Contemporary political, social, educational, economic, and religious institutions and philosophical emphasis have an imbalanced emphasis on “how” and an inadequate focus on values, purposes, and goals which one might call “why.” The article provides an analysis of this issue and suggests an approach to remedy its hazardous effects.
Humanity faces unprecedented global challenges that demand an integrative cultural paradigm uniting spirituality, creativity, morality, and ethics. This paper introduces the Cultural Code of Evolution (CCE), a framework designed to harmonize human consciousness, guide ethical and creative action, and foster sustainable social transformation. Drawing upon cultural evolution, philosophy, pedagogy, and neuroaesthetic research, CCE transcends traditional approaches by integrating ethical-spiritual development, creativity, intercultural dialog, and neuroscience into actionable practices. CCE is operationalized through initiatives of the Culture & Art Creators Guild, including cross-disciplinary platforms such as ART Imaginarium, the International Children’s Film Festival “World through the Eyes of Children”, the ArtWay Method, and the Meta-Neuro Art paradigm. These initiatives cultivate empathy, moral reasoning, creativity, and global collaboration by linking artistic, cognitive, and ethical dimensions. Meta-Neuro Art, exemplified by the Artivellux platform, integrates neuroscience, neuroplasticity, immersive media, and interdisciplinary knowledge, enabling art to function as a transformative tool for consciousness and societal evolution. The paper emphasizes the pivotal role of humanistic education, family support systems, and culturally enriched pedagogy in fostering ethical, creative, and socially responsible individuals. Furthermore, it highlights the necessity of guiding technological and scientific advancements, including AI and biotechnology, through ethical frameworks aligned with humanistic values. CCE embodies a vision where culture, art, and education converge to promote peace, sustainability, and global unity. By embedding moral imagination, creativity, and interdisciplinary collaboration into practical strategies, CCE offers a blueprint for humanity to navigate ecological, social, and spiritual crises, achieving harmonious development and fostering a regenerative and ethically conscious future.
The difficulties associated with studying climate change and social sustainability in archaeology from a transdisciplinary and long-term perspective have been extensively documented through a historical review of natural disasters in the ancient world, as found in ancient literature and old sacred texts. Disasters that have impacted the course of civilization are mentioned in various verses. This paper briefly examines the water element, specifically floods, as a destructive force through the lens of mythological deluges worldwide. The present era experiences such extreme climatic events. Flooding is a major issue, and the recent mega-flooding events echo ancient mythological reports and ancient engineered hydraulic activities. This study will report on early hydraulic works from prehistoric times that were developed to drain flood-prone and marshy environments and enable cultivation. Learning from history should be a guiding principle, but it must be implemented practically. Climate programs that receive funding to study the catastrophic consequences of climate crises should shift focus from theoretical evaluations to inspiring tangible efforts that safeguard cultural heritage, modern life, and infrastructure. To prevent disasters, it is crucial to adopt modern technological tools and practices.
The concept of reliable knowledge conceptualized by the World Academy of Art and Science seeks to transcend the limits of fragmented, disciplinary thought by integrating the complementary insights of science and art. Reliable knowledge is tested not by theory alone but by its power to generate effective results in life. It is founded on a transdisciplinary perspective grounded in universal values that recognizes the interconnectivity and interrelationship between all forms of knowledge and all dimensions of life. It unites the precision and objectivity of science with the subjective perceptions generated by creativity, emotion, intuition, and the value-sense of the arts, philosophy, ethics and religion to form a holistic understanding capable of guiding human action. Rightly conceived, this synthesis can provide a holistic foundation for addressing the complex global challenges of our age to evolve a peaceful, prosperous, equitable, harmonious and sustainable future for humanity.
