Mother Nature has some great ideas—for free!—for a political
platform, if only we would listen, according to Thomas Friedman’s latest book, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s
Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations.
In a world encountering a faster speed of change than ever
before, Friedman writes that our ability to keep up is understandably lagging—for
reasons he explains in the book. Toward the end, in a chapter called “Mother
Nature as Political Mentor,” he offers an optimistic agenda for thriving that
is inspired by the 3.8-billion year-old woman herself.
Mother Nature’s “killer aps,” he writes, include adaptability,
lifelong learning, relentless entrepreneurship, diversity, rootedness, sustainability,
and patience.
Friedman goes on to lay out an amazing political platform inspired
by Mother Nature’s example. What we need, he says, is “an entrepreneurial
mind-set, a willingness to approach politics and problem-solving with an utterly
hybrid, heterodox, and nondogmatic mixing and matching of ideas, without regard
to traditional left-right catechism—letting all kinds of ideas coevolve, just
as plants and animals coevolve in nature.”
An example of something on Mother Nature’s platform from the
left, according to Friedman: “She would favor a single-payer universal health
care system funded by a progressive value-added consumption tax (except on
groceries and other necessities).”
For the right: “She would appoint an independent commission
to review the Dodd-Frank financial reforms and the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting
regulations to determine which—if any—of their provisions are needlessly making
it harder for entrepreneurs to raise capital or start businesses. We need to
make sure we’re preventing recklessness—not risk-taking.”
I wish this book, or at least this chapter, or at least the
platform ideas on pages 328-336, could be required reading for everyone! Maybe
it could help us bridge our wide gaps between left and right.
Why not let our Mother
be our guide??
