What would King Louis XIV have done to have the kind of access to the world that virtually everyone in the industrialized nations and many people in developing nations have at their fingertips? Engine driven travel, whether it be train, motorcar or airplane, shrunk the world in a period of several decades. Analog and digital communication systems, ranging from the telegraph to the internet, connect people at opposite ends of the world almost instantaneously.

The world shrank significantly over the last century in more ways than one. An airplane trip from Atlanta to Detroit, a trip that in my grandparents childhood years would have taken a week or more, is now completed between breakfast and lunch. Sending a letter to a friend in the Middle East while sitting on top of a mountain in British Columbia would have taken the Sun King’s Foreign Minister months to achieve, but now he could do it via satphone within seconds.

Like so many changes that come along the incremental (in this case within a lifetime) changes that come about are quickly accommodated as being the new “normal.” Yet when viewed in the context of a slight larger period of time (say, a century), it is almost hard to fathom how quickly life has changed on earth. Disease now spreads more quickly around the globe, as does news, both good and bad, and while you might assume that the standard of living in the world would increase universally, it seems that power and wealth are more concentrated now than they have ever been.

With any new technological development there must be a corresponding moral, ethical and spiritual development capable of preventing or at least mitigating the misuse or abuse of the new tool. The addition of new laws is often used to place parameters on the use of new technology, but it is clear that all new technologies have been used for nefarious as well as constructive purposes. The rule of law is certainly necessary and has proven to be beneficial at maintaining a relative state of peace, safety and prosperity in many parts of the globe, yet unless we work diligently to develop what is called in Latin “mens sibi conscia recti,” or “a mind conscious of right,” we run the risk of legislating internal character and the ability to perceive righteousness out of existence.

Without a firm moral, ethical and spiritual foundation we cannot expect to develop those who govern our future through anything other than the lens of precedent. The individual foundation of which I write is not learned by rote, nor is it possible to develop or maintain by strict adherence to a written code of behavior. Life is multi-dimensional and ever-changing, and a flexible and dynamic consciousness is required to develop the holistic sensibility required to navigate safely and wisely.

The pace of change seems to be accelerating. Globalization, industrialization, commercialization and the information revolution are large background factors that continue to reshape the world and touch the lives of just about everyone on earth. Whether or not the counterweight is set properly is yet to be proven. Time will tell.

What are the chances that you would do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, absent of any external legal framework? The more you do and can the less we need to rely on regulation, legislation and oversight. The future is in your hands!