From International to Global to Planetary
We Have Planetary Power and Pre-Planetary People
The defining adventure of the twenty-first century
A couple of weeks ago I saw Nils Gilman speak at Ars Electronica. In his talk and his book Children of a Modest Star, which I bought as soon as it came out a few years ago, he suggests the idea of planetary subsidiarity. A way to govern ourselves on this planet we are on. This is something, which doesn’t exist yet, but something that is direly needed, especially since the forms of government we currently have do not seem to be working very well considering what we see on the news every day and the direction things are taking from climate to geo-politics to AI.
When I was seven, I saw the Earth from above for the first time. While it was on TV, for me it triggered what astronauts refer to as the Overview effect. It gave me my life purpose, one that I am living into to this day. I told that story in At the Threshold, so I will not tell it again.
The Relational Age is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
What matters here is what I understood as a seven-year-old understood without having any language for it back then.
I was part of the web of life.
Not as an abstract idea. Not as the kind of nice sentence you put underneath a photograph of a forest on a motivational poster. I felt deeply that I was an expression of the same life moving through the trees, the animals, the people around me, and the living planet itself.
Then, as happens to most of us, I was “educated” out of it.
I learned to experience myself as a separate individual, living in a particular country, operating inside institutions with rules, roles, borders, and expectations. None of that was wrong. Separation is necessary for experience. I can only encounter you because you are not me. Thou requires an I.
But something important had been obscured. We are separate, but we are not independent, we are interdependent. We require each other.
For more than forty years since, I have been trying to understand the strange operating system of the human being: our different circuits, our reality tunnels, how we regulate ourselves, construct identity, form relationships, create meaning, imagine futures, and occasionally transform who we are (more on that here).
I have had the privilege of doing that work with people who live at the edges of evolution: Artists, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, corporate change agents, activists, educators, other human development practitioners. People who can sense that our existing systems had reached their limits, often long before the majority is even aware of it or ready to admit it. People trying to create something for which there is not yet an accepted or defined role, language, market, institution, or permission.
Again and again, across industries and continents and decades, I have arrived at the same conclusion:
Our institutions cannot evolve beyond the consciousness of the people who create and inhabit them.
Every organization I have worked with has proved this to me. Install the finest operating model available and within eighteen months it will have been metabolized back down to the developmental level of the people running it. The org chart changes. How we run meetings or who we are with each other does not.
And that has now become a rather urgent problem, because the same law is operating at the scale of the planet.
Three centuries, three ways of seeing
The international age
At the end of the eighteenth century, Jeremy Bentham needed a new word.
He was writing about jurisprudence and wanted to distinguish the laws operating within a state from those governing relations between states. The older phrase, the law of nations, was not precise enough. So in 1780 he coined one: international. He noted in a footnote that the word was new, and hoped it was analogous enough to be intelligible.
Inter, between. Natio, from nasci, to be born. A nation is a birth-group. Internationalism is the art of managing relations between birth-groups, and while the birth-group remains the unit that matters, at least it was also honoring the interdependence of such groups.
The nineteenth century became the great age of the nation-state. Borders were drawn, national identities cultivated in the form of shared values and social contracts, bureaucracies developed, and people increasingly organized into imagined communities far larger than the villages and regions they actually lived in, beyond the territorial borders drawn in the Westphalian peace agreement.
That was an enormous achievement. Belonging became a matter of a shared culture. Treaties, embassies, congresses, the slow construction of a body of law that made war slightly less permanent and trade slightly more possible. Millions of people are alive because that architecture was built.
Notice, though, the question at its core:
How should separate nations relate?
The global age
The twentieth century gave us a different scale.
Two world wars demonstrated that industrial technology, empire, finance, ideology, and violence could no longer be understood as merely national. After 1945, the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund attempted to coordinate an increasingly interdependent world. The UN Charter was signed in San Francisco in June 1945 and came into force that October (United Nations). Later came multinational corporations, global supply chains, satellite communication, commercial aviation, the internet, and digital platforms operating across nearly every border.
