The Good Ancestor Mindset by Roman Krznaric

Human beings have an astonishing evolutionary gift: agile imaginations that can shift in an instant from thinking on a scale of seconds to a scale of years or even centuries. The need to draw on our capacity to think long-term has never been more urgent, whether in areas such as public health care, to deal with technological risks, or to confront the threats of an ecological crisis. And there is little that the unborn citizens of tomorrow can do about it. They cannot throw themselves in front of the King’s horse like a Suffragette, block an Alabama bridge like a civil rights protestor, or go on a Salt March to defy their colonial oppressors like Mahatma Gandhi.
What can we do to overcome the tyranny of the now? The drivers of short-termism threaten to drag us over the edge of civilizational breakdown, while ways to think long-term are drawing us towards a culture of longer time horizons and responsibility for the future of humankind.
The good news is that a pioneering generation of time rebels is now emerging to challenge the myopic political presentism at the heart of representative government, where politicians can barely see past the next election or even the latest tweet. This vanguard movement of political activists, policymakers and engaged academics has proposed more than 70 different ways to embed long-term thinking and intergenerational justice into democratic institutions, offering a new kind of politics that I call ‘deep democracy.’
By creating a cognitive toolkit for challenging our obsession with the here and now offers conceptual scaffolding for answering one of the most important questions of our time: How can we be good ancestors?
--- Roman Krznaric
This animation explores the legacies we might leave for future generations and humanity's place in the cosmic story.
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Video credit: Tom Lee at Rocket Visual - www.rocket-visu....