The New People was born out of a deep sense that something vital has been forgotten in our recent past, and must be remembered if we are to survive, unlike the 99.99% of species that came before us.
Most organizations pick a singular crisis and throw gobs of money at it without much forethought. We take the time to be prudent and ask, what are the causal reasons behind all our known crises: climate change, social inequality, mass shootings, mental health, the emerging threat of AI and Big Tech. This may seem counterintuitive to how we typically approach any problem-solving endeavors. But that’s precisely the point.
The old ways of doing science and looking at the world–from the philosophies of mechanism, reductionism, and determinism–have proven ineffective in solving myriad crises. That’s why we need a shift in perspective. We still have the same old problems because we’re looking at them from the same old, tired angle.
Take cancer as an example. The biggest recent strides in cancer research didn’t come from trying to cure cancer as a standalone disease. They came from reframing the disease as an age-related issue. By shifting our perspective from curing cancer to preventing it, we didn’t just unlock new approaches to cancer. We advanced our fight against Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular disease, and just about every age-related disease altogether. By shifting perspectives from the old ways that we used to look at science, to new ways founded in emergent and systems-level thinking, we advanced disciplines that had been dormant for decades. The myriad issues surrounding society today deserve the same shift in perspective. And this is precisely the approach we champion at The New People Foundation.
Nearly every major issue of today stems from the same failure to understand the basic tenets of our shared human nature; the same failure to understand the issues are interrelated symptoms of the same underlying disease: that our bodies and brains evolved for a fundamentally different world than the one we’ve built today. Our basic biology is wired for small communities where everyone knows everyone, deep ecological awareness and interdependence, alloparenting strategies, nature-based spiritual systems, egalitarian sociopolitical structures, reciprocity ethics–ad infinitum.
Modern civilization, however, offers the opposite of our natural needs, and that’s precisely the reason why we keep seeing the same issues pop up time and time again. We’re increasingly disconnected from the tried-and-true ways that our ancestors evolved to live. Thus, we at The New People Foundation are guided by the conviction that the solutions we seek lie not only in science or technology, but in reconnecting with ancient Indigenous wisdom and a renewed relationship with the living Earth.
As environmentalist Gus Speth once aptly remarked, “I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy. And to deal with those issues, we need a spiritual and cultural transformation—and we scientists do not know how to do that.”
By restoring the social, ecological, and spiritual connections that sustained us for most of our evolutionary history (95-99% of our evolutionary history), we aim to build a world where people are once again deeply connected to one another, to Nature, and to the sacred web of life on Earth.