Goods became global. Services became global. Capital became global. Information became global. Culture became global. Walk into a mall in any country in the world and you will see the same structures and brands. Memes on social media can be posted from anywhere and consumed everywhere.
Similarly, a virus could circle the world before many governments had agreed on what to call it. An idea could travel from one person to millions before an institution had scheduled its first committee meeting to discuss its implications.
Read the founding documents carefully, though, and you see what was actually built. A global institution resting still on international architecture. An assembly of sovereign birth-groups, agreeing to meet in one room. Brilliant, necessary, and bounded by the consciousness that produced it.
The question it can ask:
How can human activity operate across the whole world?
The planetary age
Climate change is not impressed by a passport.
Carbon does not stop at customs. Ocean acidification does not respect exclusive economic zones. A pathogen does not get a visa or consult the foreign ministry before crossing a border. Artificial intelligence does not remain confined to the intentions, laws, or values of the country in which a model was trained.
Our greatest challenges are not international, because they do not exist primarily between nations. They are planetary, because they move through interdependent ecological, technological, biological, economic, and informational systems, across species, across generations, and across timescales election cycles were never designed to handle.
So a new question arrived with these challenges:
How can humanity participate responsibly within the living system that makes all human activity possible in the first place?
These three ages overlap. Nations will not dissolve just because I consider them obsolete (after all, we still have townships, counties, states, remnants from prior times that make up those nations). Global flows will not stop in spite of current geopolitics. The international and the global remain real, and they remain useful, but they get to become nested inside something larger than themselves.
The word planet is stranger than it looks. Planet comes from the Greek planetes: wanderer. The planets were the wandering stars, the ones that refused to hold their position in a fixed pattern. We named them for their unreliability.
We are standing on one of those wanderers. The only ground any of us has ever had is a thing our ancestors named for not staying put.
Consider that for a moment. Feel your feet on the ground and sense into the planet beneath them.
Global is not planetary
This distinction is the core of my argument, so let me be a bit more specific here.
Global describes reach. Planetary describes relationship and responsibility.
A global supply chain can move a mango from Peru to Berlin in four days while knowing nothing whatsoever about the aquifer it emptied on the way. That is the system performing exactly as designed. Reach was the design goal, and reach was achieved. Externalities were unconsciously and often consciously omitted from that design. Taken for granted and ignored.
Globalization connected markets, institutions, technologies, and people across the Earth. It did not teach us to experience Earth as the living system within which every market, institution, technology, and person exists.
The global age made the world available to us. The planetary age asks us to become responsible for it.
Planetary problems, tribal minds
The Anthropocene is real. We now hold instruments capable of altering the entire Earth system.
And we hold them with hands organized around survival and scarcity. Tribal loyalty. National competition. Inherited ideologies. Obedience to authority. Domination, extraction and exploitation. Short-term advantage.
Stack the layers and the mismatch becomes visible:
Our problems are planetary. Our economies and technologies are global. Our political legitimacy and resources remain concentrated largely in nations. And much of our consciousness remains tribal.
We continue to spend insane amounts of intelligence, attention, money and resources, emotional capacity, and technology on conflict, domination, extraction, fear, and the defense of identities built for an earlier stage of civilization.
We have developed planetary power without developing planetary people.
Or, more concretely:
We have placed planetary tools in tribal hands.
The measurements are not encouraging. The Planetary Health Check 2025 assessed seven of the nine planetary boundaries as transgressed, with ocean acidification crossing for the first time. The seven are climate change, biosphere integrity, land system change, freshwater use, biogeochemical flows, novel entities, and ocean acidification, and all seven are trending in the wrong direction. (Planetary Health Check 2025, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research)
The other half of that finding, though, is actually the more interesting half.
