Global risks and problems

Initiated in 1968, The Club of Rome (specifically Hasan Özbekhan, Erich Jantsch and Alexander Christakis) soon after produced its statement of purpose  "The Predicament of Mankind," which begins as follows:

As in every epoch of its existence, mankind today findsi tself in a particular "situation". And as always this situation is created and nurtured by those who live amid the myriad events that comprise it—events that now are in the process of tumultuous and ever accelerating change, events that now increasingly and even violently clash with one another. In some deep sense our situation compels us to animate and perpetuate it almost blindly, and thus to move toward a future whose shape or quality we do not comprehend, whose surprises we have not succeeded in reducing to a rational frame of ideas, whose complexities we are not in the least sure of being able to control.

On pages 14 to 16, under the title "Continuous Critical Problems—an illustrative list," 49 problems are named, beginning with "Explosive population growth with consequent escalation of social, economic, and other problems" and "Widespread poverty throughout the world," and ending with "Irrational practices in resource investment" and "Insufficient understanding of Continuous Critical Problems, of their nature, their interactions and of the future consequences both they and current solutions to them are generating."

A cursory look at this list will suggest that although more than 40 years have passed since it was written, all the problems that were mentioned are still both "continuous" and "critical." 

In addition,  the problem that is presently in the focus of the public eye—the climate change—was not even mentioned on the list:





Neither was the problem that revealed itself more recently, but whose threat may now be most immediate—the possible, or as some experts will say probable or even certain non-sustainability of our financial system:

 


REFLECTION: What will it take to truly find solutions? Einstein's motto "We cannot solve our problems by thinking as we did when we created them," and DebateGraph's motto "To change the world, we need to look at it differfently" give us a good place to begin. What is this 'new thinking' that we are so notoriously unable to find? What will be 'a difference that makes a difference'?

'New ways of thinking' are rarely completely new, and the one on which The Game is based is not an exception—it rather closely corresponds to what was proposed in "The Predicament of Mankind."  You will now click the Game START and continue to explore The Game. What you'll find is a prototype solution to the challenges just mentioned. You might be surprised to discover that what 'the new thinking' is will be obvious to you, just as it was to the authors of The Predicament of Mankind more than forty years ago. What will be a contribution of The Game is a strategy to put the good old ideas into practice. The Game will also offer an answer to what might be the deepest and most interesting question—Why aren't those obvious and already 'known' ideas truly known, and put into practice?
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2. New thinking
Global risks and problems
The main insight was available already in 1948 (Wiener: Cybernetics)
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