Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

by Thomas L. Friedman

That is why I insist that as a species, we have never before stood at this moral fork in the road—where one of us could kill all of us and all of us could fix everything if we really decided to do so.

“Maybe this is overly romantic, but I think leadership is going to require the ability to come to grips with values and ethics,” remarked Jeffrey Garten, the former dean of the Yale School of Management:

Education will need a strong dose of liberal arts. How will we think about privacy or genetic experimentation? These are areas where there’s no international framework at all. In fact, there’s barely a national framework. China has embarked on large-scale genetic engineering in certain animals. Where is that going? What should be the legal and ethical principles on which such activity should be based? And who has the wherewithal to even establish the right principles? How do you balance technological progress with this sense of humanity? You’re not going

to get that if you went to MIT and all you did was study nuclear physics. This is the supreme irony. The more technological we get, the more we need people who have a much broader framework. You’ll be able to hire the technologist to make the systems wor...

know—to even talk about scaling the Golden Rule to more people in more situations sounds utterly unrealistic. But the simple truth is: If we can’t get more people doing unto others as they would want others to do unto them, if we can’t inspire more sustainable values, we will be “the first self-endangered species,” argues Amory Lovins. Is that realistic enough for you?

Nearing the end of his second term in office, President Obama gave voice to exactly this sentiment in the speech he delivered as the first American president to visit Hiroshima, on May 27, 2016: “Science allows us to communicate across the seas and fly above the clouds, to cure disease and understand the cosmos, but those same discoveries can be turned into ever more efficient killing machines,” said Obama. “The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.” Our calling today, Obama added, is “to see our growing interdependence as a cause for peaceful cooperation and not violent competition. To define our nations not by our capacity to destroy but by what we build. And perhaps, above all, we must reimagine our connection to one another as members of one human race.” I don’t have the words to say it better—and it is not naïve. It’s the essence of cold, hard realism today. I repeat: naïveté is the new realism—naïve is thinking that we are going to survive as a species in the age of accelerations without learning to govern our new realms in new ways and our old realms in new ways. And, yes, that is going to require some very rapid moral and social evolution. Where to even begin?

In a world of super-empowered individuals we need to redouble our efforts to ensure that in as many ways as possible we are creating moral contexts and weaving healthy interdependencies that embrace the immigrant, the stranger, and the loner, and inspire more people in more places to want to make things rather than break things.

my colleague David Brooks noted in his November 27, 2015, column in The New York Times. “The ones I’ve seen that do it best, so far, are those that cultivate intense, thick community. Most of the time character is not an individual accomplishment. It emerges through joined hearts and souls, and in groups.”

Why is that so hard? Because “the one big bug we have as humans is that we are tribal,” answers Marina Gorbis, executive director at the Institute for the Future. “We always need the group to give us identity. We are wired that way. From the first campfire, human beings evolved as tribal beings.” And therein lies the challenge, and the need for moral innovation: in a much more interdependent world we have to redefine the tribe we are in—we have to enlarge the notion of community—precisely as President Obama advocated in his Hiroshima speech: “What makes our species unique [is that] we’re not bound by genetic code to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can learn. We can choose. We

can tell our children a different story, one that describes a common humanity, one that makes war less likely and cruelty less easily accepted. The world was forever changed here, but today the children of this city will go through their day in peace.”

There is no better example of the choice we now have to either destroy everyone or fix everything than the choice of whether we rise to the challenge of climate change or not, noted Hal Harvey. With the steady drop in the price of renewable energy and efficiency, “it now costs the same to destroy the climate or save it,” said Harvey. “The price is basically the same, but at the micro scale there will be different winners and losers.” Coal and oil companies and traditional utilities will lose out. Wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, and efficient and distributed energy purveyors will win. “At the macro scale, though, the whole world will win or the whole planet will lose. The impact will hit every generation going forward and will not respect national boundaries in the least.”

