Project Vision 21

Francisco Miraval

There is no denial our world has changed, and those changes have been deep, swift, irreversible, and global. Meanwhile, we have been distracted. For whatever reason, we have been doing other things and thinking about other things because we assumed those things were more important or urgent than knowing the world around us.

If fact, the old distinction between reality and illusion, between knowledge and opinion, a distinction that marked the beginning of Western philosophy two and a half millennia ago, has now disappeared and we enter in the age of post-truth where illusion is even more real than true reality and know and opinion are the same. The wise and the fool are one and the same.

For that reason, in spite of everything changing and, therefore, in spite of the changes inside us, we deny those changes and we even deny we are changing. I frequently hear people saying that “This happened many times before” and that the solution to our current problems is “to educate young people” for them to follow “the old ways” (assuming the “old ways” even exist.)

Nothing causes amazement anymore. Nothing motivates or moves us. We have seen everything and know everything. Nothing is new to us. If there is an event, an accident, a gathering, or a discovery, we immediately say, “I saw it before on a movie” or “I already read it on Facebook”, or similar answers.

As Allan Bloom in the preface to his 1968 about Plato’s Republic, “It is always that which strikes us as commonplace or absurd which indicates that we are not open to one of the mysteries…”

In other words, we are unable to see the truly new in the truly old and we can only see the old. So, for us, everything is “common sense”, “familiar”, or “already known”. Such an attitude, Bloom says, we close our mind (or heart, or spirit) to the mystery associate with that object or circumstances.

A closed mind (or heart, or will) will create the “social field of negativity” (according to Otto Scharmer), that is, an interaction with others where others are not recognized as others like us. If we don’t even know who others are, we don’t know who we truly are.

If we are disconnected from others and from ourselves, we will also be disconnected from nature and from the universal mind expressed in nature. As a result, we turn nature into “natural resources” and us into “human resources”. Unaware of our own situation, we discard traditional teachings as “obsolete” and we acritically accept almost every new idea, ideology, fad, or technology crossing in front of our eyes.

Perhaps we should pay attention to what Bloom said half a century ago son we stop seeing the common as common and the absurd as absurd. Perhaps we should return to the paradoxical flux of existence, a thought that attracted and preoccupied early Greek thinkers, so we can finally meet our true selves again and for the first time.