The global effort to address climate change stands as one of the most profound manifestations of humanity’s collective consciousness and social evolution. This article is adapted from the author’s opening plenary address at the Thessaloniki Sustainability Summit 2025 on October 2, 2025, organized by SDSN Black Sea under the auspices of WAAS and Dept. of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.1 It traces the intertwined history of scientific progress, global governance, and societal transformation since the mid-20th century. It situates the climate crisis within a larger context of humanity’s ongoing struggle to consciously direct its own evolution—technological, social, and moral. Reflecting on both the achievements and the shortcomings of the past decade since the Paris Agreement, the article argues that the climate challenge is not merely a threat, but a transformative opportunity to redefine global collaboration, economics, and governance. The paper concludes by calling for a radical re-envisioning of our institutions and values to align human development with planetary sustainability.
Science has produced an enormous amount of empirical information about nature, perhaps leading some of us to believe that we are outside and above nature. This is not true, of course, because our behavior may be very much conditioned by our biology. For example, biology requires two things of us: our survival and the need to reproduce. This creates two often conflicting emotional needs in us: a need for power, or the need to dominate and control in order to survive, and a need for love and affection in order to reproduce. Men, because of their greater strength, have assigned themselves the role of survival, and thus the need for power. Women have, because of their biology, been assigned the role of reproduction, accompanied by the emotional need for love and affection. As we can observe historically, much of male behavior is conditioned by their need for power, including their traditional need to dominate women. Capitalism and oligarchy, with their ideologies of predatory individualism, are well-suited to the male need to survive, something which is accomplished through the accumulation of wealth. As Epicurus illustrated over 2000 years ago, efforts to create a more cooperative society, based upon the female attributes of love and friendship, have had to withdraw from larger society.
This article introduces a new Planetary Arts Movement—also called X-ART, whereby X-ART refers to Existential Threats and the desire for humanity to continue to Exist. It builds upon the original vision and legacy of eminent artists and scientists at the foundation of the World Academy of Art and Science in 1960, whilst reflecting the existential challenges that the world faces today. The article outlines the vision, goal, purpose, origins, context and guiding values and principles of this new initiative. The main global challenges and priorities for the Planetary Arts Movement are described along with the root causes and strategic solutions. The scope of X-ART includes creative solutions to addressing our global challenges, framed under the sustainable development clusters of Planet, People, Peace and Prosperity. Finally, an initial action plan for advancing this new global arts initiative is outlined, followed by a Manifesto for the Planetary Arts Movement, X-ART which invites wider engagement with artists, scientists and creatives from around the world. This introduction is intended as an overview to the Planetary Arts initiative, with further concepts expanded upon in a series of related articles in this and future editions of Cadmus.
Inside This Issue This issue explores humanity’s journey at a moment when our systems, assumptions, and modes of thought are being tested by unprecedented complexity. It opens by examining the foundations of development itself—probing how societies evolve, how human consciousness transforms matter into resource, and how creativity, confidence, and organization act as the real engines of progress. Development is revealed not merely as economic change, but as a deep psychological and social process shaped by attitude, aspiration, and the power of ideas to reorganize life. From this conceptual grounding, the focus widens to the global stage, where environmental destabilization intersects with rapid societal shifts. The accelerating pressures on Earth’s life-supporting systems, combined with geopolitical volatility and technological disruption, demand far-reaching structural renewal. Institutions, long shaped for a different era, must adapt to provide clarity, cohesion, and resilience. The need for conscious transformation—of systems, values, and governance—emerges as a defining imperative. Attention then turns to global turbulence and the search for frameworks capable of guiding societies through overlapping crises. The call is for integrating knowledge systems, harmonizing scientific insight with ethical purpose, and expanding our understanding of security beyond traditional boundaries. Human wellbeing, planetary stability, and social trust are highlighted as essential dimensions of a more inclusive and integrated conception of global security. The issue then explores the transformation of leadership. Traditional leader-centric models are shown to be inadequate in a world where influence flows through networks, relationships, and