Hastening that heavenly day is the moral work of our generation. I don’t know where it ends, but I know where it has to start—by anchoring people in strong families and healthy communities. It is impossible to expect people to extend the Golden Rule very far if they are unmoored, unanchored, and insecure themselves. How to build strong families is beyond my skill set, but I know something about strong communities, because I grew up in one. And so I hope you’ll indulge me if I end this journey by taking you back home with me to discuss the final kind of innovation we need to promote resilience and propulsion in this age of accelerations—innovation in the building of healthy communities.

Anyone who has grown up in the hills or used to sit by the spring to drink, or played outdoors in the neighborhood square; going back to these places is a chance to recover something of their true selves. —Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change, “Laudato Si’,” May 24, 2015

hope that it is clear by now that every day going forward we’re going to be asked to dance in a hurricane, set off by the accelerations in the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s law. Some politicians propose to build a wall against this hurricane. That is a fool’s errand. There is only one way to thrive now, and it’s by finding and creating your own eye. The eye of a hurricane moves, along with the storm. It draws energy from it, while creating a sanctuary of stability inside it. It is both dynamic and stable—and so must we be. We can’t escape these accelerations. We have to dive into them, take advantage of their energy and flows where possible, move with them, use them to learn faster, design smarter, and collaborate deeper—all so we can build our own eyes to anchor and propel ourselves and our families confidently forward.

“Collaboration moves at the speed of trust,” argued Chris Thompson, who

The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity—

bumper: I am a socially liberal, deeply patriotic, pluralism-loving, community-oriented, fiscally moderate, free-trade-inclined, innovation-obsessed environmentalist-capitalist. I believe that America at its best—and we’re not always at our best—can deliver a life of decency, security, opportunity, and freedom for its own people, and

can also be a bulwark of stability and a beacon of liberty and justice for people the world over. How did I come to this worldview? As I said, not by reading any particular philosophers. Rather, it emerged bit by bit from the neighborhood, the public schools, and the very soil of the community where I spent my first nineteen years.

It was a powerful lesson in community for me: When you are in a real one, never, ever say to someone in need: “Call me if you need help.” If you want to help someone, just do it.

“It was the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history—the country was giddy with pride and opportunity.” It was a time of “great compression of incomes and great shared prosperity—high growth and high equality.”

all three factors—productivity growth, distribution, and participation—aligned to benefit the middle class from 1948 to 1973 … Income inequality fell, with the share of income going to the top 1 percent falling by nearly one-third, while the share of income going to the bottom 90 percent rose slightly. Household income growth was also fueled by the increased participation of women in the workforce … The combination of these three factors increased the average income for the bottom 90 percent of households by 2.8 percent a year over this period … This period illustrates the combined power of productivity, income equality, and participation to benefit the middle class.

“Today, people of affluence and people of modest means live increasingly separate lives. We live and work and shop and play in different places. We send our kids to different schools. I call this the ‘skyboxification of American life.’ This marks a departure from the Minnesota of our youth. It is corrosive of citizenship and democratic equality. At the time, we scarcely noticed this democratic civic landscape. It formed the background conditions of everyday life. It is more evident in retrospect, now that it has become a distant memory.”

St. Louis Park and Minnesota, when they were at their best, offered many of their citizens the opportunity to belong to a network of intertwined “little platoons,” communities of trust, which formed the foundation for belonging, for civic idealism, for believing others who were different could and should belong, too.

Is that a bridge too far in too many places? I honestly don’t think so—with the right leadership.

Minnesota, and even little St. Louis Park, has and had a critical mass of leaders who year in and year out came to politics and power in order to govern.

there was and remains an unusually high degree of public-private collaboration in Minnesota,

Additionally, the public in Minnesota and St. Louis Park have come to expect both politicians and business leaders to engage in these best practices; politicians are expected to compromise in the end, and corporations are expected to contribute to the community.

Amory Lovins likes to say whenever people ask him if he is an optimist or a pessimist, “I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist, because they are each just different forms of fatalism that treat the future as fate and not choice—and absolve you from taking responsibility for creating the future that you want. I believe in applied hope.”

