I would like to extend my appreciation to the administration and teachers of Umberland College, to the parents and friends who have made this day possible through their enduring support and encouragement, but most of all to the graduating class of 2050. You are, without question, the greatest gift to our society.
When your President Richardson asked me to give this commencement address, she had two requests: please share your story of the transformation from 2024 to today, and please try to keep it brief. I am proud to say that these remarks will absolutely meet one of those objectives. When I went to college, we would have said that fifty percent was a failing grade, and if you are wondering what a ‘grade’ is, that’s its own history lesson for another time. Suffice it to say that we had different ideas about the purpose of education in those days.
In 2024, most of you were significantly less corporeal, and if you are not enamored with history, you may not be aware of the very different nature of the world’s societies back then. Yes, societies… plural, for we hadn’t yet come to appreciate the reality that is so obvious to us today: that we are one species, one strain of being in a uniting ecosystem. Don’t blame your parents for not seeing it right away, or your grandparents for not seeing it at all. They were raised on chemical-infused food substitutes and grew up in a world fixated on advertising, with an internet driven by profit and fueled by rage. Thirty years ago, countries still measured success based on a concept called Gross National Product, or GNP, rather than today’s recently instituted measures of Net Collective Happiness and the Opportunities Index. I won’t even mention the phenomenon known as ‘reality television’. Trust me, you’d rather not know.
I was fifty-seven years old in 2024, with no expectation of living to eighty-three—not because eighty-three was biologically hard to obtain, but because society appeared to be on a collision course with its own ego. I ran a small charity at that time, one focused on understanding the nature of consciousness and trying to share that new vision with a world preoccupied with material acquisition. It wasn’t an easy message to deliver, and especially not to the decision-makers of that era.
My charity had something, however, of tremendous potential. We, and several organizations like mine, recognized that as conscious beings, we have the ability to influence the world around us, and that such influence starts with conscious, deliberate intention. We saw the potential for a new approach to raising children, how shifting focus at the very beginning of a person’s life could have profound impacts on the choices that person would make throughout their time in this world.
Let me explain the plan. No, you don’t get to graduate until I finish, but I promise not to give you a day-by-day account.
What became clear to me was that the overwhelming majority of the problems the world of 2024 was facing were the result of our living within a shame-based culture. Rather than embracing exploration and recognizing mistakes as the fertilizer in which we grow, we raised children to feel that it was unacceptable to be wrong. Where most children today are taught to focus on reaching their own potential, in 2024 they were told that success was came from striving to appear more than their peers, whatever “more” could mean. We had not yet come to appreciate that two people can never be compared meaningfully in such a fictional absolute. We had not yet embraced the reality that diversity gives rise to a strength far greater than uniformity could ever achieve.
From this realization we started the Mindlight Academy.
Mindlight focused on three things, three forms of resources. First, we provided resources to parents who wanted their children to grow up feeling comfortable with themselves. We showed them how to encourage their children to be open-minded, how to be critical thinkers. And perhaps most importantly, we enabled them to take responsibility for this themselves rather than relegating it to government or educational systems.
Second, we established resources to give very young children the tools necessary to build healthy relationships. We taught them how to listen, how to express themselves, and how to gain mastery over the outdated and self-destructive patterns of clinging to the familiar. They were taught that growing up is not about losing one’s youth, but learning to leverage it to everyone’s advantage.
Third, and most importantly, the Mindlight Academy established a community of mutual support. We knew that books and games would only take things so far. To make a change of the magnitude required, a few hours a week would not be enough to resist the pressure of a consumerism world. To be successful, families engaging in Mindlight needed a support network to help them stay on track—something to remind them that there is more to life than money, and that the type of control that matters most is the control a person has over one’s self.
To be honest, I didn’t think it would work. My charity was far from wealthy, and the expenses for running Mindlight at a meaningful scale were steep. I cannot recall how many times we thought the program was over, but at each critical moment we found someone who believed in what we were doing and was willing to invest to keep it rolling. To appreciate just how miraculous this was, you must realize that the affluent in the 2020’s typically made investments based on how much money they would receive in return. Mindlight was an investment in forging a healthy society, one that would come to downplay the importance of money, making it secondary to goals such as maximizing kindness, joy, and harmony. It was a hard sell, as we used to say.
