Project Vision 21

Let's be honest: we live in an immature society. It is nothing new: Milan Kundera already proclaimed it decades ago in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Heraclitus already lamented it more than two millennia ago, as his fragmentary writings attest.

To the immaturity typical of a relatively new species in the long history of this planet, we now add our personal and collective immaturity, powered by technological advances that take away our own initiative, by social networks that limit our thinking, and by institutions dedicated to perpetuating the past and continue with the status quo.

Not only do we not think, we don't even think we don't think. It is a double forgetting: we forget to think, and we forget that we have forgotten to think. So, not only does everything become a problem, but everything becomes a big problem. And, since we don't think, we want to solve everything with “things” (money, for example.)

Creative thinking (accustomed, for that reason, to living with the finitude of life) has been removed and replaced by calculating thinking, which does not seek to create, but seeks to obtain results in order to become fictitiously immortal. And in that fiction, we get caught up, telling stories just to appease our ego and massage our narcissism.

The real crisis is not the economy, global pollution, climate change, overpopulation, scarcity of resources, destruction of the planet, educational failure, wars, or pandemics and epidemics. The real crisis is the collective immaturity that perpetuates childish thinking for decades in people's lives.

And it is not an exaggeration. In fact, that’s the reason we have amusement parks that bring fiction "fantasy" to "real life". In these well-known amusement parks, adults enjoy the visit more than children because they never stopped being children. Some researches believe that “maturity” is reached now at 40, twenty years later than a few decades ago. 

It is true that we face great challenges. In a few days we experience more changes than people 200 years ago experienced in their entire lives. And those changes of yesteryear were so slow that sometimes they were not perceived and, because they were slow, people have time to adapt. Today’s changes are sudden, unforeseen, profound, irreversible.

In addition, each day we receive more information than the average person 100 years ago received in their entire lives. And we interact daily with hundreds and sometimes thousands of people almost anywhere in the world, something that until the beginning of the 20th century was considered only science fiction.

And our brain doesn’t know and cannot respond to these challenges. As the American biologist Edward Osborn Wilson said in 2009, we have a paleolithic (prehistoric) brain in a context of medieval institutions and with advanced technology. In other words: we are cavemen and we pretend to be gods. We deceive ourselves to believe we are gods.

In the meantime, nothing is ever solved and, worse still, old solutions to new problems are attempted, a very clear sign of immaturity.