Two boundaries are holding. Ozone depletion and aerosol loading. Those two are holding because humans noticed a consequence they could not see with their own eyes, but believed the people who could see it, agreed across birth-groups, and changed industrial behavior at scale. So it’s not that we cannot do things like this.
As Johan Rockström put it when the report came out, the diagnosis is dire, the window of cure is still open, though, and failure is a choice rather than an inevitability.
We have done this before. Twice. On the two most easily managed cases.
Now the cases get harder, and the same capacity is asked of us again, at higher resolution, under more pressure, with more actors and less trust.
The defining question of the twenty-first century is whether human consciousness can develop quickly enough to meet the scale of human power.
If it cannot, we may vanish from the face of the Earth. Or we may collapse into an earlier form of civilization and hand some future generation, if there is one, the job of beginning the long climb again with fewer resources, less accessible energy, and a thinner margin.
It might look like Mad Max. Or Wall-E. It might look like technological feudalism with the majority of humans as serfs to the billionaire class (which is pretty close to reality already if you think about it). Authoritarian enclaves. Resource wars. AI killing us all off, or some other version of dystopia that we have not yet been imaginative enough to turn into entertainment.
None of this is inevitable, though.
Neither is our transformation.
We are at a threshold, in the liminal space between what was and which is no longer serving, and what will be, but isn’t yet. A threshold is not a promise. It is a place from which we can move forward, freeze, or turn back (although neither freezing nor turning back to some glorified past are real options, only the false promises of demagogues).
Institutions are consciousness made structural
We often speak as if institutions were entities standing outside of us. If only we could redesign the constitution, reform the United Nations, regulate artificial intelligence, fix the market, or elect better leaders, the machine would finally produce the right future.
But institutions are not separate from consciousness. They are consciousness made structural. Crystalized ideologies. They embody what their creators and participants can perceive, value, imagine, and coordinate.
If we want higher-level institutions, we require higher-level humans.
Robert Kegan described, among others, three ways in which adults organize meaning.
In the socialized mind, identity and values are largely authored by the systems we belong to. We know what a good person, a loyal citizen, a responsible employee, a proper man, a successful woman, a respectable member of society is supposed to do. We may believe we are choosing freely while the culture is handing us a template to follow.
This worked remarkably well for nations. You cannot build a nation without millions of people willing to identify with strangers, follow shared rules, accept common symbols, and sacrifice for an imagined collective. It also sustains international institutions and global systems, provided a sufficiently authoritative order is telling people what is expected. But our social contracts are already broken, both inside nations that have lost their identities, as well as between nations (take the climate agreements that have become a sad example of this).
In the self-authoring mind, something changes. We become able to examine the values and identities we inherited. We can build an internal compass, author our own commitments, and enter relationships without being entirely defined by them.
In the self-transforming mind, we can step outside even the system we authored for ourselves. We recognize that every identity and worldview, including our own, is partial. We can hold contradictions, learn across different systems, and allow the self doing the seeing to be transformed by what it sees.
Kegan’s research put roughly 35% of adults at self-authoring and only around 1% at self-transforming, with the caveat I always attach to those numbers: they come from a specific and largely Western, educated, industrialized slice of humanity, and they are estimates rather than measurements of the species (the planetary spectrum is probably even worse).
Planetary governance cannot run on obedience alone. It requires people who understand the values beneath the rules, who can recognize when a rule no longer serves those values, and who can consciously participate in transforming the system rather than waiting for permission to mention that it is broken.
Higher-level institutions require humans with access to higher levels of consciousness.
Which is why I lose patience with the institutional design conversation when it runs on its own. We do not lack proposals for planetary governance. The shelves are full of them, many of them elegant. What we lack is people that could inhabit one of those systems without immediately reproducing the old dynamics inside the new container.
Structure follows consciousness. Every single time.
Systemic transformation is always also human transformation.
