1. Multiple revolutions are laying foundations for new approaches to organizing society.

Ø Science and technology: Technological innovation results in increasingly powerful tools and ever vaster and more elaborate mountains of data and information leading to new interpretations of the nature of reality and of the world around us and inside of us. Technology is also enabling unprecedented levels of interaction, conversation, and travel enabling more people than ever before to exchange experiences and insights. Revolutions in science are providing intriguing, powerful, and coherent new assumptions, hypothesis, concepts, theoretical models, and other tools. In turn, as has been the case throughout history, they are drawn upon to review and improve current political, social, and economic structures.

Ø Philosophy: Never in known human history has such a massive cross-fertilization of ideas and interpretations of reality been possible as is today. Never have so many people from so many different spiritual, religious, ethical, and cultural backgrounds found themselves talking to one another. Never has it been as easy as it is today to access, review, synthesize, and cross-reference ideas from multiple sources.

Ø Spirituality, religion, ethics, and tradition: For the same reasons just mentioned, never have so many people with diverse interpretations and answers to the ultimate, most perplexing questions of humanity, coexisted relatively peacefully on such a large scale. We are moving from several major monotheistic cultures to a polytheistic global society in which multiple interpretations of ultimate reality – multiple names for god - or gods – coexist. This process is shocking to humanity, especially in the west. Centuries of relatively uncontested clarity regarding the basic assumptions on which the western belief system has been built, and which has to a large extent contributed to the political predominance of the “west” in the last three centuries, are now subject to profound review and reform. Two simple trends are clear signs of this: the growing influence of far-eastern spiritual practices and concepts in the west, and the increasingly impassioned dialogue between cutting-edge western-driven science and seekers of spiritual answers.

Ø Demographics and environment: The human population is simply the largest it has ever been and is expected to continue to grow for another two decades. Never have their been so many people on earth, such a vast pool of human capital from which new ideas, sciences, technologies, products, services, and other goods could be generated. Never before has there been a greater need for innovations to ensure that awareness, cooperation, and civilization will prevail over chaos and unprecedented levels of death, pain, and violence. Never before has this planet and its limited resources had to sustain, to our knowledge, as many consumers as it does today.