In this striking book, Yehezkel Dror bravely goes where few authors dare, offering a big-picture view of the fateful choices facing the human species. He urges humankind to adopt unconventional survival and thriving strategies, including elevating the future of humanity above state interests, limiting the production and spread of dangerous knowledge and tools, and strengthening humanity’s collective deliberative capacity. The author confronts the evolutionary trap of science and technology ensnaring unprepared humankind by providing it with awesome future-shaping power, which contemporary values and institutions are unable to handle. Dror warns that tribal and nationalist values, the inability to learn from history, and mediocre leadership will catastrophically endanger the future of human life, making radical, even painful, innovations essential. According to Dror, the prevailing form of politics is obsolete. Instead, he argues urgently for a new type of political leader – “Homo Sapiens Governors” – willing and able to fulfill the daunting mission to save humanity from itself. Recognizing that the tyrannical status quo will try to prevent essential transformations, Dror predicts new crises making what is still unthinkable clearly compelling – and that humankind will have to choose: learn rapidly to survive and thrive, or perish. YEHEZKEL DROR is professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Recognized as a founder of modern policy studies, he integrates multi-disciplinary scholarship with extensive personal experience as a global advisor into a novel paradigm on alternative evolutionary futures of humanity – as shaped by fateful choices humanity has never before faced.

—Publisher