Has our existing cultural mindset run its course of usefulness?

a new cultural mindset will draw from but also transcend the limitations of the current one

Why is a new Western cultural mindset required?
Cultural mindsets continue to change incrementally over time in response to ongoing lived experience, including an ever-expanding knowledge base. At certain stages in a culture’s history, however, the mindset requires a radical transformation. Why? Because a once-useful cultural mindset does finally outrun its course of usefulness. According to Duane Elgin, a cultural mindset has run its course of usefulness when it, “causes more problems than it fixes” (Promise Ahead).

Does our existing mindset cause more problems than it fixes?
The existing set of assumptions that orientate the current cultural mindset, assumptions including humancentric and ethnocentric domination; separation; competition; and consumerism, has given rise to an identity that Professor AnaLouise Keating named “self-enclosed individualism” (Transformation Now). Self-enclosed individualism has given rise to a values system that seeks the flourishing of the individual above and beyond all else. In response to an identity centred on self-enclosed individualism, Western societies have operated from a mindset of continual consumption of the natural world; a world that was created for them to exploit.

Crisis of limits
And yet, Barbara Marx Hubbard argued that our world has reached a “crisis of limits” (Conscious Evolution) due to the excessive way that we live. For example: due to our excessive exploitation of land, seas, and skies, we live with the threat that Earth may one day become uninhabitable for humankind.

Therefore, it would seem that our existing mindset has run its course of usefulness and is now causing more problems than it fixes. As such, our existing mindset requires a radical transformation.