Rainn Wilson on the Broken Blue Marble

Plus: A visit from Andrew Yang!

Greetings, Fellow Travelers on Spaceship Earth!

This week, we welcome Andrew Yang to our podcast. Here at Soul Boom, we appreciate Andrew because he’s that rare thinker who not only sees the cracks in the current system but is also asking the hard questions about how we could fix them long term. He’s not about minor tweaks or just glossing over what’s broken; he’s here to talk big change, the kind that could take us from division-driven status quo to a future where democracy is vibrant, inclusive, and actually… uh… maybe works for us all?

On the pod, he and Rainn hash out some thought-provoking ideas—things like ranked-choice voting, grassroots movements, and digital democracy. Together they ask: Can a system built on competition and cash ever really work for everyone? And are we heading toward a future that’s more Star Trek or Mad Max?

With this week’s conversation with Andrew as our backdrop, we’re sharing an excerpt out of “The Broken Blue Marble” — a chapter from Soul Boom (the book). In it, Rainn takes on the big, cosmic questions: How do we transform in a world that’s caught between the tumult of breakdown and breakthrough? Inspired by that breathtaking Blue Marble photo taken from space, Rainn paints a picture of a moment in history where we finally saw ourselves as one species on a fragile, floating planet. But instead of finding unity, our world’s been rocked by powerful forces of disintegration—broken systems, rising divisions, and global challenges that sometimes feel like they’re tearing us apart.

Yet, amid the chaos, Rainn argues that there’s also a force of integration that's leading us irresistibly toward a new world. In Rainn’s telling, these two forces—disintegration and integration—are constant, simultaneous, and acting on one another. And while it might seem bleak, it’s actually part of a cosmic evolution toward something better: a unified world, a humanity that works as one.

So buckle up, friends! We’re at a turning point. Are we heading toward a united future, or will we get lost in our divisions? As you tune into Andrew’s thoughts and check out Rainn's excerpt, we hope you consider your part in this grand, spiritual revolution. It’s going to take us all. As Marshall McLuhan wrote: “There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.”

Live long and prosper, grasshoppers!

The Soul Boom Team

The Broken Blue Marble

Excerpt from Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution

By Rainn Wilson

The Blue Marble, taken by either Ron Evans or Harrison Schmitt of the Apollo 17 crew in 1972.

We are watching the birth, more than the death, of a world.

—Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

One of the most seminal and transformative events in human history was the taking of a photograph. And it happened almost by accident.

The famous photo is called “The Blue Marble,” and it was taken by one of the astronauts of Apollo 17. It was snapped in December 1972, during NASA’s last manned lunar landing. One of the three astronauts, spontaneously inspired by all that beauty, pointed a Hasselblad camera out the window and snatched the first image of the entirety of Earth, illuminated completely by sunlight, surrounded by the dark, starlit immensity of space.

It was the first photograph that showed us our true home. All was revealed. We are floating in outer space on a beautiful round, cloudy, vibrant miracle, alone in the black vastness.

I remember seeing this iconic photograph when I was a child and resonating with the power it held. It’s the most reproduced photograph of all time, and like the whale songs, it was a necessary, beautiful testament to something important and essential. It launched movements. Environmentalists, educators, and peace activists would time and time again showcase “The Blue Marble” as part of their mission, their vision.

Wars seem obsolete when gazing at the image. Pollution seems like a grotesque crime. It sparked countless conversations, and that single image urged us toward world unity in a way that little had done previously.

I’ve alluded to this previously, but in the ’60s and ’70s, world peace seemed possible, doable, buildable. We mock them now, but beauty contestants used to wish for “world peace” when receiving their trophies. And they sincerely meant it! Students in the ’70s would write reports on world peace. Hippies would have probing conversations about it. Politicians would talk about it with a straight face. The threat of the A-bomb hung over our heads, and humanity longed for a way out of all those deadly wars of the twentieth century, and WORLD PEACE was on the banner at the finish line. And throughout all this, “The Blue Marble” hung in every classroom as a testament to the possibility of peace and love on our beautiful little home.

