Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Chris Anderson, featured by Ideas.TED.com.

To read the complete article, please click here.

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It might seem like our interconnected world is unraveling, if last week’s Brexit vote is anything to go by. What can help knit humanity together? Great ideas, says TED curator Chris Anderson.

I’m a Brit. But also a global soul. It’s a core part of my identity. Last week’s Brexit vote made me feel as if my heart was being ripped out; as if an idea I believed in to my core was being trampled on.

For the past few years, a lot of us have wanted to believe that most humans were gradually expanding their circle of empathy. That instead of our instinctive “us/them” labels, we have been extending our sense of shared identity to all of humanity. That the physical connectedness brought by globalization and the internet made this trend both possible and almost inevitable. That countless millions of humans were on a trajectory to becoming global citizens.

That belief just suffered a savage blow. We might be dead wrong. The world may instead be heading in exactly the opposite direction. That’s a terrifying and depressing thought.

What happened here?

I know there were many complex factors behind Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, including an understandable dislike of distant bureaucracy and oversight. But it seems clear that ultimately the decision was driven by real fear and real anger. Millions of people in Europe and America have lost the hope of high-paid jobs and the lives they once dreamed of — and they are lashing out. Blame the outsiders, blame the global elite, smash the system and try something else. Anything else.

We ignore this at our peril. There is far more at stake than whether one country remains part of a trading bloc. We’re battling here for the survival of an idea on which the world’s future depends, the idea of humanity as one connected family. Millions of people seem eager to reject this. To believe that life would be better if we all just kept to ourselves. No outsiders here, please: we don’t trust you, and we don’t like you.

How should we respond to this? The need for new ideas has never been more apparent. Two huge areas in particular are crying out for fresh thinking.

The first is the future of work itself. The truth is that because of the new capabilities of technology, most of the jobs that disappeared are never coming back … and they probably shouldn’t. Humans are capable of being so much more than production line robots. But without jobs, how do they survive? Long-term, we can dream of a world rich enough to pay everyone a living wage as a birthright, of thriving human creativity, and of thrilling new ways for humans to build on and collaborate with machine intelligence. But how do we get there? There are no quick answers. It may take a revolution in education; we may even need to rethink capitalism itself. Certainly we’ll need ideas to address the growing inequality that has driven so much of the anger. So let’s seek out those with compelling ideas to offer here. The current system is in danger of breaking. We need to give a platform to dreamers and reformers who are thinking outside the box.

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After a long career in journalism and publishing, Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading. TED is a nonprofit devoted to sharing valuable ideas, primarily through the medium of “TED Talks” — short talks that are offered free online to a global audience. Trained as a journalist after graduating from Oxford University, Anderson launched more than 100 successful magazines and websites before turning his attention to TED, which his nonprofit foundation acquired in 2001. His TED mantra — “ideas worth spreading” — continues to blossom on an international scale, with more than one billion TED Talks viewed annually. He lives in New York City.

I highly recommend his latest book, TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (May 2016).

To learn more about TED, please click here.