Leaping into a positive future
Why is humanity so knotted up? Why can’t we unravel ourselves and make the world a better place rather than continue on the self-destructive course unfolding before us, as if we were actually driven by fatalistic forces with tragic humours lacking all semblance of any collective free-will?
The fault lies in contemporary humanity’s general lack of futuristic vision, which in turn stems from a self-engendering pessimism fuelled by an almost universal, albeit subconscious, nihilistic belief that humanity is a despicable species destined to ultimately err. From this comes the basic tenants of religion: Save us O Lord from ourselves! In other words, the greater part of humanity exists in a bubble of such low self-esteem that human greatness can only manifest itself either accidentally or through the small minority of human beings who actually do think we could be great, achieving the greater good and furnishing a much better world for ourselves. This minority has managed to create fine art and fantastic technology, but even this traditional hope of redemption through the manifestations of human genius is now sharply threatened by the enormous impotence generated at the political and social level of civilisations, through the narrowing vias of autocracies and dictatorships, on the one hand, and of the inhibiting forces of nihilism-driven democracies, on the other.
Politically, of course, this conclusion is devastating as it leaves progress without a road to take and with no chance of building one. While the nihilistic attitude is predominant in society, an authentically forward-looking politics is impossible. In order to go forward in a meaningful way the nihilistic bedrock of society has to be challenged and changed.
But nihilism is so embedded in humanity’s perception of reality that it will take a metaphysical upheaval of that perception to alter our current tragic course: and that means that we need to think, firstly scientifically, and then socially and politically, about the philosophical question of Being.
Idealism has taught us that this question is double-edged, and that reality consists of the physical world, but it is also conditioned by our sapiens perception of that world. Hegel talked of the naïve consciousness of Absolute Being, and we would like to invert that to consider the naïve consciousness of Non-Being. Being doesn’t begin with perception, as Berkeley argued, rather it is made real or actual by it. Being matures through sapiens perception and evolves into something which could be meaningful.
This means that the great gap between Naïve Being and (Authentic) Being is a matter of meaningfulness. Naïve Being lacks any meaning but strives for it because it lacks it – but it is a blind, unconscious striving, driven by pure, intuitive need rather than any desire.
Seen from this metaphysical perspective, our human place in the Universe is by no means a purposeless, nihilistic one, but rather a fundamental tool that gives the Authentic Being to the Naïve Being of the sapiens-absent cosmos. This tiny adjustment to our way of perceiving ourselves, would be a radically positive, revolutionary way of combatting the inherent and enormously destructive pessimism that is so ingrained in humanity’s self-perception today.
To unravel ourselves we need to embrace our enormous, inherent nature as generators of meaning and purpose in the cosmos. The decline of human progress is not only created by the knots we have tied ourselves into through our nihilisms and pessimisms, it is also the greatest threat to meaningful reality in the entire Universe. And if that is not a sobering, life-changing idea, what is?
It’s time to unravel the great knot and let humanity breathe freely again in the pure air of meaningfulness.
