It’s election day and the local paper shouts “FINAL FIGHTING WORDS” across its front page, as two old white men are depicted looking like opposing crime bosses.

Is this the best we can do with all that’s at stake?

We have to grow up! Grow our political system out of its fighting Adolescence. As that series sadly and beautifully showed us, you do not solve complex social problems by making it about us and them, by shouting Fight from the sidelines.

Of course you can sell seats in the stadium this way, draw young eyeballs into the manosphere. Othering got tribes of our ancestors through scarcity, back when we had to compete for resources or die.

But this is 2025. We have never had more resources as a species. Or more scarcity thrust on most of humanity by a grasping minority.

Fight, we are told. And we believe it.

This, as Rutger Bregman points out in Humankind, is not because humans are all evil or stupid – we are evolved to be kind. It’s because we are not evolved to live in groups larger than paleolithic bands of 20-50.

Large groups bring out the Adolescent in all of us. When we are too many in the cave without good-enough adult leadership, our identities can feel that teenaged peer pressure again. We will do anything to fit in.

We look to those adults who position themselves to lead us, to help us with who we are, who to trust, who to love, and who to hate. Then what to do about it all.

And – as the show brutally depicts – if we can’t find them at home or at the front of the classroom, we go online.

The best leaders, true adults, will tell you they can’t tell you who you are, that trust is the most precious thing, that love and hate are not opposites, and that there’s not much more harmful and slow to heal than a hateful act.

The rest of the leaders, adult in chronological terms only, readily peddle false and damaging identity, sell trust for power, insist on being loved, deploy hate as it serves them, and incite acts in the absence of thought for consequence.

And we buy it, because we are so many, and we need to belong.

My field is psychotherapy. I’m fascinated by human evolution but my job is with human development. Growth.

Not the economic growth capitalism is addicted to (sowing scarcity experiences as it goes) but genuine whole-body, whole-household, whole community, global growth.

Growth that can grow our population without it being preyed upon by power-addicted leaders and their enablers.

In my practice I watch humans of all kinds grow. I know it’s possible at the individual and small group level.

We grow when we adapt to our circumstances in ways that borrow less from tomorrow to get through today. When we choose actions that consider the needs of those around us and beyond, without forgetting our own needs.

This way our local network of human bodies has the best chance of riding out storms literal and figurative, and reaping rewards of sunnier times.

What I want to know is whether larger groups of us can grow like this, and how we use what we know about human growth to inform our politics.

I’m pretty sure that billing it as a fight between two old white men every 3 years isn’t going to help us grow.

Who will help grow our politics up? We need inspiring leadership, to get us to adult a bit ourselves. Pay our taxes. Engage in policy debate. Listen to the science of society and plan a generation or more ahead.

Truly adult leadership – upscaled from that which the kids in Adolescence were sorely missing – can save lives.