collective intelligence. Leadership becomes an emergent property of collaboration, shared purpose, and conscious participation—an activity distributed across people rather than concentrated in individuals. Economic and financial innovation enters next as a key lever for shaping a more secure future. New strategies for managing resources, financing transitions, expanding monetary tools, and strengthening public systems are foregrounded. Underlying these proposals is the recognition that trust, reciprocity, and fairness form the bedrock of any functioning social contract. How societies raise, allocate, and legitimize financial resources becomes inseparable from how they cultivate cohesion and shared responsibility. Shifting outward, the geopolitical lens examines the ongoing reorganization of global influence. Historical patterns reappear in new forms as power re-concentrates around civilizational centers. The durability of any hegemonic role is questioned as multipolarity accelerates and long-standing assumptions are challenged. Within this shifting landscape, the need for cooperative institutions, shared norms, and value-based global stewardship becomes more urgent. From external systems, the issue moves inward toward culture, consciousness, and creativity. The integration of art and science is presented as essential for generating insight that is both analytically rigorous and emotionally resonant. Imagination emerges as a transformative force capable of revealing new possibilities and mobilizing shared meaning. Themes of spirituality, ethics, and personal purpose highlight the inner resources required to navigate uncertainty. Historical perspectives on past climatic disruptions serve as reminders that humanity has long lived through cycles of change—and that interpretation, memory, and learning are crucial. Reflections on our current trajectory underscore the risks of forgetting foundational human values and the dangers of allowing technological power to outpace moral responsibility. The fragility of our species becomes a mirror for reevaluating how we live and what we prioritize. The issue concludes by situating climate change as both a warning and a catalyst—an existential challenge that compels societies to elevate cooperation, rethink institutions, and embrace a new stage of global social evolution. Across all themes, a common thread emerges: the future depends on our capacity to integrate knowledge, cultivate wisdom, and act with shared purpose. We hope you enjoy this issue.
This article explores the need for a comprehensive conceptual framework to understand and consciously direct the process of social development. The authors argue that, unlike physical sciences, social progress has advanced largely through trial-and-error, lacking a unifying theory to integrate knowledge across disciplines. They define social development as the organized expression of human energy and creativity leading to higher levels of accomplishment. The paper traces how societies learn—physically, socially, and mentally—and evolve through increasing organization, values, and self-awareness. Drawing parallels with advances in science and technology, the authors propose that a valid theory of social development could vastly enhance humanity’s capacity to achieve sustainable progress. They emphasize that human beings—not external instruments—are the primary drivers of development, and that discovering society’s creative potential is the key to conscious, accelerated evolution. This article builds on thoughts developed by the authors after conducting two conferences organized by WAAS in Vancouver, Canada and Chennai, India in 1998 and 1999, and the publication by WAAS of Human Choice: The Genetic Code for Social Development, written by the authors and three others. It seeks to elaborate on earlier discussions by identifying some of the basic principles of a theory of social development.
How to achieve a better world for us all to live in? The recent WAAS conference ‘Addressing Global Turbulences: Sources & Solutions’ showcased an impressive array of possible solutions to the dire times we live in. It was truly inspiring, intellectually challenging but also heart-warming to hear about the broad grip and various initiatives dedicated people work with. The take-away is that fundamental changes are urgently needed to create a more sustainable world where people feel more secure—economically, politically, socially. WAAS calls for integrated modes of thinking, transdisciplinary approaches educating people, and a new paradigm for global development. It should not just be a world for the ultra-resourceful rich who can construct literal and practical walls to enjoy a luxurious lifestyle keeping the rest of the world’s people out. The key is how to create a better and more secure world for all.
The article is a response to the seminal paper of K. Patel et al. published in Cadmus (2025), addressing how to finance UN-SDGs. Beyond traditional measures, like mobilizing private wealth, taxation and taxonomies, the article stresses the relevance of an out of the box approach, using additional conditioned liquidity, issued by Central Bank’s Green Quantitative Easing and Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) and their associated swab lines. This approach will be able to hedge systemic risks, mobilize private capital and fund and manage planetary goods.
