Among those who care, we already know by now enough of the rough outline of what’s wrong to be sufficiently motivated to act. We know we need to change things, but no one knows what to do, what would be effective, or what would work in concert with enough others to actually produce change of the kind that would derail the rush to destruction.

Knowing the nature of the big problems brings in a package deal knowledge also of how hard it is to find the thing everyone will buy into, the thing that won’t bring worse unintended consequences, the thing that will actually change what really at the bottom of it all needs to be changed. In short, we need some new ideas.

New ideas originate in one of five nodes that are common features to the organization of every society: politics, business, religion, academia, and arts and culture.

Today, political parties seem lost in a sea of reaction and have fallen back several steps behind the lead. They seem structurally incapable of generating new ideas.

Business corporations, after the sub-prime debacle, the Enron scandal and the dot.com meltdown, seem to have exhausted their capacity for new ideas as well. One should bear in mind that those three examples were each, in their time, not just experiments on the fringe of the business world, but were centerpiece, widely agreed-upon solutions to the biggest problems the most engaged minds in the business world feared the most. They have all crashed spectacularly.

Religious bodies are famously adrift and don’t even require a recounting of how they’ve fallen off the page. It’s been a long time since any thinking person has felt compelled to question the authority of religion.

Academia, on the other hand, is due for a particularly harsh assessment of its contributions, or lack of them to be more precise. The latest hot idea there is to make studies of previous studies, aggregating bad work in the hopes of averaging out mistakes to find what might be true but unseen in those banks of old fog. How walking a zig-zagging, doubling-back route in a field with no compass is supposed to get one back to the road is beyond me, but I suppose it at least keeps one’s mind occupied instead of dwelling on just how lost one really is. Read any products of the philosophy departments at universities lately? “Lost” lights up like neon in the cerebral cortex.

So, political parties, business offices, religious cloisters and academic campuses all have bare cupboards and the timing is bad: we have never needed new ideas, and fast, more than right now. The last chance for new ideas rests with the arts and culture sector.

For this sector to ride to the rescue, certain conditions need to be established in which ideas germinate—in which a hundred bad ideas are allowed to sprout and whither in some fertilizer where one of them will be good.

Cross-pollination is crucial. Ideas rarely sprout free of contact with others. Nearly all good ideas are some new combination of two old, familiar, and even by themselves bad ideas.

Tolerance and comfort are required. It feels too weird to be different in a species in which mimicry and repetition has become the time-honoured and sure bet to success. To contemplate problems and reach for new ideas that might address them is to break wholly with the recipe that brought this species, mankind, a pretty high level of accomplishment.

To step out of mimicry and repetition is to sacrifice self-interest. It takes, for example, pursuing something other than a full-time job in the repetition and mimicry economy to leave time and energy for thinking and researching. It means not chasing what everyone else is chasing, and quite often catching, to their great personal satisfaction: wealth, home, marriage, promotion, etc. It brings questions, judgments, hostility even, and accusations of laziness, of not pulling the weight in the same direction everyone else is pulling—which is the point, isn’t it.

Just as it is understood that academics need sabbatical, that political people need private holidays, that business leaders need exclusive clubs, and religious leaders need retreats and monasteries, the arts and culture sector needs a place to speak to each other with privacy and discretion, trusting in shared values and purposes, far from the madding crowd and daily mundane pressures that occupants of other nodes of idea generation enjoy.

Time is short. We probably need a whole new way of determining social order and direction that breaks with the political system we have inherited from a whole different age, and have been gerry-rigging and patching with less effectiveness with each passing year. We probably also need a whole new economic ordering system beyond the rudimentary cash reward system we inherited also from a past age when cash reward was innovative. Dolphins leap for herring at the aquatic show only because they’ve been denied access to herring abundant in the wild from which they’ve been abducted. Once they see the pot brimming with herring, they lose interest in leaping.

We certainly need a whole new conception of how to use the intellectual class besides running mouse wheels in universities that have devolved administratively into accreditation factories. And it’s obvious that spiritual authorities need a clean sweep, even while it would appear true that humans have undeniable need for spiritual succor, for mythological guidance, and for touchstones on paths that extend far beyond, in both directions, their own life spans in the space of time. So new religion too, as John Lennon said.

The biggest hindrance is lack of common cause and too many distractions. Everyone’s going off in too many directions at the same time creating revolutionary armies of one each filling the field with yet more chaos instead of the clarity and ideas that we desperately need. Arguments erupt over whether it is advantageous to join existing power centres inside one or another of those five nodes or to work on the much harder, much less certain effort to displace in toto those old, tired wholly and systematically inadequate power structures.

People get tired. There are so many bad ideas and even good ideas never hold anyone’s imagination for longer than the next meal. People want to know what they can do, but before anyone even figures that out, we need to shift our focus off the four tired and exhausted nodes and turn lavish and generous attention to the arts and culture sector, the only place where “what to do” might be newly addressed, for a change. And we need to trust that there is something out there that, if we do it, really will solve the problems. We’ve had promises like that dashed so often before by political parties, business boardrooms, religious authorities and academic campuses, that we’re understandably wary of getting fooled again by the even more loosey-goosey world of arts and culture.

Maybe those in that sector can help things by taking their own work far more seriously than they have lately. A good exercise to try is to imagine you’ve been given five minutes in which all 6 billion people on the planet will be giving you their complete and undivided attention. What would you have to say to them? Would it really be how your mother spanked you or how pointless your walk to the grocery store was last Saturday or how badly you want that girl on the bus? Somehow I don’t think so.