Doomsday Clock
We now visibly witness the world seemingly crumbling before our eyes. We hear alarm bell after alarm bell after alarm bell. We watch in terror as the Doomsday Clock ticks down to midnight.
Humanity Is Beautiful
Read excerpts from a living draft of Peter's upcoming book Humanity Is Beautiful: A New Story For A World On Fire.
19 Posts
Collateralized Debt Obligations
Where Exxon Valdez and other oil spills demonstrated the false “Progress” of our energy systems, the 2008 financial crisis demonstrated the false “Progress” of our financial systems.
Exxon Valdez
For those in the early-to-mid 20th Century, these fossil fuels must have appeared as a gift from God. In 1989, that rosy outlook changed forever.
Donald Draper
At the turn of the decade in 1960, some in the United States desperately clung to the old ways. But more than ever, the new generation was calling in, even insisting on, a new way.
The Trenches
For centuries, humans in the West had been galvanized around the concepts of liberty and reason. For many, The Great War proved this spirit of humanity and progress a farce.
The Industrial & Scientific Revolutions
The monumental changes of The Enlightenment were about more than liberty and justice. For many, in myriad ways, day-to-day life was getting vastly easier and safer as the technologies and knowledge at our disposal grew and grew.
The Enlightenment
Baruch Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Leibniz, Rousseau, Voltaire, and many others wrote some of the early chapters of The Story of Progress.
The Dark Ages
After the fall of the Roman Empire in the Fifth Century C.E., the Western world fell into what many Enlightenment-era historians and philosophers – and many people to this day – pejoratively referred to as the “Dark Ages.”
The Story of Progress
We are the ones who will create Heaven from this Hell we sprouted from.
The Story of Decline
The only way forward is to finally accept how truly ugly, reckless, and depraved we have become and to return to how we were before when we were wise, good, and whole. This is one of our favorite stories about ourselves today.
Memes
Many of my mental models are those shared with others. Together, they form what we call “culture.”
Mental models
It is utter chaos all around us. Our brains are by necessity simplifiers, pattern seekers, and meaning makers. We use mental models to cut through the noise and give shape to the chaos.