We inhabit an era defined by unprecedented uncertainty, distrust, and insecurity. The world faces a multidimensional crisis, a “polycrisis”, encompassing political, economic, technological, social, and environmental components that defy traditional solutions. This turbulence stems from the rapid globalization following the Cold War’s end, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, climate change acceleration, and the emergence of artificial intelligence as both opportunity and threat. The current period represents more than isolated crises; it reflects humanity’s struggle to adapt to the fastest pace of change in human history. Population growth took millennia to reach one billion but only two centuries to reach eight billion. Global economic output has multiplied 100-fold in 200 years. We have evolved from hunter-gathers that gathered in isolated agrarian communities to an interconnected global society communicating instantaneously, yet our institutions, values, and governance structures lag far behind today’s technological advances. This turbulence manifests as a clash between progressive forces driving global integration, technological convergence, and universal values, and reactionary movements resisting change through nationalism, authoritarianism, and cultural retrenchment. The resulting tensions generate social polarization, institutional weakness, and the erosion of multilateral cooperation. Power is shifting from traditional centres to new configurations: from national governments to corporations, from scientific authority to populist narratives, from the middle class to extremes of wealth and poverty. Understanding these dynamics is essential for developing effective responses to our civilizational challenges. This article is a reprint of the lead article in the Sign of the Times newsletter in August 2025. It steps back from the current polycrisis facing the world to provide a conceptual framework for the causes that generate today’s turbulence, the consequences that follow from them, and the solution areas required to bend the arc of global society’s progress toward a more inclusive and sustainable future. This paper draws heavily on the World Academy of Art and Science’s paper on “Sources and Solutions for Global Turbulence” by Garry Jacobs and Ketan Patel in the July 2025 issue of Cadmus, but thoughtfully condensed and reshaped to highlight the theoretical underpinnings of the contemporary polycrisis.
Leadership must be reconceptualized. This new economic era of the third millennium is marked by profound global changes, challenges, and chaos. Now is the time for scholars, practitioners, and professionals to universally adopt a postindustrial definition of leadership for the twenty-first century. In the absence of a universally accepted construct, the study of leadership will fail to advance, and the practice of leadership will fail to address the critical challenges of our global society. In short, we must finally acknowledge that the traditional conceptualization of leadership is entrenched in the industrial twentieth century orientation and remains in a state of arrested development under the influence of the leader-centric paradigm. The overwhelming gravitational pull of this industrial leadership paradigm will not be overcome by simply redefining current leader and follower roles and responsibilities, replacing leaders with followers as the unit of analysis in empirical studies, or by artificially elevating the significance of followers in the popular and practitioner press.
Humanity stands at a major inflection point. Never before has scientific knowledge and technological capability expanded so rapidly, nor has civilization faced so many interrelated crises simultaneously. Science has given us unprecedented power—yet the same advances that have enriched human life now threaten the sustainability of our societies and ecosystems. This article argues that the current turbulence arises from a fragmentation of knowledge and purpose: technological evolution has outpaced moral, institutional, and cultural evolution. To navigate this complexity, a new paradigm of integrated knowledge—linking science, art, ethics, and governance—is required. This paradigm, long envisioned by the founders of the World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS)†, offers a pathway from mechanistic progress toward conscious social evolution and global human security.
A common vision of security for all is indispensable for the future of humanity and the biosphere. Recovering from COVID-19, addressing the perils of climate change, and responding to the range of conflicts, risks and vulnerabilities the world now faces, requires a vision of security that is holistic and cooperative, and a strategy that is integrated and scalable. Such a vision is at the heart of an approach to security first imagined by the UN in the early 1990s: Human Security. This approach embodies an integrated strategy of security that is designed to respond flexibly and effectively to the overlapping and interconnected human and environmental precarities that affect our world today. Responding to vital challenges, it seeks to strategically address the security, health and wellbeing of humanity systematically and holistically whilst simultaneously ensuring the security, stability and sustainability of planet Earth. Emphasizing that all academic disciplines can contribute to Human Security, this paper is intended to highlight the importance and potential of Human Security in policy and practice.