Mindlight endured in a state of continual existential crisis for nearly a decade, and then in the mid-2030’s everything changed. Mindlight-supported children were now in the public education system, and patterns were emerging. These kids demonstrated strikingly low rates of anxiety. The critical thinking skills that had been ingrained in them, combined with a thirst for exploration and an absence of fear of failure, had produced children who were performing off the charts in every way: academics, arts, collaborative athletics, and social stability.
The world began to take notice.
Of course, that attention had its pros and cons. Mindlight became very popular, with an almost alarming expansion of programs. At the same time, however, it attracted attention from very powerful people who were not excited at the idea of a society filled with intelligence, critical thinkers. We had several offers to buy the Academy for huge sums of money, always with contractual clauses that we would not institute a similar program again. There were outright threats.
Fortunately, by that time Mindlight had expanded so significantly that there was no longer a single entity driving this cultural change. More and more parents were becoming not just members of the wide-spread Mindlight communities, but proponents in their own right. By 2040, Mindlight was no longer an organization in any practical sense. The philosophies of the program had reached far enough, deeply enough, that it was simply a societal expectation. It was ‘how things are’.
Now, ten years later, we are seeing a new breed of leaders emerging. People are voting for political candidates who speak honestly and are focused on solving problems for the greater good. People support businesses based on how well they care for their employees and the degree to which they improve the world. Last year’s Congress of Nations, the first assemblage of every single government on the planet, unanimously signed into the law the Freedom of Opinions act.
And that is the world we give to you, the 2050 class of Umberland College. Care for it, enjoy it, and make your corner of it a little bit better than you found it.
The idea laid out in this essay arose from a process of logic. Simply put, it came from looking at the issues that humanity is facing today and engaging in a relentless exercise of asking why. Why are we facing this problem? Why are we facing that problem? And at each stage, I continued to drill down. Why do we have wars? We do we seek dominion over others? We do feel the need to horde resources? Why do we feel threatened that others do not see the world as we do?
If one continues the drill down, nearly all of our unhealthy, self-destructive behaviors stem from a deep-seated insecurity. But that’s not rock bottom. Why are we insecure? Despite far more immediate, existential threats, animals in the wild aren’t emotionally insecure at such pandemic proportions. Ultimately this line of questioning led to the true core of the problem, and what is the true core of the solution:
We are insecure because we are raised from birth to be ashamed of ourselves as a baseline state of being. Right from the very beginning, the training to be a societally-functioning human is grounded in shame. We are told that being sufficient requires more than being who we are; it requires being better than others. We’re told that mistakes represent a failure of self, a lessening of our comparative worth. So few children our told that they have inherent value that it’s kind of amazing that we have survived as long as we have.
For these reasons, amongst others, our society is on a path of increasing loneliness and isolation, one where we struggle to believe that our lives have a purpose. Even worse, the modern scientific mainstream reinforces that misguided belief – despite the fact that the greatest scientists throughout history have all denied that that is what science is saying. And worst of all, we have lost sight of the implications of our lives having purpose: that we are undeniably and intrinsically interconnected. We’re in this together as part of a greater ecosystem, building blocks of a greater organism. We would not be pleased if our spleen decided that it should tell the heart how to pump blood, or if some cell in our stomach lining demanded that all non-stomach-lining-cells must either convert to be stomach cells or be put to death. Yet… that cancerous behavior is exactly what we try to do to every other living being we encounter.
So how do we change this? Properly framed, the problem hands us the solution. Instead of forging our children with the anvil of obedience-through-shame, we must encourage them to grow using the tools with which they are born, the tools that come naturally.
Curiosity.
Let children (of every age) explore. Don’t stop them from making mistakes; simply keep them safe while they do. Let them learn, and encourage them to improve at what every infant does instinctively: applying the scientific method. Observe, hypothesize, test, revise. And be comfortable with the idea that, through their mistakes, they will continue to discover new facets of reality over the course of their lives.
