The lesson of Deep Survival, Scott Berkun says, is that the people who survive abandon their mental models of the world and open their eyes:
They don’t try to force the world to be a certain way: instead they respond to the world like a child, taking it to be what it is, and working within the real world to try and survive (or thrive).
It’s certainly clear that if the West doesn’t replace its current mental model of humanity-as-blank-slate with something more congruent with how the world really works, then it won’t survive.