The politics of dignity means putting behind us—like the toys of our youth—the predatory strategy that has taken Homo sapiens this far, but can take us no further. Domestically, the shift from predation to protection means taking care that no one is marginalized or exploited. It means abandoning policies that hold people down so their labor will subsidize the rest of us. Taken to the international level, a dignitarian strategy is tantamount to a world without war.

Practicing equal dignity for all, regardless of role or rank, will mark a turning point in human history. The twenty-first century will be seen as the transitional century during which humankind completed the shift from predatory to protective behavior. No blame, no guilt over the past. Predation has simply stopped working as well as it used to. It’s a recipe for perpetual unrest, terrorism, poverty, and war, whereas equal protection brings peace, productivity, and prosperity.

The only thing as important as how we treat the planet is how we treat each other. Dignity is what people want. As we learn to give it to each other consistently, many of the man-made problems that plagued us throughout the twentieth-century, and threaten us still, will become tractable and finally recede into the mists of history.