The main point of Wade's TED talk is that we are rapidly losing many of the world's smaller cultures, and that this a tragedy for all of us. More than 50% of known cultures are on the brink of extinction.
He says that the world we live in is just one model of reality, and other cultures teach us that there are other ways of thinking, being, and looking at our world. He says the world's cultures form a so-called "ethnosphere", an invisible web of all the thoughts, dreams, myths, and ideas that have ever been produced by the human imagination.
He points out that the model of reality we all accept now (which grew out of the Industrial Revolution) has been around for such a short period of time (compared to all human history) that there is no reason to be confident it has all the necessary answers for the huge challenges humanity faces today. Peoples from minor cultures have knowledge about the natural world that we don't, and we can't even understand how they came to know it.
His message is that we need to stop pushing traditional cultures out of their homelands, so that we can live in a truly multicultural world- a world where collective wisdom can contribute to everyone's well-being.
Writing topic: What do you think of his idea? It seems to be in opposition to how the world is actually going. We are becoming more mono-cultural. For example, it's hard to go to any city in the world and not find a Starbucks or MacDonalds. What do you think about our current model of reality (a globalized world focused on business, and economic growth)?
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