If people appreciated the tremendous gift that is learning, it would change everything. Someone who expresses a different perspective is no longer the enemy, but a treasured advisor. We no longer need to argue to the death to defend mistakes of the past. We grow comfortable with apologies, and – even more importantly – with forgiveness. Instead of waging war in the name of vengeance, we can focus comfortably on working together to find answers that support and respect everyone.
And all it takes is to remove the stigma from the statement “I was wrong”. Okay, maybe it takes a little more, but that is our starting point. Healthy relationships are built upon trust and openness, which is enhanced when people are not constantly on the defensive. Empathy flourishes in the face of recognizing our commonalities, and respect grows in appreciating the strengths of our differences.
And I think it can all be a reality if we start raising children to define success as taking pride in being the unique being they are, as being a contributing part of a harmonious whole instead of striving to outdo one another like isolated, lonely consumers in existential competition with everyone and everything else.
There were some comments made on Substack that I’m importing here.
Andrew Gaines
I voted for Jeffrey Dunne’s “Changing the World: A Reflection.” Jeffrey identified a key leverage point for evolving a viable society: raising kids who are not conditioned into the status quo, and who indeed can think critically with compassion for themselves and others. The real-world background for this is that public education systems in America have been heavily influenced by smart people in the 1800s who wanted students to learn basic math and literacy skills but did not want them to think for themselves lest they challenge the current authoritarian system. Therefore subjects were taught in silos, with no reference to the great issues of the day. And for decades American schools have used multiple-choice tests, and teachers ‘teach to the test’. Fortunately, there are many exceptions. Of course, Artificial Intelligence is the new kid on the block. Ever more sophisticated programs will be developed that plausibly imitate actual human interactions. But they are not actual human interactions; kids will be communicating with machines that have no feelings or real empathy. In other words, kids will be trained to be okay dealing with psychopaths, and they will fail to develop their own capacity for empathy and skillful social interaction. Not good! Therefore those of us who care about a positive future for humanity would be well advised to champion rolling back the emphasis on STEM (science technology engineering and math) education, and instead focus on helping young people – and ourselves – become the kind of people that can create and enjoy a compassionate, life-affirming culture.
Suzanne Taylor
This is great storytelling about what Andrew described. It should be a must-read for anyone who works in education. It is such a beautiful evocation of the way to educate, told as a speech by a charming man to a graduating college class, about how it was in 2024. It is a gorgeous mapping of then and now, where every sentence says something meaningful. “…we hadn’t yet come to appreciate the reality that is so obvious to us today: that we are one species, one strain of being in a uniting ecosystem. Don’t blame your parents for not seeing it right away, or your grandparents for not seeing it at all. They were raised on chemical-infused food substitutes and grew up in a world fixated on advertising, with an internet driven by profit and fueled by rage.” The commentary on 2024 is so sharp. And, it has a great ending, where the Midlight Academy, that trained children in the way that prevails in 2050, struggled for survival until its graduates, 20 years later, took over the world. I think this is a perfect story.
Leela Sinha
I love the idea, raised in several essays, of raising our kids with better toolkits, and I think there are a lot of small groups already working on that in a variety of ways. How do we build out from and spread those efforts? What shall we do to bring that to reality?
Suzanne Taylor
I’ve shared it with some friends who are educators, asking if they can get it shared in their worlds. I’m realizing that’s something we can do with a lot of the essays, where we share them with the people in our spheres who work in the fields the essays talk about.
Eimear O’Neill
One simple change in the educational process can be transformative. I’m a healer of collective and historic trauma…and a transformative educator. Teaching in a circle where each participant can see everyone else, speaks from their own experience, and is encouraged to participate even with a gesture, shifts the power dynamics in any classroom. It encourages deep listening, empathy, and a sense of community, of learning together rather than competing for marks. Leadership is from the middle, not from above. Think Joanna Macy’s Work that Reconnects or Plum Village. Anyone interested in doing this, contact me through Resonant Earth Substack or my web address eimear@eimearoneill.com.