The bombings in the Indian city of Varanasi were a shock, but not a surprise. I was just in this remarkable holy city, where Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists have lived together for centuries, traveling with a diverse group of colleagues from the International Futures Forum. We were on a “learning journey” looking for signs of hope and trying to grasp something of the complexity that is today’s India. We wanted to engage at a personal level, with people on the ground as India attempts to navigate the cultural rapids generated by their move into modernity. As one of our hosts put it, we wanted to feel first so as to understand better.

This is a society of over a billion people, which with its 8% economic growth rate makes India the darling of global financial markets. Of course this benefits those members of the elites who participate in the global economy, many of whom were educated in the best universities in the West and are fully hooked into the information society. At the same time though, 75% of all Indians live in villages in the rural areas, eking out a subsistence living to the timeless rhythms and traditions, with no electricity or running water, cooking on fires of dried dung, and where most of them have never made a phone call. (see photos on website). The global economy needs to trickle down a very long way before they see any change in their lives and when it does, it may not be for the better.

What we saw in India left little doubt that as modernism takes off there, the cultural understandings that provided social and psychological coherence, are unraveling. The centuries old traditions of language, way of life, hierarchy, caste and religion, which though often degrading and oppressive, nevertheless provide some measure of psychological and spiritual stability. These are under siege. For many—members of lower castes, women and girls, for example, this unraveling makes room for some welcome social advances, but it often comes at the cost of profound dislocation, social disintegration and ever higher anxiety. At the same time as there is tremendous buzz everywhere in India about phenomenal economic promise, abject poverty is still the daily lot of hundreds of millions. A European walking in the streets of Varanasi is besieged by women and children – many maimed and sick — begging for a few rupees to make today a little better than yesterday. In the cities the gaps between groups of all descriptions especially the “haves”, “have-nots” and “have a lots” are large and growing.

But India is not the only place where the psychosphere is in tatters. I was just recently in Japan, as the guest of the Japanese Academy of Counselors, where I led workshops for some 200 counselors in training. Though very different from Europe, US and India, Japan—itself once the darling of the world’s business investor classes, is also suffering the effects of a collective entrancement with addictive consumerism. In Japan, it is not terrorist or sectarian violence that plagues them; Japan’s is a quieter form of desperation and a less obvious form of rage. There I learned about the Japanese NEETs (kids who are Not in Education, Employment or Training—a British category) -- people so demoralized and disaffected they have neither the skills nor inclination to participate in the world of work. There are close to 750000 NEETs in Japan and will be over a million by 2015. The economy doesn’t need them and doesn’t want them as they are so they live with their parents - bored, alienated and hedonistic. Professor Yuji Genda of the University of Tokyo says, " the NEET is the young person who gets tossed about in an age that emphasizes individuality and expertise, loses hope of working, and comes to a standstill.” They are says Akira Takanashi in “quiet rebellion” against modernity. But unlike the campus rebellions of the 1960’s it is a rebellion that is unconscious and utterly debilitating. The counselors I met were alarmed at the rising tide of self-destructive and aggressive behavior in these youngsters, where suicide is the leading cause of death.

In India, Japan or anywhere else in the modern world we seem to have become, as my colleague Rajiv Kumar puts it “distracted by the wrong issues.” Unless we make a serious course correction -and soon - we are in danger of falling into a global dysphoric pandemic. The bombings in Varanasi and the NEETs in Japan, aside from arousing our compassion for the suffering involved, should also be alerting us to an even bigger looming issue that is rapidly overtaking us. In the past several decades we have entered a collective trance in which we see our problems and their possible solutions only through the lens of business and economics. We have taken what used to be a means to fulfillment—financial wealth—as an end in itself. We have been persuaded by leaders and opinion makers—and our own unmanaged appetites-- to trade away those aspects of our lives that used to make them meaningful and bring us joy, often for deadening jobs and the ability to buy things that we don’t need. Money has become the new meaning and the single measure of a person’s worth. Our best and brightest young people study business, economics and law; the languages of finance and trade have colonized all the spaces of our lives. We have evolved into “homo economicus”, ceased to value those aspects of human life that have no price tag and relegated to optional status those ways of being that represent spiritual rather than material value.

Mahatma Gandhi once asked “what is the economy for?” and his answer was that it was to sustain human aspiration, and that, he believed was enough. But as Gandhian scholar Satish Kumar says, “The economists and industrialists of our time fail to see when enough is enough. Even when countries reach a very high material standard of living, they are still caught up with the idea of economic growth. Those who do not know when enough is enough will never have enough, but those who know when enough is enough already have enough.” We have come to the point where enough is never enough. The developed world’s “enough” is too much to be sustained by an earth of limited resources. If we are to survive as homo sapiens , the supposedly wise species that we were meant to be, and perhaps to evolve to even higher levels economics must share the space in our priorities with other ways of understanding what is important—like art, friendship, religion and civic participation. The economics of greed that drives our accelerating desperation must give way to an economics that aims to deliver human fulfillment and sustainable societies.

If we are to reach our potential as a human collective where we can celebrate our diversity, not go to war over it, we must put humanity back at the center of our social theory and social practice. If not, the future will bring us more NEETs, more bombings in sacred cities and more wars among those fighting for more of what they don’t need.

We went to India to find signs of resilience and hope, and even amid the garbage strewn streets suffocating under the press of people, poverty, dysfunctional government and now bombings, these capacities are visible everywhere. In Varanasi we met Navneet Raman, a young man who returned from a successful career as a stockbroker in Delhi to invest in his city and its people. He told us that existence in the mega-city was too inhuman for him. He needed to feel life in its fullness and for him that meant coming home to his beloved Varanasi, participating in projects to restore the creative life of the community, and preserving the ancient crafts for which Varanasi has long been known. Navneet took pains to show us the tolerant heart of his city, where Muslims work together with Hindus producing fabrics for Buddhist customers. As he showed us around and introduced us to a new generation of younger people working for NGOs of all stripes, his confidence in the creativity and resilience of this ancient city infected us all. We also met a young woman, Priya Ayer, a teacher whose alternative school was providing education that aimed to replace the stultifying traditions of colonial education and offer instead a learning environment that in addition to preparing students for the modern world of science, technology and commerce, nurtured their Indian authenticity and released their creativity, self-sufficiency and healthy self-esteem. Priya stressed the importance of educating girls. “Educate a girl,” she said, “and you educate a whole family”.

In Japan my host Yoshitaka Fukui, a successful young businessman, explained how he had recognized early in his life that unless it provides the means to reach others and to give back, his material success is as inconsequential as bubbles in champagne. For Yoshi, giving back includes providing training for hundreds of counseling and educational professionals who want to help the young people whose lives have no meaning. Priya, Yoshi and Navneet are what Arun Maira calls Fireflies—centers of light that if present in great enough numbers are the carriers of transformational change. These young people, and hundreds of thousands of others, though from vastly different cultures are truly signs of hope. They have a spiritual core to their being, and have in common a willingness to reach beyond their own self-interests for the common good. They all express an unquenchable faith in human potential to ultimately transcend the shocks and threats presented by murderous and self-serving elements. And what struck me the most, was that they all have made the same commitment to building conditions in their community that enables a needed shift to take place between a worldview based on the power of fear to one centered in human love and solidarity. Fireflies all.