Quick and Dirty Answers to the Biggest of Questions

Quick and Dirty Answers to the Biggest of Questions addresses how the new kind of understanding we need today, besides helping us confront modern-day challenges, also brings a new creativity of perspective to more ultimate questions. It describes how many such ultimate questions have baffled us not because they are inherently difficult, but becase they require a maturity of understanding of which we are only now becoming capable. This short book uses the thinking of Creative Systems Theory to take on some of the most important and timely of such questions. Some examples:     —How do we best understand the times in which we live?   —How do we best understand the human story as a whole?  —Why, at different times in history, has human understanding taken the forms that it has?  —How do we best understand the experience of free will?   —Are the beliefs of science and religion just different or, instead, parts of a larger picture?   —What is our place in the larger scheme of things?     These questions share a common bond: they are systemic, and systemic in a particular sense we are only beginning to fully grasp. Quick and Dirty Answers describes how the needed answers to these questions are in fact straightforward, indeed rather common sense. What is new and different is that this is a sort of common sense that we are only beginning to be able to get our minds around. Quick and Dirty Answers to the Biggest of Questions is intended for people who find particular fascination with overarching, "theory of everything" reflection.

Quick and Dirty Answers to the Biggest of Questions addresses how the new kind of understanding we need today, besides helping us confront modern-day challenges, also brings a new creativity of perspective to more ultimate questions. It describes how many such ultimate questions have baffled us not because they are inherently difficult, but becase they require a maturity of understanding of which we are only now becoming capable. This short book uses the thinking of Creative Systems Theory to take on some of the most important and timely of such questions. Some examples:     —How do we best understand the times in which we live?   —How do we best understand the human story as a whole?  —Why, at different times in history, has human understanding taken the forms that it has?  —How do we best understand the experience of free will?   —Are the beliefs of science and religion just different or, instead, parts of a larger picture?   —What is our place in the larger scheme of things?     These questions share a common bond: they are systemic, and systemic in a particular sense we are only beginning to fully grasp. Quick and Dirty Answers describes how the needed answers to these questions are in fact straightforward, indeed rather common sense. What is new and different is that this is a sort of common sense that we are only beginning to be able to get our minds around. Quick and Dirty Answers to the Biggest of Questions is intended for people who find particular fascination with overarching, "theory of everything" reflection.

Charles M. Johnston is a psychiatrist and futurist. He is best known as the originator of Creative Systems Theory, and for directing the Institute for Creative Development, a non-partisn think tank and center for advanced leadership training, He is the author of numerous books on the future and how we can best prepare to meet it.