Connecting the dots: can psychology prevent the decline and fall of civilization?

Abstract

Health is closely linked to wellbeing, and driven by socio-economic and environmental contexts, currently strongly determined by political economics. Personal security, esteem and other fundamental needs, education and discovery, arts and culture, human scale communities that facilitate sharing and giving influence wellbeing, yet we are increasingly pressured into accepting the discourses of individualism, market forces and economic growth based on competition to maximize personal acquisition, creating extreme inequities that detract from wellbeing. These factors erode the resilience of the environmental, cultural and social systems and services that have enabled our civilization to thrive. Psychology has played a major role in this activity, which, within this larger perspective has been largely corrosive. One consequence of this is that collectively, we now fail to perceive the deterioration in the interconnected networks that sustain urban civilization and this perceptual blindness is serious. The problems with perceiving and responding to this complexity are an ideal subject for psychology to address. How can we help people recognize the bigger picture? What can psychology do to facilitate beneficial changes, at the individual and also the community and global scales? The nascent growth of psychology in these areas remains too modest for the imminence of the threats that we face today. Managing the transitions to a more coherent paradigm is one of the most urgent issues we face. Psychology has a major role to play in providing both evidence and means to facilitate and create that change.