“I am Republican by birth and a Democrat by choice—and now I have no time for either.”

participation in local government can cultivate the ‘habits of the heart’ that democratic citizenship requires,” said Sandel. “The New England township, he wrote, enabled citizens ‘to practice the art of government in the small sphere within their reach.’ And that reach extends as the sphere expands. Civic habits and skills learned in local associations and neighborhood councils equip citizens to exercise self-government at the state and national level.

Time and again I saw proof just in little St. Louis Park of Gidi Grinstein’s dictum that social innovation is happening all over the country today at the local level. Nothing new has to be invented—all that exists just needs to be scaled, or as my colleague David Brooks observed in his June 21, 2016, New York Times column: “The social fabric is tearing across this country, but everywhere it seems healers are rising up to repair their small piece of it. They are going into hollow places and creating community, building intimate relationships that change lives one by one.”

Itasca is not a political party, but if it were it would be a Mother Nature party—nonpartisan, agile, heterodox, hybrid, adaptive, and focused on owning best practices.

The number-one thing when you’re learning languages is that you have to be ready to be laughed at—we are learning a new language,” he said. “I have gotten comfortable being laughed at when trying to promote diversity.”

The Minnesota way is that everyone should maintain their customs, but there are certain bedrock values—regarding how you treat women, the rule of law, other faiths, public institutions, and community spaces—that are nonnegotiable.

It’s amazing what happens when people gather around a dining room table, and build trust by focusing exclusively on what they can do to push the community forward.

“Trust doesn’t just materialize,” Welsh concluded. “It takes work. It requires a whole bunch of people to keep at it—to keep showing up, and that doesn’t just happen magically.”

was “I am weak, how can I compromise? I am strong, why should I compromise?” The notion of there being “a common good” and “a middle ground” that we all compromise for and upon—not to mention a higher community calling we work to sustain—was simply not in the lexicon. So when I came back to Washington in 1988, after thirteen years abroad, it was with a certain eagerness to rediscover America. But over my nearly thirty years now of reporting from Washington, what I found instead was that with every passing year American politics more and more resembled the Middle East that I had left. Democrats and Republicans were treating each other just as Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Persians, Israelis and Palestinians did—self-segregating, assuming the worst of each other, and, lately, shockingly, never wanting one of their kids to marry one of “them.”

What those numbers also tell you is that leadership matters more than ever—at the political and personal levels—but a particular kind of leadership. At the national and local levels, we need a leadership that can promote inclusion and adaptation—a leadership that starts every day asking, “What world am I living in? And how do I engage in the relentless pursuit of the best practices with a level of energy and smarts commensurate with the magnitude of the challenges and the opportunities in this age of accelerations?” It is also a leadership that trusts the people with the truth about this moment: that just working hard and playing by the rules won’t suffice anymore to produce a decent life.

Finally, philosophically speaking, I have been struck by how many of the best solutions for helping people build resilience and propulsion in this age of accelerations are things you cannot download but have to upload the old-fashioned way—one human to another human at a time.

That’s why I wasn’t surprised that when I asked Surgeon General Murthy what was the biggest disease in America today, without hesitation he answered: “It’s not cancer. It’s not heart disease. It’s isolation. It is the pronounced isolation that so many people are experiencing that is the great pathology of our lives today.” How ironic.

Those trees and I had both grown up and out from the same topsoil, and the most important personal, political, and philosophical lesson I took from the journey that is this book is that the more the world demands that we branch out, the more we each need to be anchored in a topsoil of trust that is the foundation of all healthy communities. We must be enriched by that topsoil, and we must enrich it in turn.

That prescription is easier to write than to fill, but it is the order of our day—the real über-task of our generation. It is so much easier to venture far—not just in distance but also in terms of your willingness to experiment, take risks, and reach out to the other—when you know that you’re still tethered to a place called home, and to a real community. Minnesota and St. Louis Park together were that place for me. They were my anchor and my sail. I hope this book will inspire you to pause in stride and find yours.

And don’t worry if it makes...