Image courtesy Kevin Dooley
The third cornerstone to a worldview is other people. It's simple, we, ourselves, share the responsibility to steward what we have with all of the others inhabiting the earth. This sharing process is the time-transcendent challenge of humanity. Models of corporate sharing cannot be glanced over - some of the world's greatest thinkers have worked on (and been stumped by) this very subject, from Karl Marx to Adam Smith. By studying social psychology, economics, history, and anthropology, among others, we gain a better understanding of human behavior. They give us perspective which helps us to make better decisions. I keep an eye out for pockets of people who have strong understanding of society and the power to make improvements.
My key here is businesses. Few other groupings of people can match in their knowledge of markets with how people are behaving on massive scales and what they want. Business's incentives make it such that they attract bright minds, succeed only if markets validate what they're doing, and their means give them the flexibility to shift as their markets think differently. I've found that this is the 80/20 domain (with government and political policy right behind) to study as a window to understand and impact the social networking of humanity.
The final worldview cornerstone is the space-time continuum we know as the context for our lives, especially our home planet, earth. This is the amalgamation of most everything else that provides the context for which we live our lives, like geographical regions, environmental components, climates, animals, plants, human creations, and influencing factors. Our beliefs for what components exist in our context and the relationships between them, and us with them also sets the stage for the narratives we write with our being. You can imagine how someone would live differently if they believed they lived on the edge of a flat earth, or if someone thought that a heating earth was a purely natural ebb and flow of the planet, or if someone didn't believe in the existence of supernatural forces. Our views about our context tell us what we should or shouldn't put our effort into.
So, what's the key, here? I've found that it is economics. So much of the big picture of our existence is determined by how we engage with a context of limited resources, and that is by common definition, economics (the study of limited resources). By studying economics, we're bound to look at nearly every factor of our context, the role it plays on earth, and the cost-benefits for the greater whole if it remains as it is or if it changes. It's also a powerful perspective into our relationship with the context and what it should be. Want to understand why people live in your city in the first place? Economics might show. For my city, the land was a location along a river that sped up the transportation of people and goods, and the river provided the electricity needed for factories. If you want to understand the context in which you live, economics is a great place to start.
If you devote your attention to these four keys, you'll have a strong grasp of your world and a greater chance to make an impact. My encouragement is to clarify you perspective in each of the four cornerstones. Write out your views and go see if they hold water. Here are the two questions to ask yourself: 1) Is this view intellectually credible? 2) Is this view existentially satisfying? Put them to the test, clarify, and adjust your behavior to live a better life.