Sovereignty requires separation
Sovereignty does not mean radical independence. There is no such thing. You are breathing oxygen produced by other beings, speaking words created by generations of dead people, eating food grown in ecosystems you did not design and fields you did not dig your hands into, and you are reading this through a technological system that no single human being fully understands.
Nor does planetary consciousness mean melting into a great benevolent oneness in which difference disappears. That is not development. That is regression into pre-rational relating, emotional enmeshment, and would only create the feared New World Order in the form of an authoritarian world government.
Experience requires separation.
Without a boundary between self and other, there is no relationship. There is only fusion and dissolution. Relational intelligence begins when I experience myself as a sovereign being and consciously choose to connect with another sovereign being across the space between us.
Sovereignty requires separation. Relationship requires the conscious choice to connect across it.
This is the fourth circuit in the Human Operating System I work with. The point at which we move from being unconsciously shaped through relationship to becoming conscious participants in it. What CG Jung described as part of the process of individuation, where we become aware of our personae, our imprinted and conditioned masks, and instead of reacting from them, choose our response consciously from our center. From driven and reactive to choosing and responding consciously. From enmeshed or isolated to genuinely connected.
Which distinguishes planetary consciousness from both nationalism and collectivism.
Nationalism protects separation and restricts identification. You are an individual citizen (not even a sovereign), but your circle of concern stops at the border of your birth-group.
Collectivism creates belonging by subordinating individuality. You get the warmth, but you pay for it with your authorship and authenticity.
Planetary relational intelligence protects sovereignty while expanding conscious relationship. You remain yourself, actually claiming your sovereignty. Your circle of concern extends to the whole web of life. Both at once, which is harder than either, which is why it is a developmental achievement.
Unity is not sameness. Unity is coordinated difference.
Anyone who has worked on a diverse team already knows this experience. The coherence you feel at the end of a hard, well-held conflict is a different substance from the agreement you feel in a room of people who think alike. One is alive. The other is asleep.
Coherence is the new efficiency. At planetary scale too.
Further up the developmental map comes overview, and it arrives in two stages.
At the fifth circuit it turns on personally. You become able to look at yourself and your own lifetime from above: to see the identity you constructed, the patterns you repeat, the reality tunnel you interpret the world through. What you can see from above, you can begin to transform on purpose. This is the what Maslow called self-actualization, but it stops at the edge of one individual life.
At the sixth circuit it expands past the individual. You watch yourself authoring, you revise the author, and the horizon extends beyond your own biography into the systems, generations, and species you are part of. Maslow added this level late, above the peak of his own system, and called it self-transcendence.
Astronauts gave us the most literal version of the second stage with the overview effect. Borders disappear. The thin film of atmosphere becomes visible. Earth stops being a map on the classroom wall and becomes a fragile living whole suspended in darkness.
Planetary consciousness lives in that expansion. Nations, markets, institutions, and civilizations stop appearing as permanent facts. They become human constructions. Real, consequential, but available for transformation.
The problem with developmental ladders
At this point, developmental language becomes dangerous.
It is very easy to divide humanity into the evolved and the unevolved, place ourselves conveniently near the top, and reinvent the civilizing mission with better vocabulary and a nicer retreat center.
That is not what I mean.
Developmental difference is not a hierarchy of human worth. Done carelessly, this kind of language is a superiority machine, and it has been used that way for centuries, usually by people who were certain they were helping. That is not a reason to abandon the developmental lens. It is a reason to build the correction into the framework itself.
In my essay The Human Punch Card I offered that correction. Every human being carries the same broad architecture, but not every capacity is equally accessible. Some openings are active. Some are dormant. Some are partial. Some have been scarred shut. Some become available only in a particular relationship, environment, or moment.
No two cards, no two humans are identical.
