3. Vision map for the next level of society

The first article introduced the Societal Emergence Model — the four-layer framework that laid out how the deepest assumptions of a society unfold, layer by layer, into the lived reality of its people. The second article applied that framework as a Diagnostic Map of the industrial society we live in. It laid out the issues that we are facing, including their root causes.

This naturally raised the question: so what is the alternative? If we want to grow our society out of today, and onto a next level: what would that look like?

In this article introduces what I refer to as a Vision Map. It is mirrors the Diagnostic Map, laying out not our challenges, but our goals. Like the Diagnostic Map, the Vision Map does not introduce any new concepts. It merely presents them relative to each other.

The Vision Map describes a society organised around a different set of assumptions — and what would naturally emerge from those assumptions, layer by layer, in the same way that our current problems naturally emerged from ours.

Everything begins with assumptions. The Diagnostic Map showed how three assumptions — anthropocentrism, atomism, competition — have shaped the industrial society we inhabit. The Vision Map begins by replacing each of those assumptions with something different. Not their opposite, exactly, but a more complete and accurate account of what human beings are and how the world actually works.

These are not new ideas. They appear in indigenous knowledge systems, in ecological science, in complexity theory, in many philosophical and spiritual traditions. What would be new is building institutions on top of them — systematically, at scale.

Today’s society	The next level society
Anthropocentrism — humans at the centre, everything else a resource	Ecocentrism — humans as part of nature, not above it
Atomism — the world as separate, competing parts	Relationalism — the world as fundamentally interconnected
Competition — parts locked in struggle to survive	Collaboration — mutual flourishing as the organising principle

Ecocentrism does not mean that humans don’t matter. It means that human wellbeing is understood as inseparable from the wellbeing of the living systems we are part of. There is no human flourishing on a depleted planet. There is no healthy economy in a sick ecology. The boundary between “us” and “nature” is a fiction that has been enormously costly.

Relationalism does not mean the end of the individual. It means recognising that individuals are constituted by their relationships — to other people, to communities, to place, to the natural world — and that a society designed around the isolated individual is therefore designed around an abstraction, not a reality. The basic unit of social organisation is not the individual but the relationship.

Collaboration does not mean the end of competition or difference. It means that the organising principle shifts: from “how do I win?” to “how do we flourish together?”. Competition can be a useful mechanism within a collaborative framework. But when competition becomes the frame itself, everything is consumed by it.

As the world view changes, the institutional expressions that flow from it change too. Each of the four pillars of the industrial system has a counterpart in the next level society — not as an ideological prescription, but as the logical consequence of different underlying assumptions.

Today’s society	The next level society
Growth imperative — GDP growth as structural necessity	Regenerative economy — prosperity within planetary boundaries
Financialised economy — capital markets shape all decisions	Stakeholder finance — capital serving long-term common good
Nation-state sovereignty — competing states block global coordination	Multilateral governance — shared authority for shared problems
Individualist welfare state — care around the isolated citizen	Community-based care — resilience built in relationships, not bureaucracy

The regenerative economy replaces the growth imperative not by abandoning prosperity but by redefining it. Prosperity that depletes the conditions for future prosperity is not prosperity — it is borrowing from the future. A regenerative economy measures success by whether it restores and maintains the social and ecological systems on which it depends. Frameworks like Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness, and the work of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance point in this direction.

Stakeholder finance replaces the financialised economy by changing the question capital is asked to answer. Instead of “what returns?”, the question becomes “what serves the long-term common good?”. This does not mean abolishing markets or investment — it means redesigning the rules under which capital moves, so that patient, long-term, mission-aligned capital is structurally advantaged rather than structurally disadvantaged. Cooperatives, public development banks, impact investment, and reformed corporate governance are all partial expressions of this shift.

Multilateral governance replaces the sovereignty of competing nation-states with shared authority for shared problems. This is not world government — it is the recognition that some problems are inherently transnational and require transnational solutions. Climate, biodiversity, taxation, migration, digital governance: none of these can be adequately addressed by nations acting alone. The European Union is the most advanced existing experiment in pooling sovereignty for shared ends — and its deepening, not its unravelling, is one of the most important institutional projects of our time.

Community-based care replaces the individualist welfare state by shifting the unit of care from the isolated individual to the community. This does not mean withdrawing the state — it means redesigning it to strengthen the relational fabric through which people actually support each other, rather than bypassing that fabric entirely. It means valuing the informal, the reciprocal, and the local as seriously as the formal and the institutional.

