Indigenous wisdom tells us. Religion tells us. Science tells us. Walking in a forest, swimming in a lake, or standing at the top of a mountain tells us. Even sharing dinner with friends tells us: We are part of something larger than ourselves. No matter what you call it, it is there.

All life that has ever existed on our planet was created by the same energy. We don’t know its ultimate origin — but here we are, 13.8 billion years later — an integrated part of this energy: the planet’s web of life.

We are family, children of this incredible biodiversity. It is not just our environment — it is our safety net. It keeps us alive.

About 100 years ago, we were seduced by a dangerous illusion: that the planet’s resources were endless. We were right to realize its incredible richness — just taste a raspberry. But we failed to understand that all this life has to be respected and maintained. It is not there for us. We are here because of it.

It’s time we recognize life’s value beyond our use.

All our decisions must be grounded in this reality. That is why this is the base of our thinking, the first tenet of The New Foundation.

The more we respect and value biodiversity, the better our lives will be. Not just practically. Spend a day or even just an hour in nature and you feel it. We were made by this planet and spiritually, this is where we belong.

And belonging is, more than ever, what we lust for today.

Human well-being, social structures, business, the climate, and the economy are all part of the same equation. It is a single, living system.

We spend too much time working in silos — discussing the climate in one room, injustice in another, and business in a third. But reality has no departments. These aren't separate problems; they are different symptoms of a broken system. Trying to solve them individually is like trying to fix a broken car by only changing the tires.

We see the ripples every day: When salaries are stagnant, societal division grows. When poverty goes up in Latin America, trees in the Amazon are cut down. When politics promote division, trust in society disappears and democracies weaken.

These interactions should not be surprising; we are experiencing the reality of a system built for a zero-sum game. To change the game, we must stop chasing symptoms and start addressing the deeper interconnections and driving forces of the system.

No individual or organization can solve these challenges alone. Only by working together from a common ground — our shared wish for a better life — can we build the momentum for systemic solutions that honor the spirit of all life.

Fractured political landscapes, mental health crises, and climate tipping points are not just unfortunate side effects; they are the logical results of the systems we design. The ‘design’ is as much the product of our actions as our inactions.

Even the most complex systems follow the predictable physics of behaviour. If we reward short-term profit over the long-term health of the planet, biodiversity collapse should come as no surprise. If we stay quiet as economic inequality skyrockets, we are also silently accepting the decline of mental health and social trust.

To change the result, we must understand the forces that shape our reality.

The cradle of our lives — the planet’s biodiversity — should be our greatest teacher: all organic systems are built on the benefits of coexistence.

Today, exploitative systems designed solely for competition are transforming us from players on "Team Earth" into an invasive species. We are set on a lonely, gilded path toward our own extinction. There is no reason to take that path when we can instead build healthy, growing, and profitable systems in cooperation with all life on the planet.

The more we understand how systems work and the forces that control them, the less of a mystery the world around us becomes. This doesn’t make life less magical.

Think of it as music: the more we understand the interplay of the instruments, the more our experience and enjoyment grow. This interplay is what makes music, and all life on the planet, a magical wonder.

The gift of belonging, the one we all crave, starts with an understanding and respect for the microscopic chance — the great cosmic throw of the dice — that has made our lives possible.

We have spent years discussing solutions through political agendas, frameworks, and legislation. It’s exhausting work. Despite our human ingenuity and brilliance, we are still not moving forward in the areas that matter most.

Why? Because of the elephant in the room: the vastly different grounds we stand on.

Our efforts to collaborate shatter when our differences turn into dividing forces — rigid identities derived from nationality, heritage, ideologies, and beliefs. We stop discussing solutions and try to "win" by throwing ideological grenades. It doesn’t work. Without a shared foundation, every attempt at cooperation sits on the edge of collapse.

Somehow, we have forgotten our common humanity — all the things we share. The conversations that should open up new paths mostly turn into arguments. But no one can argue their way into a good life. A marriage full of arguments is not a good marriage; the same is true for the world.

A world that lives by conflict will also die from conflicts.

To move forward, we must build emotional safety: spaces where we can resonate with each other and stay human despite our differences.

Sadly, this is the opposite of what much of our modern discourse has become. Instead of opening our eyes to power imbalances and invisible systems of harm, many movements have retreated into moral certainty, shaming, and exclusion. Instead of giving air to much-needed conversations, they lock the door — and throw away the key.

It is an anxious, small way to live. It pretends the world is a zero-sum game. But it has never been one. If it were, we would still be hunter-gatherers in caves. All evolution is fueled by daring to open up to the new. Ask any entrepreneur: the unknown is where you find new values.

To move beyond today’s destructive discourse, we must work to build a common ground. Sounds impossible? It shouldn’t be. Despite all our differences, we actually want the same things: healthy, free lives. To feel safe and respected. To do meaningful work. To love and be loved, have friends, and see our children thrive. We want to laugh, rest, and find joy and belonging in something greater than ourselves.

