The ever-tightening connections among us all should have offered us a wealth of opportunities and facilitated infinite abundance, but somewhere along the way, something went wrong and tilted the world out of balance.

We all want to enjoy life. In fact, our natural desire for pleasure is the hidden engine that continually motivates and pushes us toward development and progress.

In the past, a roof over one’s head, a family, and steady provision were sufficient to journey through life with relative contentment.

Over the past generations, this natural desire of ours to enjoy grew to great extents, and we came to a place where we began too develop envy toward other people’s possessions and achievements. Suddenly, a desire was evoked within us to fence our own lots, and to trade with others. Some generations later, humanity discovered the delight of governance and respect from within the eyes of people. Thus, gradually, we gradually became a society that is dissected into classes.

Each generation came with a more evolved desire for pleasure than its predecessor, demanding new and more sophisticated ways to satisfy it. As our desires for pleasure grew, our minds evolved to obtain the objects of our cravings. And the more our minds evolved, the more we realized that we could derive pleasure from our connections with others. This, in turn, caused us to strengthen the ties between us.

During the Stone Age, we lived in clans and were content to do so. Yet as our desires for possessions, respect, and dominance evolved, struggles over power, land, and dominance ensued. Additionally, we developed agriculture and commerce, leading to even tighter connections among us, while in science, discoveries transformed our views and propelled our need to know more about the world, and to somehow control it with the human mind.

The industrial revolution initiated a great many changes: it improved production methods and the over all standard of living, and prompted mass urbanization, resulting in social, cultural, and educational revolutions. All of these processes tied us increasingly closer, promising happiness and wealth, but also marking the start of a new era in human development: the global era.

The moment we discovered we could derive pleasure out of human connections, particularly the pleasure of having more than others or being more respected or powerful than others, we began to create an entirely different reality. In the new reality, each person could communicate and trade with any other person or institution in the world without any limitations. It seemed as though the world was heading toward infinite abundance and bliss. But then we discovered that the rules had changed.

Rules of the Global Society

When globalization was in its infancy, the prevailing view was that the tightening connections would have us all speaking the same language, we would all be able to travel freely to any place in the world, and economic, political, and social ties would enhance tremendously. Indeed, it all came true. However, now we are discovering that the term “global” means much more than we originally thought it meant.

In the last financial crisis we discovered that existing globally is about far more than having hundreds of Facebook “friends” from the world over. Being global primarily means being dependent upon many people of whom I neither know nor care for.

Indeed, the rules of life have changed: from aspiration to personal success, we’ve come to a state where, as Nobel Prize laureate, journalist and economist Paul Krugman defined it, “We’re all sort of in the same boat.”

From Dog-Eat-Dog to One for All

Despite all the above-said, it is still unclear why people’s self-centered behavior, which has prevailed since the dawn of time, has suddenly become the main problem. Indeed, egocentrism is only half the problem. The other half is the great shift in our connections. Reality has markedly changed as we have become inseparably connected.

Our problem is not our growing egotism. Rather, it is the fact that we are continuing to behave egotistically instead of altruistically, while living in a closed, integral system. Such a system requires true care and concern for one another and for Nature’s system as a whole. In a closed system, everything you do affects everyone else, but it also comes back to you in unimaginable ways. Since we have now become elements in an integral system, disparate yet connected, unable to know which act will cause which response and how it will affect the entire system, we must learn to behave differently.

Gordon Brown, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, wrote about it in Times Online (March 1, 2009), “Historians will look back and say this was no ordinary time but a defining moment: an unprecedented period of global change, and a time when one chapter ended and another began… Globalization is not an option, it is a fact, so the question is whether we manage it well or badly.”