psychology, these advances have come at a cost.

The result of all this specialization is that the cost of goods and services increases exponentially due to their apparent scarcity. An example of this fragmentation can be found in a sick person and poor living conditions. Lack of clean water, unhygienic living conditions, poor nutrition and lack of access to basic medicine contribute to the person's sickness. According to current perceptions we would need a doctor, a nutritionist, a social worker, and a housing advocate to deal with the problem.

Pieces of the solution are at best scattered making the problem overwhelming. How could we instead tackle such a problem from a more holistic perspective? One way would be to change our thinking around the problem. Although we may have an understanding of all the separate challenges at hand, we could use a more integrated approach to solutions.

For example, why not use people in hospitals to help doctors integrate a social diagnosis into their routine medical examinations? This would give greater insight into the cause of the problem which could then be eliminated at source.

Instead, billions are spent on medical bills to try eliminate the surface nature of the problem, only for it to reappear further down the line. There's no broader understanding of how, in this case, medicine can be integrated and used in the bigger picture through a process of transferring information and working together.

Government agencies would then be able to use such information to tackle wider, more significant problems like disease, unemployment and poor living standards. But the way we've gone about trying to solve such problems remains fixed in limited ways of thinking. Scarcity modes of thinking have resulted in fragmentation and separation.

We are approaching a fork in the road and soon we'll have to decide to either continue along the path of ascent which will lead to an eventual dead-end. Or, we can choose another path. Although we don't yet know how to navigate this path, we can begin to integrate solutions from tools at hand through a process of interaction and cooperation.

As Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient noted, the greatest challenge lies in our mindset: changing our mindsets about poor people, financial institutions and the nature of capitalism, all of which stunt the well being of millions. "Mindsets play strange tricks on us," he says. "We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see."