Sounds good? Then let’s build a common ground from the scientific laws and the emotional driving forces that shape life on Earth. To succeed, we must build emotional safety — a space where we can stop defending our beliefs and start to resonate with each other.

When we do, we start to realize that our differences are, in fact, our greatest strength. we don't need to be the same to work together — that would actually be boring.

What we need is to stay human.

It’s comforting to be right. To treat our opinions like truths. But the reality is much more complex.

First casualty: When you believe you are right, you stop learning. In an ever-changing society, that is a fatal flaw. It will hold you back.

To dig deeper: Most of our opinions are older and less unique than we think. Neuroscience tells us that our internal maps — our core sense of “right” and “wrong” — are wired into our brains by our families and environments before we turn seven. All before our “self” is developed, before we have the integrity to question the input.

We are, in other words, not drawing our own map. Still, once it’s installed, it just feels very comfortable there. We spend our lives defending these inherited views like sports fans defending a home team. We rarely ask if our map is accurate, if they still serve us or the world. Instead, we look for facts that fit inside the lines — and instinctively reject the rest. Because… of course, we are right! It fits on our map!

The annoying irony is that to be wrong feels exactly like being right. But it’s not us thinking, we’re just expressing the reality we were taught to see.

If we go on believing those inherited, dusty maps are correct, we are wasting precious time applying older generations’ views to a reality they never could conceive of. When we defend our “rightness” today, we are too often just carrying others’ water.

To move forward, we need Cognitive Liberation.

It’s a difficult path. Our current political and cultural environment is designed to defend itself against this very freedom. Cognitive Liberation is the act of becoming aware of the stories we’ve inherited. It’s the moment we stop automatically playing for the “home team” and find our own inner compass — using critical thinking to create new maps based on empathy and compassion. (Check out the Inner Development Guide for inspiration!). www.innerdevelopmentgoals.org/guide

The common ground we need today will never happen if we stay locked in inherited dogma. It’s only when we move beyond our anxious need to be right that we can finally focus on the solutions that create the best living conditions for everyone on this magic planet.

The territory has changed. It’s time to update the map.

What makes design, art, and music so dear to us? They lift the weight of isolation, making us feel understood and less lonely. Artists make us see the beauty of our world anew.

But why do we like what we like? Our reference point is the reality we know. Wonder why Science Fiction often makes aliens ugly? It’s an easy way to signal that they don't belong in our world.

The world we come from is our truth. What we call ‘elegance’ is simply what fits beautifully into our universe. Our lives are a subset of the massive, interconnected living system we call biodiversity. It is the ultimate elegance on this planet, and it fits perfectly — because it was created here.

Elegance goes beyond aesthetics.

When mathematicians search for truth, they find that the best solutions are also the most elegant. Take Euler’s Identity: \( e^{i\pi} + 1 = 0 \). It’s considered the most beautiful equation in math because it shows that reality has a deep, structural unity. Elegance means, in other words, that a thing fits perfectly into its world.

In today’s primitive, zero-sum worldview, we are asked to accept an ugly, brute-force logic: Profit against Nature. Growth against Wellbeing. But solutions that require one part of the system to lose for another to win are the opposite of elegant. They don’t belong in the system they exist in. They create friction, imbalance, and eventually, collapse.

The solutions we look for should be judged on their elegance.

An elegant solution is one that benefits everyone — the individual, society, and nature simultaneously. For this, we surely need competition, but also collaboration. A tree grows taller to reach the sunlight, but alone, it is fragile. So trees grow together — competing for light while collaborating through a hidden underground network of roots and fungi. They find an elegant balance where the individual thrives because the collective is healthy.

Once that balance is reached, the system finds its “enough.” It stops the frantic reach and focuses on living in harmony with the whole.

The old saying goes that you "can't see the forest for all the trees." But the reality is more profound: without the forest, there is no tree.

Progress is not about how much we can take; it’s about how perfectly we can fit in.

That’s elegance.

What do we get from the sun? Energy, you might say. But our planet radiates roughly the same amount of energy back into space, so that’s not it. What we actually receive is movement. A continuous flow of energy that transforms chemical processes and allows ecosystems, the vast web of life, to appear, adapt, and grow in complexity. The sun is our battery, we transform the energy, and then we send it back into space.

Systems evolve when energy flows.
Movement is the gravity of evolution. We see it in the constant journey toward complexity — or, if you prefer thermodynamic terms: the move toward higher entropy. Over billions of years, simple structures reorganized into more complex ones, until — voilà — here you are. We don’t just benefit from change; we exist because of it.

All healthy, open systems are constantly reorganizing. They learn and adjust from feedback as they search for stability at higher, more beneficial levels of complexity. This is how evolution works.