The third layer maps what the system generates in society — its concrete patterns and dynamics. In the Diagnostic Map, this layer contained the dysfunctions: the structural failures that the industrial system reliably produces. In the Vision Map, the same layer contains what I call enabling conditions: the patterns that a next level system would structurally generate instead.

What is striking about this list is that none of these enabling conditions are technically impossible. They are not waiting for a scientific breakthrough or a technological miracle. They are waiting for a different set of priorities — which is to say, a different world view, expressed through different institutions, generating different patterns.

Today’s society	The next level society
Disconnection from nature	Living within natural cycles — human activity regenerates rather than depletes
Commons destruction	Commons stewardship — shared resources governed for long-term flourishing
Market failure	True-cost economics — prices reflect full social and ecological cost
Concentration of power	Distributed power — checks, balance and access for all, not just elites
Short-termism	Long-term thinking — decisions measured in generations, not quarters
Care deficit	Care recognised and valued — social and unpaid care central to the economy
Community infrastructure collapse	Thriving local communities — civic life, third places and local fabric restored
Accountability gap	Radical transparency — power and decisions visible and accountable
Identity fragmentation	Rooted identity and shared meaning — coherent narrative, purpose and belonging

Living within natural cycles means designing production, consumption and waste so that they work with ecological systems rather than against them. Circular economy, regenerative agriculture, biomimicry — the practical knowledge exists. What has been missing is the systemic will to apply it at scale.

True-cost economics means making visible what is currently invisible in prices: the carbon cost of a flight, the water cost of a kilogram of beef, the social cost of a zero-hours contract. When prices tell the truth, decisions change — not because people become more virtuous, but because the system’s incentives align with reality.

Radical transparency means that the exercise of power — in corporations, in governments, in financial markets — is visible and therefore accountable. Secrecy is not a feature of legitimate power; it is a symptom of power that cannot withstand scrutiny.

Rooted identity and shared meaning may be the most underestimated enabling condition of all. People do not change behaviour at scale because of rational argument alone. They change because they are part of communities with shared stories, shared values and shared commitments to a future worth building. Culture is infrastructure.

The outermost ring of the Vision Map maps what people would actually experience in a society organised around these different assumptions, systems and workings. These are not guarantees — they are the natural outputs of a system that is working well, in the same way that the outer ring of the Diagnostic Map is the natural output of a system working as currently designed.

Today’s society	The next level society
Ecosystem collapse	Ecological health — biodiversity restored, living systems thriving
Resource depletion	Resource stewardship — circular use, nothing wasted
Geopolitical instability	Peaceful cooperation — diplomacy and shared institutions
Democratic erosion	Participatory democracy — engaged citizens, legitimate institutions
Inequality	Shared prosperity — wealth, health and opportunity for all
Mental health crisis	Collective wellbeing — purpose, mental health, vitality
Intergenerational rupture	Intergenerational justice — young people inherit opportunity, not debt and crisis
Social isolation	Belonging and connection — people embedded in care networks
Trust collapse	Institutional trust — legitimate, responsive, accountable governance
Social fragmentation	Social cohesion — bridging divides, shared identity

The first is that every item on the right is simply the restoration of something that human beings have always needed and that functioning societies have, in various forms, always provided. None of this is exotic. Belonging, purpose, ecological stability, trustworthy institutions, a future worth inheriting — these are not radical demands. They are the basics. The industrial society, for all its extraordinary achievements, has progressively undermined them.

The second is that the items on the right are not independent goals to be pursued one at a time. They emerge together, from the same source. You cannot have genuine social cohesion without shared meaning. You cannot have institutional trust without accountability. You cannot have intergenerational justice without long-term thinking. You cannot have ecological health without living within natural cycles. They are expressions of the same underlying shift — which is why addressing them one at a time, without touching the world view and system that produce them, has so far proved insufficient.

The Vision Map is not a blueprint. Societies are complex, adaptive systems — they cannot be designed from scratch, and anyone who claims to have the complete answer to how they should be organised should be regarded with suspicion.

What the Vision Map offers is something more modest and more durable: a direction. A way of asking, about any decision, any institution, any policy, any investment — does this move us toward the right side of these tables, or away from it? Does this regenerate or deplete? Does this concentrate or distribute? Does this connect or isolate? Does this serve the long term or consume it?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are navigational ones. And having a map — even an imperfect one — is better than navigating without one.