What I do see possible is to really examine our cultural foundations, given the degree of fracturing that is occurring.

There really is quite a lot of conceptual patching going on, over ideas, beliefs and assumptions that go back to the dawn of civilization. Often tilted by vested interests.

For instance, Michael Hudson wrote a good book some years ago, called, Forgive Them Their Debts; The Fall of Antiquity. About how the tension between political leaders trying to hold states together were in conflict with the wealthy and powerful using their wealth and power to accumulate more, draining the energy and strength from the societies. Compound interest being one example, for which debt jubilees were devised as a circuit breaker.

While this is a touchy subject, having followed world news since the 70's, it is a fact the oligarchs were sucking Russia dry after the fall of the Soviet Union and Putin managed to put the focus back on Russia as a state. Meanwhile China was/is getting pretty far out on the financial limb and Xi has become the political strongman to focus back on the state.

Both mirroring this age old tension. So while I don't like authoritarian governments, nor do I prefer oligarchs running roughshod over the system, so there has to be some balance.

As I pointed out in this essay, to culture, good and bad are some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, while in nature, it's the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental.

If you think through the implications of that, it is far deeper and more fundamental than culture's black/white, carrot/stick control mechanisms.

There is both good and bad in everything. Without the testing of what is bad, we just get weak, for instance. We get spoiled by the good times.

So given that neither are Russia and China, nor their current leadership, all bad, nor is the West all good, but it's all very complex and to the extent we try to think of it in simplistic terms, the more we become detached from the larger realty.

And it does seem our leadership is becoming ever more detached.

Which is to get back to the point, that the underlaying models need serious upgrading. What we are about to have, amounts to a large forest fire, with lots of dry deadwood and serious winds to drive it. There are not the resources to just start over. The earth is going to take millennia to come close to recover from what we have put it through in the last century and will likely put it through, once the fires have burned out.

So it seems the only possibility of growth is realize that we are not going to beat nature, but we do have to learn how it actually works.

Cyclical, circular, reciprocal and feedback generated, not linear and object/goal oriented.

Journey, not the destination.

Life is like a sentence. The end is just punctuation. What matters is how well you tie the rest of the story together.

Not everyone gets to be the punchline, or we are all just punchlines to our own jokes.