A brilliant technologist may possess extraordinary rational and visionary intelligence while remaining unable to regulate fear or have the empathy to read the emotional field of a room. An Indigenous elder may have access to ecological, ancestral, and relational ways of knowing that a highly self-authoring Western executive has never developed. An activist may perceive systemic injustice with great clarity while reproducing narcissistic domination in their closest relationships. A spiritual teacher may speak eloquently about oneness while being unable to honor another person’s boundaries.
Development is patchy.
The architecture may have a vertical dimension. While we all roughly go through these developmental steps in our first seven years and every seven years, individual results may vary. Development does not follow a linear path.
Mine certainly has not. The older I get, the more specific I can be about which positions on my own card are closed, the less interesting my opinions about other people’s cards become, and the more compassion I can have toward my own fallibility and that of others.
The task is not to rank people. It is to make more of our shared potential available.
Potential → Experience → Integration → Access → Embodiment → Expression
The potential is already there in everyone. We all have the hardware, but not necessarily the software installed to use it. Experience ultimately installs it. Integration makes the experience usable rather than merely memorable. Access makes it available on purpose rather than by accident. Embodiment makes it yours at the level of the nervous system. And expression puts it into the world, where it becomes an experience for someone else, and the cycle begins again in them.
That last loop is the mechanism of culture.
Get philip horváth’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
It changes the developmental question. Instead of asking why can’t those people see what I see, we get to ask:
What opening would need to exist for this to become visible?
That question introduces humility. It also introduces responsibility.
The intelligence of the whole living system
Planetary consciousness is not expanded humanism. Humanity is not the only form of intelligence that matters.
Alfred Korzybski, writing in Manhood of Humanity in 1921, distinguished between chemical-binding, space-binding, and time-binding forms of life. I use these less as biological classifications than as a way of naming the intelligences a human being gets to integrate.
Plants bind energy, chemistry, and matter into living form (so do the 37 trillion cells in your body). Animals move through space, sense their environments, experience emotion, form bonds, hunt, play, protect, and cooperate (as do we in our emotional realms). Humans bind time: we use symbols to transmit experience across generations, so that a person born today can think with someone who died three thousand years ago.
We contain and depend upon all three.
Modern civilization has largely treated plant and animal intelligence as inferior stages we transcended rather than living capacities we integrate. We dissociate from the body, override emotion, destroy ecosystems, and then congratulate ourselves on being rational (which is only the case if you leave out more than half of the variables in the equation).
The next level of intelligence is the one this century is asking for. Relational intelligence, sovereign beings consciously choosing relationship. Once centered there, higher forms of intelligence become available. Expressive, embodiment intelligence and visionary self-transcending overview intelligences, which begin as the capacity to see your own identity and lifetime from above and make them available for transformation rather than defending them, and then expands past the individual to hold the systems and generations that lifetime is nested in (and also the seven generations to come). Ultimately then unlocking our creative intelligence, our capacity to willfully co-create reality.
Which brings me back to the astronauts, and to the part of that research that matters most for my argument. Reports of awe, emotional intensity, and identification with humanity and the planet are common after seeing Earth from space, and researchers have studied them through the psychological constructs of awe and self-transcendent experience. (Yaden et al., Psychology of Consciousness, 2016, DOI 10.1037/cns0000086)
The response is not automatic and not uniform. Not everyone who goes up comes back changed, and those who do come back changed do not all change in the same direction.
Which is a miniature version of the whole problem. We keep hoping that exposure will do the work. Send them on the offsite. Show them the data. Put them in the community. Give them the medicine. Show them the Earth from orbit.
Experience alone develops no one. Integrated experience does.
The common ground we need is therefore not a single culture or ideology. It is the web of life itself. The recognition that every human community, every economy, every technology, and every possible future depends on a living system that no nation owns.
A planetary human does not rise above life. A planetary human becomes conscious of participating within it.
Anarchy is not the absence of order
If planetary governance is not to become a centralized global authority imposing one model on everyone, what might it become?
Here the deeper tradition of anarchist thought becomes useful.