Unfortunately, somewhere over the course of the next twenty years, that lofty goal, urged on by a single photograph, faded away into a jaded haze of cynicism and a core belief that humans will always be at war in some way, shape, or form. Get used to it, buddy. We have come to collectively believe that world peace was a pipe dream, only idealized by the naive, the foolish, and the childish. It is pretty universally thought that countries will always be armed to the teeth and deadlocked in a series of cold wars with proxy battles around the globe…

A strangely disordered world…

Political ad spending in the United States for the midterm elections in 2022* was almost $8 billion. This is for all those idiotic, mean-spirited ads shouting at you (that you never pay any attention to) on television, radio, and digital platforms (Facebook, Google, etc.). And this was during a midterm year! And this is just one country! Just think about what we could do for education, health care, or the environment in the United States with allll that money! But we don’t discuss this. Ever…This amount keeps growing exponentially every election cycle and will continue to expand, ad infinitum and ad absurdum…

In a similar but larger vein, global advertising itself in 2022 reached $781 billion. That’s TV, radio, billboards, online, and print across the globe…With that nearly trillion dollars, we could fix world hunger. Climate change. Education. If we, all eight billion of us, collectively decided not to advertise “stuff” or “things” or “products” or “goods” or “services” for only one year!

I know it’s a teensy bit more complicated than that, and of course one might argue that the trillion dollars in advertising helps drive the economic engine of many more trillions of dollars. Jobs included. But surely, naivete aside, if some ad dollars were somehow redirected for philanthropic purposes, somehow, the world economy would percolate along just fine, don’t you think?

The point is, our global priorities seem epically misguided and upside down, and there are countless examples of the absurd choices we humans make on the largest of scales…

But are we truly living in folly? Some might disagree with that assessment.

There is a school of contemporary writers called the “new optimists,” which includes Steven Pinker, Hans Rosling, and Matt Ridley, and many others. [They have] one central point to make:

“The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being and… almost no one knows about it,” says Pinker.

And by many measures these secular-liberal-capitalist-lovin’ writers are right… extreme poverty has fallen from 90 percent to 10 percent in a century or so. Global life expectancy has dramatically increased, from twenty-nine to seventy-one years, and infant mortality has dropped from 30 percent to 3 percent over the last one hundred years… And technologically, advances continue to make our quality of life better and better. Think of all the progress made even in the last decade! GPS and touchscreen glass on every phone. Blockchain. 3D printing. Alexa and other smart home technology. And what about all these nifty food delivery apps? Zoom! Crowdfunding websites! Self-parking cars! Cloud-based streaming music and video! Instant Pots!

The Jetsons… entertainment or prophecy?

And yet…

At the exact same time, here we are with many of those same problems getting colossally worse, not better. In this moment, unlike any other time in history, humanity seems on the verge of destroying itself in about seventeen different ways…

On the political home front, our democracy seems on the verge of collapse. Meanwhile, increasing extreme weather events kill ever more people around the world, and the disastrous effects of climate change continue to pile up.

So that’s bad.

The list goes on and on. Revolutionary progress in some areas, and never-before-seen destructive setbacks and global threats in others.

So…How do we hold both of these world-warping, contradictory forces in our mind at the same time?

Forces of integration and disintegration…

Embedded in the teachings of the Bahá’í Faith, there is a key concept that helps me make sense of what exactly is happening in the world right now — how the disparate and conflicting energies of our time are at work in the transformation of human society on a global level. It’s relatively simple, but astonishingly revelatory. The concept explains that at any time, there are two parallel powers working on the world at once: the forces of integration and the forces of disintegration.

In other words, both destruction and evolution are happening at the exact same time! And believe it or not, they are both urgent and necessary.

The leader of the Baha’i Faith in the early and mid-twentieth century, Shoghi Effendi, described this phenomenon perfectly, all the way back in 1938:

“A twofold process, however, can be distinguished, each tending… to bring to a climax the forces that are transforming the face of our planet. The first is essentially an integrating process, while the second is fundamentally disruptive. The former, as it steadily evolves, unfolds a System which may well serve as a pattern for that world polity towards which a strangely-disordered world is continually advancing; while the latter, as its disintegrating influence deepens, tends to tear down, with increasing violence, the antiquated barriers that seek to block humanity’s progress towards its destined goal.” [emphasis mine]

From this perspective, we are headed toward global unity one way or another. Unity of humanity. Unity of class, creeds, nations and cultures. That’s the only way forward. It’s the only conceivable final result. Remember, we all live on a blue marble floating in space. Whether we destroy ourselves along the way or not is up to us, but the ultimate outcome is a human species inhabiting a planet together in harmony. (Even if there are only 147 of us left.) Much like humanity in Star Trek, we are sometimes gradually, sometimes pell-mell and chaotically, headed toward the creation of a global society that is just, balanced, wise, and compassionate…

A call for a new foundation…

But before we get into all that “changing the world” stuff, there’s one phrase from that previous quote by Shoghi Effendi that really pops out: “strangely-disordered world.” And to me, those three words really sum up what a spiritual revolution is all about.

Our world is strangely disordered. So much about how we do things…is upside down, backward, and inside out. And things have to change if we want to achieve the mental, physical, and spiritual wellness we long for on a personal and a global level.

