Project Vision 21

In a recent interview, American thinker Steve McIntosh remarked that “the degree of our transcendence depends on the scope of our inclusion.” I am not entirely sure I fully grasp the precise meaning of that statement, but one thing became clear to me: transcendence is neither an escape from reality nor a rejection of it. Rather, it is the capacity to expand reality without collapsing it or reducing it to simplistic terms.

Because we have failed to expand reality—both personally and socially—and have instead confined it to our beliefs and opinions, we are now facing a global crisis of meaning. This crisis is not the result of a lack of information or intelligence. It stems from our inability to overcome the systematic exclusion of the other, an exclusion that generates deep personal and cultural incoherence.

Over the last five hundred years, we have built institutions that privilege efficiency, growth, profit, and technological rationality over meaning, wisdom, inner dialogue, dialogue with others, and long-term responsibility. The consequences of this imbalance are evident and have been analyzed in depth by thinkers such as John Vervaeke.

From another angle—Otto Scharmer’s Theory U—we have become accustomed to “downloading” information through the endless scrolling of our daily lives, without truly sensing reality or being present to the future that is emerging. We have sidelined the voices, experiences, and emotions that could take us beyond inherited frames of reference and open us to future possibilities.

Within this context, science fiction, along with magical realism, emerges as a practice of inclusion and an invitation to explore possibilities that have not yet been explored. Authors such as Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke (among many others), as well as series like Star Trek, are not primarily concerned with predicting new technologies. Their deeper aim is to create imaginal worlds and existential horizons in which we are invited to participate.

Put differently, good science fiction—like good philosophy, good literature, and good art—asks us to rethink the present from the standpoint of something we do not yet inhabit, something we have not yet reached, but that nonetheless presents itself as possible. In doing so, we are invited to expand our field of meaning. And that expansion often produces a certain sense of unease and discomfort.

I like to think of science fiction as a rehearsal for the future, one that moves us beyond the thoughts, categories, and habits we have already internalized, conceptualized, and institutionalized. In this sense, the feeling of discomfort arises when we become aware that unexamined alternatives exist. It is the discomfort of realizing that we have not yet seen what is already visible.

In some cases, that seemingly implausible invitation to actively witness the future through an alternative reality eventually becomes reality itself. A clear and compelling example of this leap from fiction to reality is the short novel The Machine Stops, published in 1909 by E. M. Forster—a work that deserves to be read today with renewed attention.

Perhaps philosophy itself needs a touch of science fiction, in the spirit of Plato’s Cave, which produces an existential dislocation and brings us closer to truths that would otherwise remain abstract—or even unbearable.