Anarchy is commonly misunderstood to mean chaos. But anarchism in its most interesting form, is not the rejection of organization. It is skepticism toward domination and toward authority that cannot justify itself. Its constructive traditions emphasize voluntary association, mutual aid, cooperative ownership, local self-governance, direct participation, revocable delegation, and federations of autonomous communities (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
This is governance modeled on relational intelligence.
Separate sovereign individuals form cooperative collectives. Those collectives coordinate through larger federations without surrendering their sovereignty. Authority is delegated for a purpose and can be withdrawn. Decisions stay as close as possible to the people and places they affect, while problems whose consequences are planetary get addressed at planetary scale.
Not one world government.
Not eight billion people doing whatever they want.
A nested, polycentric architecture of conscious cooperation. Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman call this planetary subsidiarity in Children of a Modest Star (2024), and it is the most serious institutional proposal I have read in this territory. Elinor Ostrom had already demonstrated the empirical half: communities can and do govern shared resources without relying exclusively on either private ownership or centralized state control, and the successful commons reliably feature agreements, participation, monitoring, accountability, conflict-resolution processes, and nested levels of organization.
Freedom does not eliminate structure. It changes the source and the quality of structure.
Read that with a leadership hat on, because it is the same proposition I make to executive teams every month, only at a different scale. Every functional team I have worked with runs on conscious agreement. Every dysfunctional one runs on habitual submission and pretends that this groupthink is alignment.
Separate sovereign entities choosing conscious coordination without surrendering their entire sovereignty.
Holarchy, not hierarchy. The deeper possibility of anarchy is order created through conscious agreement among sovereign participants rather than obedience to a power standing above them.
Compassion still requires boundaries
What happens when an individual, a corporation, a community, or a nation damages the planetary commons?
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” — Hanlon’s razor
My starting point is that a person doing harm is not necessarily malicious. They may simply be missing perspective, which is why I prefer the notion of ignorance over Hanlon’s term stupidity. A position on the punch card is closed. The consequences of their action, the reality of another being, or the larger system may literally not be available to them. To them, their actions might be completely rational.
I watched this just this past weekend on a playground where a child dominated a toy tractor, with multiple other kids waiting in line while his parents completely ignored everyone else who was waiting, and then even got aggressive when asked if maybe they could tell their kid to let some of the other kids use it for a moment too. They thought they were absolutely justified in their ignorant behavior. Hello Dunning-Kruger.
I have also watched this in enough boardrooms and corporate meetings. The executive making the destructive decision is usually not a villain. He is frightened, narrow, and operating with several relevant openings shut. When your KPIs are about value extraction, many insane decisions seem absolutely appropriate.
That changes the first response from condemnation to inquiry. And staying in curiosity has moved more behavior in my career than any amount of righteousness.
It does not excuse harm.
Compassion is not permission.
Karl Popper described the paradox of tolerance in 1945: unlimited tolerance can allow intolerant forces to destroy the conditions that make tolerance possible. His point gets flattened into the idea that we should simply become intolerant toward people we have labeled intolerant. Popper was more specific. As long as intolerant ideas can be met through rational argument and public judgment, suppression is not warranted. A tolerant society retains the right to defend itself when a movement rejects dialogue and uses coercion or violence to eliminate the freedom of others.
Planetary governance will need the same maturity.
We do not constrain people because we have decided they are evil. We constrain harmful actions when necessary to protect the relational field in which sovereignty, learning, and cooperation remain possible.
The boundary is not the end of relationship. On the contrary, it is what actually makes relationship possible in the first place.
Hold both halves. Hold only the first and you get a therapeutic culture that cannot defend itself. Hold only the second and you get a punitive culture that manufactures the very closure it is punishing.
I do not think that tension resolves. I think we get to stay inside it, consciously, for as long as this takes.
How human development accelerates
If institutions reflect consciousness, and humanity gets to develop quickly enough to meet the planetary threshold, where do we begin?
