Seventy-Five

If enlightenment were a scale from zero to one hundred—zero being pure evil and one hundred being a truly enlightened civilization—I think we're somewhere around 58.

That's probably better than it sounds.

For most of human history, life was brutally tribal. Violence was ordinary. Conquest was honorable. Slavery was economically normal. Children worked. Women were property. Public executions were entertainment. Your religion, birthplace, skin color, or family name could determine nearly everything about your life.

We've come a long way.

But 58 feels about right.

Because we've developed something strange:

Near-godlike tools running on Stone Age emotional hardware.

We can split atoms.

Edit genes.

Speak instantly to someone on the other side of the planet.

Put the accumulated knowledge of humanity into everyone's pocket.

Build machines that can reason alongside us.

And then we use some of those machines to argue with strangers about politics.

Our capabilities might be 90 out of 100.

Our wisdom might be 58.

Maybe that gap is one of the most important measurements of civilization.

So I've been wondering:

What would 75 look like?

Not 100.

Not heaven.

Not some utopian world where everyone meditates at sunrise and spends the afternoon planting community gardens.

Seventy-five.

People still get divorced.

Teenagers still slam doors.

Neighbors still piss each other off.

People still want money and beautiful houses and successful companies. We still have conservatives and liberals. Competition. Jealousy. Ego. Religion. Atheism. Arguments. Bad days.

We're still human.

We've just grown up a little.

And I think the first thing you'd notice about a 75 world is surprisingly simple.

People aren't as afraid.

Not because nothing bad happens.

Because fewer people benefit from keeping everyone terrified.

Politics doesn't require you to believe half your country is evil.

News can tell you something terrible happened without convincing you that civilization will collapse before dinner.

Advertising doesn't need to remind you twelve times before breakfast that you're inadequate.

We still disagree.

Sometimes fiercely.

But disagreement isn't automatically interpreted as threat.

A conservative can look at a progressive and think:

You're wrong.

Without needing to add:

And you're a terrible human being.

And vice versa.

Changing your mind when presented with better information becomes a sign of intelligence rather than weakness.

Imagine that.

A politician standing behind a microphone and saying:

"I was wrong."

And their approval rating goes up.

At 75, capitalism probably still exists too.

I don't think enlightenment requires eliminating ambition.

Humans like building things.

We like competing. Creating. Winning. Making something that didn't exist yesterday.

Someone can still start a company, become ridiculously wealthy, own a ridiculous house and park a ridiculous car in front of it.

But status begins shifting.

From:

Look how much I accumulated.

To:

Look what happened because I was here.

We don't eliminate ambition.

We point it somewhere better.

Companies still measure profit.

But destroying communities, exploiting people, or leaving someone else to clean up the mess stops being considered clever business.

Success starts including what you left behind.

Technology changes too.

At some point we look back at the early social-media era and wonder what the hell we were thinking.

We handed corporations direct access to the human nervous system and essentially said:

See how many buttons you can push.

And they got very, very good at pushing them.

Anger.

Fear.

Sex.

Status.

Envy.

Tribalism.

Again: Stone Age hardware.

At 75, technology starts serving human intention instead of constantly hijacking it.

Maybe your phone notices you've been scrolling for twenty-three minutes and says:

The content you're seeing has become increasingly negative. Want to go do something else?

And somehow that becomes considered good product design.

Imagine a technology company bragging that its newest feature resulted in customers spending less time using its product.

That's 75.

But if I could choose one thing to change, it might be what we teach kids.

We'd still teach algebra.

History.

Literature.

Science.

But we'd also teach the operating manual nobody gave us.

Emotional regulation.

Critical thinking.

Cognitive biases.

Media literacy.

Financial literacy.

Conflict resolution.

Nutrition.

Relationships.

Persuasion.

Attention.

A twelve-year-old learns what confirmation bias is.

A fourteen-year-old learns how propaganda works.

A sixteen-year-old learns compound interest—and what happens inside their brain when they're angry.

