We Live in Two Worlds The simple and the complex

200,000 years of human history

We (Homo sapiens) emerged from our hominid predecessors in Africa some 200,000 years ago.

For the first 150,000 years, we lived as hunter-gatherers like our cousins, the apes. We lived from day to day. Our behaviors changed only a little over time.

And then, about 50,000 years ago, something amazing happened – speech and language emerged, and with it, the so-called cultural big bang.

With the cultural big bang came a great leap forward. Now we could pass down our knowledge from generation to generation much faster through cumulative cultural evolution and not the biologically slower process through our genes.

Some 40,000 years later, we made another enormous leap with the Neolithic Revolution when we transitioned from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle to farming and settlement (circa 11,000 years ago).

A little later, early cities emerged around 7,500 BCE, and Sumer, the first known civilization, developed about 4,100 BCE.

Over the following centuries, society and technology co-evolved, biological evolution having stopped with the big bang.

Then 500 years ago, during the 16th and 17th centuries, a drastic change in scientific thinking took place with the scientific revolution that laid the foundation for the Enlightenment. The scientific revolution and the Enlightenment were massive leaps forward in the evolution of our knowledge and how we thought about the world and our place in it.

Two hundred years later, in the late 18th century, circa 1760, the pace of change picked up with the dawn of the first industrial revolution, closely followed by the second industrial revolution.

Then, a mere 75 years ago, at the end of the second world war, change dramatically accelerated with the birth of the information/digital revolution (the third industrial revolution) and is further accelerating today with Industry 4.0 (the fourth industrial revolution).

This cumulative socio-technical-economic change has created a modern world that is a vastly different place from the hunter-gatherer world in which we evolved and the world of our farming ancestors of only a few hundred years ago.

Two Worlds

Since the cultural big bang, the changes over the last 50,000 years have been so significant that we can consider ourselves living in two worlds, World #1 and World #2.

World #1 is the old world, the natural world in which we lived and evolved for 150,000 years.

World #2 is the new world, the socio-technical-economic world we have constructed over the last 50,000 years, particularly the 250 years since the first industrial revolution and the previous 75 years since the third industrial revolution.

In World #1, direct relationships between cause and effect dominate, while in World #2, non-linear relationships between cause and effect dominate.

In terms of the Cynefin domains, World #1 is a simple or complicated world, while World # 2 is a complex one.

Both worlds co-exist, but most of the global population lives in World #2. For example, today, over 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas, which is expected to increase to 68% by 2050.

The impact of human activity on the planet has been so great that it has been proposed we have entered a new geological and environmental era known as the Anthropocene.

We still have old World #1 brains

In World #1, our top priority was survival, to eat and not be eaten, to win in warfare, and to mate.

Although life was difficult, it was simple. Clear cause-and-effect relationships dominated. We lived from day to day in the here and now.

Think of other members of the human family tree — apes — such as the chimpanzee or the bonobo. In World #1, our lives were not so different.

We lived in the natural world in small bands of about 25 people and tribes of 500 or more. Lives were short, and we had few choices to make.

World #1 was the world in which our brain was shaped by evolution. Evolution wired our brains for short-term tribal thinking — to think in the moment. Our brains have not changed significantly in the last 50,000 years since we started our journey into World #2.

Fifty thousand years is not long in evolutionary terms, and it is not surprising that our modern-day brains have not evolved to handle the dynamics and complexity of World #2.

In the more complex and interconnected societies of World #2, tribal thinking no longer serves us well. We need to rethink our thinking.

Credit: I would like to give credit to Ted Cadsby for his concept of two worlds and the terms World # 1 and World #2 that he writes about in his book Closing the Mind Gap.