Everywhere.
In education, parenting, organizations, technology, art, activism, governance, community, and personal practice. Wherever we can create conditions through which another person gains access to more of their own operating system.
The method I use is ARO–IAO.
First, expand Awareness. Help people perceive something that was not previously available: another perspective, an unconscious pattern, a systemic consequence, a future possibility, the reality of another species, or their own capacity to respond.
Then invite Responsibility. Not blame. Blame fixes identity around what has already happened. Responsibility on the other hand reveals the ability to respond starting now.
Then anchor Ownership. The choice gets to become theirs. Otherwise we have produced compliance, which collapses the moment the pressure lifts.
From there, create an aspirational Identity. Make it possible for someone to imagine themselves as a steward, a conscious ancestor, a planetary citizen, a person capable of participating differently. Identity is the lever, because actions follow from who a person believes they are far more reliably than from what they have been told to do.
Show alternative Actions, because identity without practice remains fantasy.
And make different Outcomes visible. People need evidence that another way of acting can create another kind of world.
Awareness → Responsibility → Ownership.
Identity → Actions → Outcomes.
ARO develops sovereign choice. IAO helps sovereign choice become reality.
This is not a program for converting people to the correct worldview. It is a way of creating conditions in which more of reality can pass through them consciously, and more of their potential can ultimately come into the world.
A word on the shadow, because this is identity-level work and identity-level work always holds both possible developments. Done carelessly, this same sequence is how cults get built. The mechanism that produces self-authorship produces indoctrination whenever the identity on offer comes from someone else’s agenda rather than the person’s own emerging truth. The test is simple and non-negotiable: does the person come out more sovereign, or more dependent on you? If the answer is more dependent, you are not developing anyone. You are grooming. Instead, we need more ethical cults, the kind where we strengthen people’s individuality, not subsume it (as Jamie Wheal pointed out in Recapture the Rapture).
What you can do this week:
- In your next contentious meeting, before arguing, ask what opening would need to exist for a different action to become possible. Ask it about yourself. Then ask it about the other person.
- Name one consequence of your team’s work that lands outside your organization, outside your market, and outside this decade. Put it on a slide. Watch what happens to the conversation.
- Pick one decision you are currently complying with rather than owning. Either own it, or stop pretending you are.
- Ask one person on your team what capacity they carry that your organization has never once asked them to use.
- Find someone whose perspective is genuinely incompatible with yours, get curious about it, and stay in the conversation twenty minutes past the point where you want to leave.
The promise of a planetary civilization
Diagnosis without vision is sophisticated pessimism, and there is already plenty of that.
So imagine that every child arriving on this planet were welcomed with something like this:
Hello. Welcome.
We will not lie to you. Teething hurts, and sometimes life will be difficult.
But we are all here to support you in becoming the fullest expression of who you can be. We will do our best to provide the safety, relationships, experiences, and resources you need to unfold your highest potential.
Read it again and notice what it does not promise. It does not promise comfort. It does not promise happiness. It does not promise that nothing will hurt.
It promises support.
What would education look like if this were its foundation?
Children would learn to understand their whole operating system. They would learn to regulate their bodies, emotions, attention, and nervous systems. They would learn to examine inherited beliefs rather than merely repeat them. They would learn to enter relationships as sovereign beings, resolve conflict productively and creatively, participate in their communities, and take stewardship of the life around them.
We would not merely teach them what to do because it is the law, the rule, convention or someone’s expectation. We would help them understand the values beneath our agreements, participate in improving those agreements, and consciously choose how they want to contribute.
Steward, by the way, comes from the Old English stigweard: keeper of the hall. Not the owner. The one who tends the house on behalf of everyone living in it, including those who have not arrived yet.
Our collective resources would be organized around enabling every individual to discover and offer their best expression. Not so that the individual can win against everyone else, but because the health of the whole depends on the flourishing of its distinct participants.
