How do we balance our needs today with the needs of future generations? Tomas Björkman's The World We Create seeks the answer in adult development

The work of the philanthropist and applied philosopher Tomas Björkman is very close to the core of A/UK. Both in terms of his material support for some of our endeavours, and also for his deep intellectual (and spiritual) inquiry into questions about the fit between subjective life and objective structures - in an age where climate crisis and automation require that fit to be far better and more developed.

In previous books like The Nordic Secret and the Market Myth, Björkman - informed by his own entrepreneurial experience - has sought to put systems like capitalism, socialism and democracy in a wider perspective. As he says in this 2017 Medium piece about the market:

The market has evolved as the un-reflected answer to our need for collective co-ordination in today’s world, our need for an ultimate authority. As an ultimate authority the “Market Myth” is very thin. As efficient as the market is for allocating private goods, it is poor at providing a satisfying shield against our collective existential void.

And we can all feel the cracks in this shield. It must address the important common question of efficiency, but also must address questions about other common human values like justice, equity and meaning. Collective questions like ‘How do we balance our needs today with the needs of future generations?’ require a bigger frame to be answered: A new meta-narrative.

Björkman’s new book (in English, though in Swedish since 2017), The World We Create: from God to Market, attempts to provide that “new meta-narrative”. Here’s some excerpts from the book’s intro below:

…Humanity has progressed through four fundamentally different stages of experiencing and interpreting the world, which I call ‘thought perspectives’. At each stage, a new symbolic invention in our worldview has been seen as the highest authority on truth and justice. The historically most important of these have been God, Science and the Market.

The most recent thought perspective and its highest authority has been postmodernism and the market respectively. The extent to which our society and culture – our collective imaginary – are shaped by social constructions, which we often remain unaware of or take for granted as natural, given facts, is one of my most central points…

The contemporary account of the postmodern condition and the dominance of the market is thus approached from the perspective of a socially constructed world. The purpose of this is to see the market as a social construction – not a fact of nature – that postmodernism unwittingly has made our highest authority. And also to realise that a ‘free’ market could be very different from the one we have today…

I move from considering the contemporary context of postmodernity’s market-induced malaises, and ask us to turn our gaze towards an increasingly complex world - one that the fragmented symbolic Universe of the present fails to properly handle.

I engage considerably with the field of psychological development. The central tenets here are that human minds develop through stages of cognitive complexity. This also applies to adults, who under favourable conditions can advance to more complex stages of thought and perception.

So it is absolutely necessary to meet the challenges of our times that we all develop our ability to see the world in more nuances, depth and complexity, if we are to ensure a successful transition to a sustainable society.

The point is this: to understand and manage an increasingly complex world, our inner complexity needs to match the outer complexity of our world. As the world grows more complex, so must we complexify, as individual thinking creatures – along with our social institutions, and the narratives about reality that we tell ourselves and others.

I end the book by exploring how we can ‘co-create’ a new ‘metanarrative’ so that we can free ourselves from the inadequate thought-perspectives of the present, and their dated or limited authorities: God, Science and the Market.

The World We Create is a title with two different meanings. The first is the realisation that the world we experience and interpret is always a creation of our own consciousness. The other is the insight that many parts of our world are created by collective human process: the social construction of reality, of our collective imaginary. Accordingly, both of these ideas will be underlying themes throughout the entire book.

If you’re intrigued by this, then you may be interested in this relaxed, clear and informative podcast interview with Tomas below (original link here), conducted by the German podcaster Tom Amarque (in English, and there’s a few seconds delay before loading).