One thing I’m struck by when I read the news is how “strangely disordered,” how broken, ALL the modern organizational structures are. I mean, what field of endeavor or area of business, society, or government is not broken? Name an existing system, large or small, and chances are it’s essentially out of whack at a fundamental level…most specifically in the United States. Obviously, I don’t have the time, room, or expertise to go into detail…

I’m going to bypass all these issues and go right to the mother of all brokenness in our government: the partisan politics of the two-party system…

Not my area of expertise in the slightest. But it’s important to shine a light on this particular apparatus for a moment because it is a barometer and bellwether of most everything that is out of balance with modern society.

Basically, I believe the toxicity of partisanship is one of the greatest threats to our way of life, the future of our nation, and perhaps the fate of the world… It doesn’t matter if a candidate from either party is grossly unfit for the office or riddled with hypocrisy. We vote for them based on our affiliation.

What about actual policy, you might ask? Don’t people vote for policy?

Yes and no. While there are some substantial political differences between the two parties, the opinions of actual voters are often more alike than we probably realize…

But do we ever hear about the areas of shared alignment on so many of these issues? Never. Instead, it’s disagreements and deadlocks. The image that’s drummed up by politicians, the media, and the parties themselves is that the “other side” are monsters threatening the American way of life.

Call me old-fashioned, but I thought our political system was supposed to be about finding public servants to transparently, fairly, and selflessly enact the policy positions that benefit the most people. Unfortunately, it’s not. It’s about getting and holding power. Getting 51 percent of the votes. It’s about winning, not governing. It’s about victory instead of sharing, uniting, and healing. And it’s often about money…

Here’s the crux of the matter: people so rarely think that partisanship itself is broken, only that the opposing party is broken.

Picture partisan politics as a house being held up by two giant support beams. Both have termites, black mold, and water damage. No amount of repairing windows or appliances or floorboards or shingles will make the rot underneath go away. And if you add a third (or fourth or fifth) beam, the rot will only spread, and we’ll find ourselves in the same situation.

Why? Because the entire foundation is constructed on a faulty, unsustainable premise. This imaginary house we’re discussing, the partisan political system, is based on the proposition that winning, no matter what, is the ultimate goal. And that these win-at-all-costs goals are achieved by competition, contest, one-upmanship, power, control, backstabbing, bluster, rivalry, domination, aggression, contention, and, most importantly, money. Lots and lots and lots of money.

We need an altogether new foundation. A solid and balanced one. One held up by cooperation, unity, humility, and selfless service. A foundation where the goal is the maximum good for all, especially those who have been traditionally left out. Building that foundation is where the real work lies.

The possibility of a spiritual revolution…

I know, I know. Naive. Unrealistic. Unobtainable. (Insert collective eyeroll here.)

“How do we get there, idiot?” you might be asking at this juncture.

Well, that’s kind of the point of…the whole revolution part…

And if we’re going to have a rebellion, even a spiritual one, don’t we need to understand what it is that we’re rebelling against?

Remember, we’re collectively hitching our wagons to the unifying forces of integration and witnessing, confronting, and overcoming those dastardly forces of disintegration…

I believe that only by recognizing that we are, in fact, spiritual beings having a collective human experience will we be open to the kinds of soul-level transformations we’re going to need to make — the spiritual revolution that this book promises. A revolution that is urgent and necessary in the healing of our beautiful but broken blue marble. And remember, the ultimate aim of this endeavor is my grand attempt to advance a conversation about the importance of the divine dimension of existence and how it can influence our lives and our futures, collectively and individually.

So there you have it. The pot has been stirred. Discussions had. Questions raised. Perspectives shifted… And to continue the cooking metaphor, hopefully enough spiritual ingredients have been added to the SoulBoom stew for us to open our hearts, minds, and tastebuds to what is next.

Because it’s time for a spiritual revolution.

*Note from the Soul Boom Team: US political ad spending in 2024 is expected to be around twelve billion dollars—up four billion from 2022.

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Excerpts from Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution by Rainn Wilson. If you’re reading this, you probably know who Rainn is… but just in case: 

Rainn Wilson is an actor, author, and general creative visionary. Previously, he was a co-founder of SoulPancake, a media company that was dedicated to exploring life’s big questions. Now with Soul Boom, Rainn is calling for a spiritual revolution — both individually and collectively. Through his work as an advocate, author, podcaster, and founder of the Soul Boom brand, Rainn offers a humorous yet earnest vision for reconnecting with spirituality to address humanity’s most pressing challenges. You can find him on social media @rainnwilson — but really he’d rather you follow us @soulboom.