We would not resource individuality despite being one planetary community.
We would become a planetary community because and so that individuality can flourish.
The measure of a planetary civilization is not how efficiently it extracts value from people and ecosystems. It is how effectively it creates the conditions in which life can unfold.
The common adventure
This essay is not addressed to those who remain identified with the existing system. It is for those who can already see beyond it. You know whether that is you by whether any of this has resonated.
You may be an artist exploring what it means to be a human today and creating new cultural memes or visions.
An entrepreneur building systems for which no category exists yet.
An intrapreneur evolving an institution from the inside, in stealth mode, often in a department nobody expects, maybe even in finance or at a front desk.
An activist protecting life and expanding who counts as a participant and making sure what corporations do does not go out of hand.
An educator redesigning how humans learn.
A leader attempting to build a more conscious organization inside a market and monetary system that does not reward it yet.
A parent, trying not to pass an inherited wound into another generation.
If you can see the threshold, that sight brings responsibility, in the original sense: you now have the ability and invitation to respond.
Not the responsibility to save or uplift everyone else. Not the right to appoint yourself a member of the evolved elite. Not permission to replace one system of obedience with another.
The responsibility is to create conditions for unfolding.
Create the conditions in which more of life can become available to itself.
Expand awareness. Invite responsibility. Anchor ownership. Make a more aspirational identity imaginable. Reveal new actions. Demonstrate different outcomes.
Do it wherever you have influence.
The quest is not to impose planetary consciousness on humanity. Imposed consciousness is a contradiction in terms, and the attempt typically has a body count. Most revolutions have eaten their children. The quest is to create the experiences, relationships, communities, institutions, and stories through which humanity can discover it.
That is slower. It is also the version that is more likely to hold.
“I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man’s pride.” — William James
The next decades will likely look like regression, but we can still seed the future for when those next systems crumble, the next waves break.
The wanderers
The international age taught nations to negotiate.
The global age connected human activity across the Earth.
The planetary age asks separate, sovereign beings to choose conscious relationship in service of the whole web of life, which is a different order of ask, because it cannot be delegated to institutions. It happens in people, and then institutions follow.
We are children of a modest star, living for a brief moment on a small planet that has somehow become conscious of itself through us. We are separate, and because we are separate, we can meet. We are sovereign, and because we are sovereign, we can choose relationship.
The old world is not going to carry us across this threshold. And the new world will not arrive fully formed. It gets to become available through us.
There is a word for what that takes.
Consider. From the Latin considerare, which the etymologists trace to con and sidus, with the stars. To consider something is to sit with it under the stars, in the company of what is vastly older and larger than you, and to let that company inform your judgment. Its twin is desire, de sidere, from the stars: what you long for, arriving out of the same sky.
We were named for wandering. We have now wandered far enough to look back and see the whole of where we stand.
This is the adventure of the twenty-first century.
Whether it becomes our initiation or our ending is still ours to determine.
What are you going to consider?
“Every man and every woman is a star.” — Aleister Crowley
I work with leaders and their teams on exactly this gap: the distance between the scale of what they are trying to build and the operating system they are trying to build it with. If this essay described something you are already living, let’s talk.
References and further reading
- Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (printed 1780; published 1789). UCL Bentham Project
- Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman, Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises (Stanford University Press, 2024)
- Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (1994)
- Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity (1921)
- Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1971)
- Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990) and “Beyond Markets and States” (2009)
- Planetary Boundaries Science Lab, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Planetary Health Check 2025. planetaryhealthcheck.org and Stockholm Resilience Centre
- Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), note 4 to chapter 7
- United Nations, history of the Charter, signed 26 June 1945, in force 24 October 1945. un.org
- Frank White, The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution (1987)
- D. B. Yaden et al., “The overview effect: Awe and self-transcendent experience in space flight,” Psychology of Consciousness, 2016. DOI 10.1037/cns0000086