We teach children how the machine works.

Including their own.

Then we wait three generations.

That alone might move the number.

At 75, justice changes too.

There are still prisons.

There are still dangerous people.

Enlightenment doesn't mean pretending everyone is harmless.

Sometimes compassion requires very firm boundaries.

But instead of asking only:

What punishment does this person deserve?

we also ask:

What produces the least future suffering?

Accountability matters.

So does rehabilitation.

We've finally figured out that those aren't opposites.

War doesn't disappear either.

But maybe it begins to feel the way dueling feels today.

Future generations read about nations sending thousands of young people to kill thousands of other young people over territory, resources, religion and power and think:

Wait. That was normal?

We still honor soldiers.

Maybe more deeply.

Because we finally understand that respecting the people willing to fight for us and questioning why we send them to fight are completely compatible ideas.

Our relationship with the planet changes.

Not because everyone becomes an environmentalist.

We simply stop thinking about nature primarily as inventory.

A forest has economic value.

It also has value because it's a forest.

A river isn't only water waiting to be allocated.

An animal isn't only a production unit.

And somewhere along the way, people start bragging a little less about what they acquired and a little more about what they restored.

Religion doesn't disappear at 75 either.

Maybe spirituality actually grows.

Certainty just shrinks.

More people become comfortable saying:

This is what I believe. I don't know if I'm right.

Religion becomes a little less interested in determining which tribe possesses the correct cosmic answer and a little more interested in the questions humans have been asking around fires for thousands of years.

How should I live?

How should I treat people?

What is enough?

What do I owe others?

Why am I here?

Science can tell us what is.

We still need somewhere to wrestle with what it means.

But the most beautiful parts of 75 aren't governments or economies or technology.

They're small.

People hold doors.

Neighbors know each other's names.

Someone crying in public isn't automatically invisible.

Men aren't embarrassed to admit they're lonely.

Parents tell their children:

"I handled that badly."

People apologize without spending the next five minutes explaining why they weren't actually wrong.

Being kind isn't confused with being weak.

Confidence isn't confused with dominance.

Busy isn't confused with important.

We spend a little less time documenting our lives and a little more time actually being there for them.

And perhaps the biggest change is something almost nobody else can see.

At 58, we tend to believe enlightenment requires fixing everyone else.

If those people were smarter.

If those people stopped voting that way.

If those people understood what I understand.

At 75, enough of us have discovered something much harder:

The part of humanity I'm actually responsible for improving is me.

That doesn't mean ignoring injustice.

It doesn't mean becoming passive.

We still build institutions.

Vote.

Protest.

Serve.

Lead.

Fight like hell for things that matter.

But we become suspicious of that ancient little voice telling us:

The world would finally be good if everyone became more like us.

Because that voice has been whispering into human ears for thousands of years.

And it has spilled an unbelievable amount of blood.

Here's the part that gives me hope.

Almost nothing in this imaginary world needs to be invented.

We don't need fusion energy.

We don't need artificial superintelligence.

We don't need to colonize Mars.

We already have the technology required for most of it.

Empathy.

Critical thinking.

Accountability.

Education.

Cooperation.

Restraint.

Curiosity.

Perspective.

Forgiveness.

Courage.

Ancient technologies, really.

We've just never deployed them at scale.

Maybe humanity is a 58.

Maybe I'm wildly optimistic.

Maybe I'm wildly pessimistic.

I don't know.

But I know what 59 looks like.

It's somebody becoming a little more curious and a little less certain.

It's choosing understanding before outrage.

It's admitting you were wrong.

It's raising children who know that kindness and strength can occupy the same body.

It's building something that leaves the place better than you found it.

It's realizing that humanity isn't some abstract thing happening somewhere else.

We're it.

Eight billion imperfect people, each contributing some tiny fraction to the score.

We already have the godlike tools.

Maybe 75 is simply what happens when the humans holding them grow up.