This article is the second in a series by the author exploring the fundamental principles underlying the process of social development and human evolution. It argues that material progress originates not in external resources but in the creative application of mind—the capacity to perceive potential where none seems apparent. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, the author examines how civilizations advance through mental attitudes that transform challenges into opportunities, as exemplified by the American frontier spirit, India’s non-violent freedom movement, and the Green Revolution. The paper also highlights the productive role of dissent as a catalyst for innovation, tracing its influence from Copernicus and Darwin to modern economics and political reform. The shifting centers of global leadership—from Greece and Rome to Europe, America, and Asia—are interpreted as successive expressions of humanity’s evolving collective consciousness. Finally, the essay delineates four progressive stages of social change—survival, growth, development, and evolution—culminating in an evolution from the mental to a spiritual stage of consciousness which transcends the limitations of the fragmented, dualistic perspectives of the dividing mind and separative ego to acquire a unifying vision of reality—by a supramental transformation of humanity’s physical, vital and mental nature. The process it presents is a psychological and spiritual phenomenon as much as an economic and political one, emphasizing that humanity’s ultimate progress lies in the evolution of consciousness itself.
We are living in an age of increasing complexity, where decades of environmental exploitation are converging with a rapidly shifting new world order. This convergence has created a negative feedback loop that heightens risk and accelerates disruptions at every level of society. For meaningful transformation to take shape, we must rebuild the institutional foundations that sustain global societies. Universities in particular must move beyond the traditional academic model and position themselves as drivers of change and positive disruption if they are to remain trusted partners in designing the future. That reimagining must include young people as active partners in co-creating the thriving future we all envision. This article highlights the ASU Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory as a prototype for a University for the Future of the Planet, demonstrating how academic institutions can help society navigate complexity and advance a more sustainable and resilient world.
The article offers a brief reflection on how the contemporary geopolitical landscape is favouring the recovery of the classical idea of imperial hegemony around a relatively small number of axes.
IntroductionAt the 2024 election, Americans faced a pivotal choice about their nation's global trajectory, amid intensifying debate over the future of U.S. hegemony. This study investigates whether the United States is experiencing a phase of hegemonic decline, signaling the end of its era as the world's leading great power, or whether its power can persist or even be revitalized.MethodsTo evaluate this, we employ a mixed-methods approach. We use quantitative modeling to analyze historical power lifecycles of previous hegemons, identifying inflection points and estimating the potential end dates of U.S. dominance. In parallel, and qualitative analysis of recurring historical markers of decline - such as strategic overreach, domestic polarization, and eroding global legitimacy - to assess their presence in current U.S. conditions.ResultsOur quantitative model projects potential turning points in American global primacy between 2032 and 2067. The qualitative analysis reveals that the United States currently exhibits several key recurring features of great-power decline, including internal division, weakened alliances, reduced moral authority, and challenges from rising powers with competing rule-setting ambitions.DiscussionWhile the United States maintains significant multidimensional strengths, these findings suggest that it may be transitioning into a phase of relative or systemic decline. This framework offers a foundation for further study into the drivers, agents, and timing of hegemonic transition, as well as how U.S. administrations may shape the durability or erosion of American leadership in the evolving international order.
The post-Schumpeterian era has constructed a green innovation paradigm that balances profit-making and environmental goals through a dual-wheel drive of technology and regulation to achieve green transformation. Under this innovation paradigm, two issues need to be addressed. First, the immature green technologies and product markets cannot generate sufficient profit incentives for enterprises to pursue sustainable development. Therefore, government regulation and policies must play a role, following a path of “social initiative—regulatory constraints—policy incentives—policy withdrawal”, transitioning from government regulation to corporate voluntary action. Second, without the leverage of market mechanisms, green technologies themselves lack the motivation and capacity for sustainable development. Therefore, it is necessary to rely on market forces, following a path of “technological breakthrough—technology diffusion—market expansion—profit acquisition”, to organically integrate the goals of green transformation and corporate profitability. In the growth period of green innovation, regulatory constraints and policy incentives play an especially important role. In the mature period, the market will become the dominant force driving green transformation.
