In the course of our work on Massive Change, we met an extraordinary man named Stewart Brand. An innovator and entrepreneur, he was the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, a countercultural landmark in the late sixties and early seventies. He led a campaign to convince NASA to make a photograph of the Earth from space, an image that has become a defining icon of our age. 

Brand is also a founder of The Long Now Foundation, an effort to expand our cultural time horizon from the next fiscal quarter to the long term. He believes that when people think things are bad and getting worse, they do the usual things people do to protect themselves: They circle their wagons, hunker down, and close the border. They move to gated communities in their cities and in their hearts. They take what they can get while they can still get it.

However, if they come to understand that things are improving — that we are working together to make things better — they will invest in their communities and their businesses, in their children and their family, in their culture and education. They will do so because once they discover that things are actually getting better, enlightened self-interest will make them want to be part of the improvement.