Audrey Tang believes 2025 may be the year we begin to recover from ‘Peak Polarisation’. How might we understand and respect points of view different from our own?

This important (long) essay from Annick de Witt uses a worldview lens to insightfully explore the origins of many of the polarities we observe today in politics, culture and society. The dynamic interplay of three dominant western worldviews are considered, as well as the notion that a new worldview is emerging that may value different perspectives while transcending and including them.

Many who write about today’s metacrisis point to the critical need for an explicit understanding of the worldviews that underpin our actions. However this is often expressed in a way that denigrates one or more worldviews.

Annick clearly articulates how we might value each worldview, while also recognising them as partial. Today, we can clearly observe their limitations when they are taken to extremes.

This essay asks that we take a breath, and listen with our hearts, rather than condemning those who think and feel differently.

Annick mentions anomalies that sit outside worldviews. The current dramatic validation of some anomalous phenomena (eg UAP and telepathy) might be a wild card that prompts deeper questioning of western consensus reality and what it means to be human.

This may encourage all worldviews to expand from nation/state and planetary, to galactic and cosmic perspectives. From the human and more-than-human, to extraterrestrial and non-human intelligences.

In short, to see a much bigger picture that may help us co-create our preferred future.