Entropy provides the fuel, and trial and error is the method. Only those who change when the world changes survive. To drive us forward, evolution equipped us with curiosity — a survival mechanism that makes exploration rewarding and also fun.

Systems that resist complexity often retreat into simpler stories about the past. They try to turn the clock back. But the world keeps moving forward, and yesterday’s maps will never solve tomorrow’s problems. Trying to survive, they often rely on power and control, which makes it harder for new ideas to break through — precisely the point of the defense. But it doesn’t work.

Still, change takes courage. We can perceive the new as a threat and cling to what we know. That’s understandable. The unknown is, by definition, unfamiliar. Fortunately, we are built for adaptation. We may fear change in theory, but once we experience a better way of living, we adjust quickly. Think of how rapidly the world moved from landlines to the smartphones most of us now carry.

Even so, change for its own sake is not progress. Evolution means learning. We test ideas, observe the results, and adjust. We once believed pesticides were a great idea. Now we know better — so we must do better.

The courageous act is not pretending to know the solution, but being willing to try new paths — and to be happy to admit all the times it didn’t work. After all, we were not “wrong” — we just learned something new.

In the world today, nothing is as dangerous as old ideas that are still profitable.

The cure, as always, is change.

The world is drowning in words Most of the communication we see is one-directional, as if thoughts and opinions could be “installed” into someone else. Many even seem to think that being loud and persistent makes their programming take hold better.

But communication is not a download. Information is not communication.

Marshall McLuhan famously said that “the medium is the message.” He was right about the power of the platform, but the medium alone cannot create meaning. You can’t install a new point of view by force.

The medium may be the message, but a message only matters when it resonates with something inside the listener.

Think about your days in school. It’s almost impossible to learn things we’re not interested in — things that don’t feel relevant to us. That’s why resonance must come first.

If you want to educate or even change someone’s mind, you have to start by listening. Talking is secondary. You have to understand their map of reality before you can suggest an addition or an update.

Communication is not a broadcast — it’s an interface you build for interaction.

For a message to stick, it must be welcome. It must find that frequency where it resonates. When that happens, you don’t need a lot of words.

In fact, people listen more when you talk less.

Do we live in a friendly or unfriendly universe?It may be the most important question we can ask ourselves — because the answer shapes how we behave.

The world becomes what we believe it is.

You can choose whether to be suspicious and unpleasant or trusting and kind to the people around you. Your attitude will influence how your life unfolds. Likewise, if we believe the world is mean and hostile, we build systems of fear: walls, weapons, suspicion. If we believe the world is good, we build systems of trust: institutions, schools, hospitals.

Our attitudes set the baseline for society. Our assumptions about the world become the systems we operate in.

So, is it friendly or unfriendly by default? When we look at life itself — at biodiversity — a pattern becomes clear. True, competition exists everywhere in nature. Species adapt, improve, and struggle for resources. But competition alone does not build complex systems.

Collaboration does. In conditions of pure survival, living systems focus on defense and competition. That response kept our early ancestors alive. But when stability and abundance emerge, something else becomes possible. Energy can be used to cooperate, experiment, and build.

This is where complexity truly begins to grow.

We see it everywhere: from cells forming organisms, to fungi and trees sharing nutrients underground, to human societies building cities and science. Complexity emerges when parts learn to work together. The great successes of our species did not come from individuals winning. They happened because, in every area of life, people joined forces to turn hardship into abundance. Life improved for the individual as it improved for the group.

Yet this uplifting and very real story of human progress is not the one we are usually told. Instead, we are taught that the world is dangerous — that we should trust no one and look out only for ourselves. Stories soon become organizing principles. And so, instead of collaborating for prosperity, we start looking for leaders who promise to protect us from “the others”.

But fear creates fragility. Suspicion breaks collaboration. Isolation reduces creativity. Conflict consumes energy that could otherwise be used to build.

Hope works differently. Hope is not blind optimism. It means knowing that we can live in a better way — that improvement is possible — and that our collective abilities can make it happen. It invites us to invest in the future, to collaborate, and to solve problems together.

This makes hope an evolutionary force. Every generation that planted crops, built knowledge, or cared for children did so because they believed tomorrow could be better. Without that belief, progress would stop.

So, is the world friendly or unfriendly? Actually, the universe is indifferent to our struggles. From what we understand, it simply continues to increase entropy. Yet life on Earth has flourished because cooperation works. Systems that learn, trust, and collaborate are more resilient than those ruled by fear. They become more complex — which, interestingly, also means higher entropy.

So, we are here because we learned to work together. Because we are a social species. The question now is which story we choose to live by: an inspiring and hopeful one, or a dark and diminishing one.

The future will not be built by those who just wish for a better world. It will be built by those who know we can do better.

That belief has a name.

Hope.